Alberta is projecting a historic deficit for the 2020-2021 fiscal year as resource revenues decline to levels not seen in decades.

In a first quarter fiscal update, Finance Minister Travis Toews gave Albertans a closer look at the combined toll on provincial coffers of what he called a “triple black swan event”: the COVID-19 pandemic, the ensuing global economic crisis and the collapse of oil prices. 

The deficit is now projected to be $24.2 billion — $16.8 billion higher than government estimates in the 2020 budget released in February.

The increase is largely due to a major decline in government revenue, which is now projected to be $11.5 billion lower than estimates in the budget. Revenue from non-renewable resources is expected to be $3.9 billion lower, while income tax revenue is expected to be down $4.3 billion.

“These numbers are incredibly sobering to all of us. If left unchecked, they predict a grim reality for Albertans,” Toews said in an August statement. 

“We are facing the most significant economic challenge of our generation.”

Resource revenue for the fiscal year is now expected to be $1.2 billion, a level not seen since the 1970s, according to the fiscal update. The biggest dropoff is from bitumen royalties, which are now expected to be $686 million, down from the $3.2 billion budgeted earlier this year.

“The global shut-down has cratered oil demand and prices, even as global producers have continued to constrain production to re-balance supply and demand,” the update says.

For Alberta, the impact has been severe. 

“Many oilsands projects are generating minimum or no positive returns this year, reducing significantly any royalty payable under the revenue minus cost royalty regime,” the update notes.

Though exacerbated by the pandemic, some observers say the challenges Alberta is facing today were already in the cards.

“It’s a confirmation of what a number of people have been saying already, which is that we need to prepare for a future where we don’t have those sources of revenue and job generation from the oil sector that we have relied on for so many years,” said Sara Hastings-Simon, a senior research associate at the Payne Institute for Public Policy and research fellow at the University of Calgary’s school of public policy.

Production in Alberta had already been curtailed due to low prices and limited pipeline access but the outlook for the oil patch was looking up in the early part of the year. That changed when the Russia-Saudi Arabia price war and dramatic drop in demand for oil wrought by the pandemic sent crude prices on a downward spiral. At one point, the North American oil benchmark — West Texas Intermediate — hit negative prices.

In response, oil producers cut production by roughly 700,000 barrels per day between February and May, according to the fiscal update. At the same time, capital spending was significantly reduced.  

Prices have since recovered as economies began the process of reopening, with West Texas Intermediate recently trading at over US$40 a barrel.

“Despite the rebound, abundant supply and high inventory levels are expected to keep a lid on prices in the near term,” the fiscal update says. 

The West Texas Intermediate is expected to average US$35.60 in 2020-2021, down from earlier forecasts of US$58 a barrel.

The differential between the WTI and the Western Canadian Select (the price many Alberta producers get for their oil), however, is now expected to average US$12.50 this year, about US$6.60 per barrel lower than forecasts in the provincial budget. The narrower differential means Alberta oil is expected to be sold at less of a discount relative to West Texas Intermediate.

Alberta’s oil production is expected to increase slowly, the province doesn’t expect it to reach pre-pandemic levels until after 2021. 

Meanwhile,  Jason Kenney’s campaign promise to sell-off crude-by-rail contracts inked by Rachel Notley’s NDP is now forecast to cost $2.1 billion, up from the $1.5 billion the United Conservative Party government had budgeted. 

The NDP government signed leases for more than 4,000 railcars to ship up to 120,000 barrels of oil per day last year in an effort to get Alberta crude to market. Kenney was critical of the plan, saying at the time it would make it more expensive for the private sector to ship by rail, CBC reported.

Overall, Alberta is projecting a “severe” economic contraction this year. Real gross domestic product is expected to decline 8.8 per cent and unemployment is forecast to average 11.6 per cent — up from 6.9 per cent last year.

“Our challenging economic results are largely, almost entirely actually, from a reduction in revenue and that reduction in revenue has come from really a reduction in economic activity, a reduction in global energy prices and so that’s why we’re putting an inordinate focus on economic recovery and economic growth in this province,” Toews said in a press conference.

While the minister said there are important discussions to have in the future about Alberta’s income tax structure, he said the middle of a crisis is not the time to talk about raising taxes.

Instead the government’s focus will be on growing the economy and delivering services more efficiently, he said. That could mean spending cuts are coming.

The UCP’s campaign promise to balance the provincial budget by 2022-23 has also been delayed.

“Right now, it would be almost impossible to provide a credible date to balance with the uncertainty we’re dealing with,” said Toews. “Balancing does remain very important to our government and we will be building a plan forward and presenting a date to balance to Albertans in the future.”

Though exacerbated by the pandemic, some observers say the challenges Alberta is facing today were already in the cards.

Hastings-Simon, the University of Calgary research fellow, said the UCP government should look to its own history with the oilsands as it tries to boost the economy.

“In some of the research that I’ve done, it shows that the government really was the one who proved out this resource and it was at that point then that industry took it on and grew it,” she said.

Moving forward, there are plenty of opportunities for economic diversification in Alberta whether it’s in natural resources — through production of hydrogen or the metals and minerals needed for a clean energy transition — or in the technology sector, said Hastings-Simon.

As for the oilsands, Hastings-Simon cautions against focusing too much energy on efforts to produce at lower costs with lower emissions.

“Even if you were able to manage that you would be talking about really trying to capture a market that’s shrinking, and that’s just not where you want to be deploying your innovation,” she said.

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The news broke in the last, ostensibly lazy week of July, and it sent a shockwave through the oilpatch: French fossil fuel giant Total was designating $9.3 billion in Alberta crude investments as stranded assets.

Citing high production costs and forecasting declining demand for oil, Total said it was writing off its $7.3-billion stake in the Fort Hills bitumen mine, a massive development capable of processing 14,500 tonnes of oil sand per hour.

Total also dropped its 50 per cent share in the Surmont bitumen recovery project, a joint effort with ConocoPhillips Canada that was busy doubling its output as recently as 2016. For good measure, Total dropped its membership in the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.

The reaction from the oil lobby and its allies in the Alberta government was swift, fierce and entirely predictable.

“I think it’s somewhat virtue signaling that there is an orchestrated campaign globally against Canada and this is a visible action they can take to wage some of that pressure,” Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers president and CEO Tim McMillan told BNN Bloomberg.

Alberta Energy Minister and former pipeline executive Sonya Savage agreed. “At the same time Total is dismissing the leadership of Canadian producers who are doing their part with active strategies that have reduced emissions, they continue to invest in countries such as Myanmar, Nigeria and Russia,” she said. “This highly hypocritical decision comes at a time where international energy companies should, in fact, be increasing their investment in Alberta.”

Indeed, it isn’t as though Total, France’s biggest company and one of the world’s seven fossil “supermajors,” is suddenly embracing a rapid transition off carbon. That surely wasn’t the tone in mid-July, when Total sealed the deal on a US$20 billion LNG project in Mozambique, Africa’s biggest project investment ever.

“The signing of this large-scale project financing, less than one year after Total assumed the role of operator of Mozambique LNG, represents a significant achievement and a major milestone for the project,” said CFO Jean-Pierre Sbraire. “It demonstrates the confidence placed by financial institutions in the long-term future of LNG in Mozambique.”

Friends of the Earth International declared the project “a windfall for the industry, a curse for the country.”

The fallback assumption among Canada’s political class is that companies like Total, Deutsche Bank, and Zurich Insurance Group are just out to get Alberta, falling prey to the supposed foreign-funded radicals whose influence Premier Jason Kenney’s government is now apparently having trouble tracking down.

“If you can picture the portfolio manager at the end of his long table in New York or London or Zurich or wherever, looking down at his juniors and saying ‘What are we doing about climate change? Well, we’re writing off investments in Canadian oil and gas,’ ” Natural Resource Minister Seamus O’Regan told The Globe and Mail last month. “And the box is checked.”

But what if the rest of the world is reading the numbers while elected officials in Ottawa and Alberta cling desperately to their own spin? What if there’s no virtue signalling or hypocrisy in Total’s decision, just a hard-nosed business assessment?

After all, Total is far from alone: in May, Fort Hills co-owners Suncor and Teck wrote down their own oilsands investments by $1.38 billion and $474 million, respectively, The Canadian Press reported. The facility was expected to operate for about half a century when it opened less than three years ago.

Contrast the triumphant tone of Total’s Mozambique release with the bean counter dryness of its Alberta announcement.

“The weakness of investments in the hydrocarbon sector since 2015, accentuated by the health and economic crisis of 2020, will result by 2025 in insufficient worldwide production capacities and rebound in prices,” the company wrote. “Beyond 2030, given technological developments, particularly in the transportation sector, Total anticipates oil demand will have reached its peak.”

With those factors in mind, along with the company’s own 2050 carbon neutral pledge, “Total has reviewed its oil assets that can be qualified as ‘stranded’, meaning with reserves beyond 20 years and high production costs,” the release continued. “The only projects identified in this category are the Canadian oil sands projects Fort Hills and Surmont.”

In other words: nothing political to see here, folks. Just listening to the evidence and following where it leads.

But in Alberta, where everything fossil-related is hyper-political, that kind of analysis leaves both major parties in a serious bind. They’re caught between their own overheated support for an expanded oilsands industry and a global economic reality that is driving down the province’s fossil economy, triggering huge cuts in health and community services that depend on it, and now threatening to eviscerate rural municipalities’ tax base.

Along the way, the Kenney government is utterly ignoring the 67,200 green economy jobs the province could tap into by 2030, including urgently-needed energy efficiency work that would deliver $2 billion in energy savings and carbon reductions. Instead of keeping faith with voters who largely supported the province’s solar and energy efficiency programs, the government shuttered its energy efficiency agency in June, returning Alberta to its previous status as the only North American jurisdiction without a functioning program. Its recently-announced economic diversification strategy is long on spin, generous with corporate tax cuts and short on detail.

In other parts of Canada, it has become fashionable to respond to Alberta’s desperate straits from one of two, increasingly polarized extremes: by holding ever tighter to an oil industry that is entering its sunset or gloating from a distance at a province that can’t seem to let go. Neither approach is particularly helpful for households and small businesses that are bearing the brunt of their leaders’ political and economic malpractice.

Kenney’s basic strategy — curse the fates and blame political opponents, real or imagined — might look like a winner. As a way to mobilize his political base and drive wedge-issue voters, it could work for some time to come. But it won’t deliver the jobs Albertans need, the strong economy they’ve come to expect or the greenhouse gas reductions their future (and everyone else’s) depends on. 

Alberta’s politicians have the option of taking an announcement like Total’s as a wake-up call, rather than a cheap shot. They’ll be failing their constituents until they start getting that judgement call right.

Doubling down on Alberta’s oil and gas sector is a risk Canadians can’t afford to take

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Amid a global economic slowdown spurred by the spread of COVID-19, Alberta’s government is paving the way for a resurgence of coal mining in the province, a move some observers say threatens sensitive ecosystems that, until June, had been protected for decades.

This spring, the United Conservative Party government rolled back protections that had restricted exploration and prevented open-pit coal mining across parts of the Rocky Mountains and Foothills since 1976.

The decision, which was announced in mid-May and came into force June 1, was framed as part of Alberta’s economic recovery. “Rescinding the outdated coal policy in favour of modern oversight will help attract new investment for an important industry and protect jobs for Albertans,” Energy Minister Sonya Savage said in a statement at the time. 

The provincial economy was hit hard this year, first by the oil price war between Russia and Saudia Arabia, then by an unprecedented plunge in demand for oil due to the pandemic. And as restaurants, movie theatres, hair salons and many other businesses closed their doors to stem the spread of the novel coronavirus, unemployment shot up. In June, the province’s unemployment rate was 15.5 per cent.

“As we strengthen our focus on economic recovery and revitalization, we will continue to make common-sense decisions to create certainty and flexibility for industry, while ensuring sensitive lands are protected for Albertans to continue to enjoy,” Savage said in May.

The concern for some Albertans, though, is that the government’s open-for-business stance on coal threatens to destroy a landscape that is important to First Nations and serves as critical habitat for grizzlies, caribou and the Alberta population of westslope cutthroat trout, listed as threatened under the federal Species At Risk Act.

“It’s a backwards move,” said Marlene Poitras, the Assembly of First Nations regional chief for Alberta. The decision to rescind protections was made without adequately consulting with First Nations, she said.

Shaun Fluker, an associate law professor at the University of Calgary, said “the timing is very unfortunate and seems calculated to implement a change like this at a time or a moment when negative feedback or criticism or resistance would be difficult to mount.”

“The government certainly could have waited to make this announcement at a time when more public dialogue was possible and feasible,” he said.

“You could say they used the public health emergency as a cloak to defend against any criticism that might attract.”

Here’s what you may have missed about Alberta’s mid-pandemic bid for coal.

Energy Minister Sonya Savage has said rescinding the coal policy will ‘help attract new investment’ for the mining industry. Photo: Government of Alberta / Flickr

The 1976 Alberta coal policy

In 1976, Alberta released a wide-ranging coal development policy that covered land use planning, royalties, labour requirements, landowner rights and environmental protections. 

Many of these provisions were either not enforced or had previously been replaced with updated measures. Until June 1, the land classification system, which divided the province into four land categories that allowed varying levels of coal exploration and development, was the only portion of the policy that remained in place.

Category 1 lands — where coal leasing, exploration and development were not permitted — will continue to be protected. 

Previously, surface mining was banned on category 2 lands, which included parts of the Rocky Mountains and the Foothills, and exploration and underground development was limited. Exploration was allowed on lands listed as category 3 under the normal process but development in these areas was restricted. Now, restrictions on category 2 and 3 lands have been removed.

Companies with coal agreements on category 2 and 3 lands no longer face development restrictions that had been in place under the 1976 policy. Map: Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society

According to the Alberta government, the intent of the 1976 coal policy “was to ensure that there were appropriate regulatory and environmental protection measures in place before new coal projects were authorized.” 

While the province says the coal policy is replaced by “modern regulatory processes, integrated planning and land use policies,” some experts are quick to note that regional land use plans have not yet been completed for the entire area previously protected by the coal policy.

The 1976 document “was an overarching policy that gave direction to the regulator and specifically said certain activities are acceptable in this area, but they’re not acceptable in other areas,” explained Brenda Heelan Powell, staff counsel at the Environmental Law Centre.

“That gives a signal to the regulator on cumulative effects and appropriate development,” she said. “And while that could happen through the regional planning, it’s not complete for that entire area.”

A regional plan has been completed for the South Saskatchewan region in southern Alberta, but the planning process is ongoing in the North Saskatchewan region, which includes parts of the Rockies and Foothills, and has yet to begin in other areas.

In the absence of an overarching land-use policy that guards against the cumulative effects of resource development, coal projects are likely to be assessed on a project by project basis, Heelan Powell said.

Alberta has duty to consult First Nations

While Poitras said the government spoke with some Treaty 7 First Nations that would be directly impacted by coal mining, she said others, including some Treaty 6 nations whose traditional lands are affected by the decision, were not consulted.

“We have three numbered treaties in Alberta — 6, 7 and 8 — and any time there’s any impacts to those treaties, the government has a duty to consult,” she said.

The government’s decision to open previously protected lands to coal development has the potential to cause lasting harm, Poitras said.

“We’re stewards of the land and when issues like that occur, where there’s environmental damage that is going to occur…that is a concern to many First Nations.”

“The mountains are sacred to our people for traditional ceremonies and gathering medicines that are harder to get in some other areas,” she said. 

The future of Alberta’s parks

Crow Lake Provincial Park in northern Alberta is one of several parks slated for closure by the UCP government. Photo: Alberta Parks

Earlier this year, Premier Jason Kenney’s government announced plans to transfer the management of 164 sites in the parks system to third parties. The CBC reported that roughly a third of those sites are located on lands where mining restrictions have been lifted.

(Alberta also said it would fully or partially shutter 20 provincial parks, but postponed closing 17 of them to ensure adequate space for camping during the pandemic.)

While Fluker said the decision to close or transfer management of provincial parks and recreation sites was probably aimed at reducing government expenses, other measures are “really about opening up public lands to more economic development, which in Alberta tends to be natural resources development.”

Katie Morrison, the conservation director of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society’s Southern Alberta chapter, noted a few of these recreational areas are surrounded by coal leases.

“It shows the risk that these places are under once their protections are removed, but I think it’s also quite indicative of how this government views the value of public lands,” she said.

“They see them as commodities for resource extraction.”

Alberta’s backyard: photos of the ten provincial parks and recreation areas that are now completely shut down

Increase in Alberta mining activity poses threat to at-risk species

Morrison said a lot of the areas previously protected under category 2 of the coal policy are important headwaters that provide drinking water to millions of Albertans downstream.

These areas are also important habitat for grizzly bears, elk, caribou and, significantly, the threatened westslope cutthroat trout (WSCT).

The southwest corner of the province is “really the last stronghold for that species,” Fluker said.

In a recent paper in the Public Land and Resources Law Review, Fluker and his co-author David Mayhood point to overexploitation, habitat destruction and hybridization with introduced species such as rainbow trout as causes for the decline of westslope cutthroat trout in Alberta.

“The story told here about the decline of the Alberta population of WSCT is certainly not an isolated one. Habitat loss is widely understood as the primary cause for the extinction crisis sweeping the planet,” the authors write.

“What is noteworthy about the ongoing decline of the Alberta population of WSCT is that losses continue despite the population falling under the protection of a threatened species legal framework.”

Opening previously protected areas to open-pit coal mining could further strain this already threatened species.

“It really undermines the whole point of the Species At Risk Act if you have a threatened species with very little remaining known critical habitat and you approve a coal mine that basically wipes out some of that habitat and potentially pollutes more of it downstream,” said Fluker, who has been working with a public interest law clinic at the University of Calgary to push for more aggressive protections for cutthroat trout for a number of years.

New coal mines emerging in Alberta as a result of the government’s recent policy change could shape up to be a high-profile battleground between industry and threatened species, Fluker said.

As well as providing key habitat for fish and wildlife, Morrison noted the region is also used for recreation and ranching. 

“Once a mine is built, that is not an area that the public can access, it’s not an area that’s used for grazing or other uses,” she said.

“These mines are massive, mountaintop removal mines,” she said, noting there are concerns not only about the quantity of water used, but also risks of contamination.

In B.C., there have been long-standing concerns about selenium pollution downstream of Teck Resources’ Elk Valley coal mines.

“We can learn from the Elk Valley and other places that went ahead with massive developments and the problems that they’re dealing with now and try to avoid that scenario for ourselves,” she said.

Unique B.C. trout population suffers 93 per cent crash downstream of Teck’s Elk Valley coal mines

UCP government opens doors to coal mining resurgence 

Alberta is already the second largest producer of coal in Canada, and last year 67 per cent of coal produced in the province was subbituminous coal, a lower grade used for electricity generation. According to the Alberta Energy Regulator, subbituminous coal production is expected to decline by more than 90 per cent between 2020 and 2029 with the phase-out of coal-fired electricity.

The new areas available for open-pit coal mining open a window to additional production of metallurgical coal, which is used to make steel.

“Just across the border, the province of British Columbia has a successful metallurgical coal industry and the demand for high-quality steelmaking coal will continue to grow,” Kavi Bal, press secretary to Alberta Energy Minister Sonya Savage, said in a statement to The Narwhal.

Teck’s Elk Valley metallurgical coal mining operations have come under criticism for their impacts on the environment. Photo: Garth Lenz

A new metallurgical coal mine, the Grassy Mountain project proposed near the Crowsnest Pass in Alberta, is currently going through a joint provincial-federal environmental review. If built, it could more than double production of steelmaking coal in Alberta.

In the areas where restrictions on the issuance of coal leases have recently been lifted, Alberta Energy is offering a first right of refusal to companies that have existing applications for coal rights. 

The Coal Association of Canada did not respond to The Narwhal’s request for comment. But in May, association president Robin Campbell told CTV there were already multiple companies considering coal mines in the Foothills and that each new mine could employ between 300 and 350 people.

If Grassy Mountain is approved, Morrison said other projects in the exploration phase may decide to move forward with their own mine applications.

It “would give an indication that governments think that is an appropriate use of the landscape,” she said.

Instead, before any new mines are approved Morrison said she wants the province to undertake a detailed land-use planning process to determine whether those landscapes could handle resource development. 

In the meantime, one of the province’s existing mines, which exports thermal coal for electricity generation elsewhere, could face a new hurdle in its efforts to expand. The federal government recently said it is reconsidering its decision from last year to exempt the proposed Vista mine expansion, near Hinton, from a federal impact assessment. 

Environment and Climate Change Minister Jonathan Wilkinson is expected to make a decision by July 30 on whether to proceed with a federal assessment, Moira Kelly, a spokesperson for the minister, said in a statement to The Narwhal. 

“Our government has also launched a strategic assessment on thermal coal to better understand the potential impact of thermal coal mining activity, to ensure effects within federal jurisdiction — especially related to climate change — are fully considered in the federal impact assessment process,” she said.

Life after coal

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

The Alberta Energy Regulator has indefinitely suspended at least 19 environmental monitoring requirements for major oilsands producers, including Syncrude, Suncor, Imperial Oil and CNRL.

The decisions come one month after the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) sent a long letter to the federal government outlining requests that environmental and pollution monitoring requirements be put on hold, requirements it described as “low-risk regulatory obligations.”

Now the regulator has issued a series of decisions that include the suspension of some environmental monitoring in the oilsands.

“It’s quite shocking and it is quite concerning,” Mandy Olsgard, a risk assessment specialist and former senior environmental toxicologist with the Alberta Energy Regulator, told The Narwhal.

For some monitoring, “losing this data for a very short amount of time might not affect the overall datasets,” she said. “But some of these clauses are there to understand potential acute risks to health or the environment.”

For Olsgard and others, the regulator’s decisions read like a “wish list” from CAPP.

In an email, regulator spokesperson Shawn Roth said “[the regulator] is in regular contact with industry, including industry groups such as, CAPP and [the Explorers and Producers Association of Canada], as we work together to navigate through the current situation.”

“Looks like CAPP got its way,” Shaun Fluker, an associate professor of law at the University of Calgary, told The Narwhal. 

The regulator has granted suspensions to multiple major oilsands projects for requirements ranging from volatile organic compound monitoring to fugitive emissions leak detection to wetlands and wildlife monitoring to bird monitoring at tailings ponds.

Just days before bird monitoring programs were suspended, Imperial Oil found dozens of dead grebes and shorebirds in their tailings ponds, according to CBC. While the regulator has required that scare cannons and other deterrents remain in place, an Imperial spokesperson said these were not effective in preventing birds from landing at the company’s tailings ponds.

Bird monitoring in the oilsands gained international attention when more than 1,600 ducks were found dead after landing on a Syncrude tailings pond in 2008. More recently, Syncrude was fined more than $2.7 million last year after 31 great blue herons died in their tailings ponds in 2015. Those herons were initially discovered by a contractor working on a bird monitoring program for Syncrude. 

As Olsgard notes, these current suspensions come during an important bird migration season.

The suspension of these requirements is effective immediately, which leaves some experts questioning how sites will be monitored. 

“You don’t know what’s going on in groundwater or surface water or fugitive emissions,” Barry Robinson, a Calgary-based lawyer with Ecojustice, told The Narwhal.

“It really is stepping out into no man’s land by suspending the actual monitoring,” he added.

“You just won’t know what’s happening.”

Olsgard is concerned that while temporarily stopping some monitoring may not pose a huge issue in the long run, other data is critically important to assessing risk to public health and the environment. 

But companies like Syncrude and Suncor emphasized to The Narwhal that these suspensions were necessary for the protection of public health during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. 

“We understand and know the public expects us to responsibly develop the oilsands, which includes monitoring for potential impacts, but we also want people to recognize that we’re relying on the guidance of Alberta Health Services,” Will Gibson, spokesperson for Syncrude, said.

The Narwhal previously reported the Alberta government had suspended the requirement to report on some environmental monitoring as a result of COVID-19. 

The latest decisions by the regulator put some monitoring itself on hold as well.

Roth said by email that companies must continue to collect the “majority of monitoring information” and make it available upon request.

But with the latest suspensions, experts are concerned some information will never be collected.

“There’s nothing to report if you don’t monitor,” Fluker said.

8 environmental responsibilities Alberta’s oil and gas companies can skip because of coronavirus

‘Unilateral’ decisions

Each decision is labelled as a “unilateral amendment to approval conditions regarding monitoring in response to COVID-19” and was posted on the regulator’s website. “We anticipate that the amendments will be in place as long as the public orders issued under the Public Health Act remain in effect,” Roth said in an email.

For some operations, such as Imperial Oil’s Kearl mine and Cold Lake in-situ project, the list of types of environmental monitoring programs suspended contains 19 items. (Imperial’s Kearl work camp is itself the site of a COVID-19 outbreak.)

According to the decisions issued by the regulator, the companies have “raised legitimate concerns about their ability to meet monitoring requirements” during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

“We made a request to the Alberta Energy Regulator, along with other oilsands operators to suspend certain monitoring activities,” Gibson, the spokesperson for Syncrude, told The Narwhal.

“We made this request because the safety and wellbeing of our employees is a top priority,” he said. “We’re following, and expecting our employees to follow, recommended and mandated government measures.” Gibson said the company wants to “make sure physical distancing is maintained” whether on buses, on site or in work camps.

Erin Rees, a representative for Suncor, reiterated Gibson’s explanations. “Since mid-March Suncor has been focused on doing our part to flatten the curve of COVID-19. Reducing interactions between people on our sites and in our offices is critical in ensuring the health and safety of our workforce and we’ve limited people on site and in offices to essential staff only since the middle of March,” she said in an email.

“We made requests to the [regulator] to postpone some monitoring in order to protect workers and the public from COVID-19 and specifically to ensure public health guidance is respected.”

“To be clear — all requests for postponement of monitoring were due to the number of people required to perform the work, impacting our ability to ensure physical distancing.”

Gibson said Syncrude has dramatically reduced its workforce in other areas as well, noting staffing at its Aurora and Mildred Lake operations have been reduced by more than 1,000 workers.

Some “monitoring activities posed a challenge in terms of maintaining physical distancing,” he added. The company has also reduced its operations maintenance staff.

Olsgard, the toxicologist, noted that with decreased staff on site to run oilsands operations, the risk to public health and the environment may actually be increased. “We’re actually in kind of a high-risk operational state,” she said.

David Spink, a retired Government of Alberta employee and former director of air and water approvals, told The Narwhal by email that he questioned the assertion that monitoring work can’t be done safely. 

“I find it somewhat hard to accept that we can have construction workers doing work on an expansion to our condo building but the oilsands industry can’t have contractors come in and do some of the monitoring that is required,” he said. 

“Having done and seen some of this monitoring it can be done very safely in the context of social distancing and minimal interactions,” he added, noting that companies should be asked to provide much more specific detail about why each monitoring requirement can’t be met, or how the missed data could be mitigated.

Imperial Oil and CNRL did not respond to The Narwhal’s request for comment by publication time. 

Concerns about work camps

Currently, Alberta’s public health rules restrict gatherings of more than 15 people, encourage physical distancing of two metres and restrict business activities to those considered to be essential services.

Essential services are still allowed to operate in the province, and the government has issued a long list to clarify what is considered essential. 

“Petroleum, natural gas and coal” jobs are considered to be essential services in Alberta, as are “environmental services for agriculture, mining, oil and gas.”

Gibson, the spokesperson for Syncrude, emphasized the company was concerned about bringing in contractors from outside the region to complete environmental monitoring.

“Some of the monitoring activities involve bringing in people from outside the province,” he said, adding that he was “not sure if we have that capability right now” to have monitoring be completed in house.

“We understand and respect the need for monitoring,” he added. “We’re not asking for these activities to be altered or taken away.”

For people in the field like Charlotte Clarke, a consultant who works in the oil and gas industry, there are serious concerns about worker safety during the pandemic.

“Whenever we delay inspections, it always is concerning for me,” she told The Narwhal. “But when it came to the choice between that and my safety, it’s a hard one.” 

For Clarke, an engineer who works with in-situ operations in the oilsands, staying in work camps is the real concern, more so than the daily work itself.

“You wouldn’t be able to maintain social distancing,” she says of the mess hall at camp. “It’s pretty much like a school cafeteria.”

“I’m just really glad that I didn’t have to go through that.”

What work is safe during a pandemic?

Minister of Environment and Parks Jason Nixon has previously said that it was his government’s goal to “keep people working … in the oil and gas industry where safe and within the requirements the chief medical officer has set out.” 

“We believe we can do that on lots of projects,” he added. He was referring to the cleanup of inactive and orphan oil and gas wells.

That leaves Robinson wondering why environmental monitoring in the oilsands can’t be done safely as well.

“If the operation is running, the monitoring should be running,” Robinson said.

Olsgard agrees. “They could have developed COVID-specific protocols to address worker safety,” she said. 

Fluker points to other activities deemed essential and the hazards facing workers. “The province is OK with letting Cargill operate,” he said, pointing to the largest single outbreak of COVID-19 in Canada, in a meat-packing facility in High River, Alta. 

Meanwhile, bird monitoring is suspended in tailings ponds at Alberta’s oilsands.

“There’s a real divergence there and it’s hard to reconcile.”

‘No end date, no public notice, no discussion at all’

Olsgard is concerned with how broad the regulator’s recent decisions appear to be. More detailed requirements, she said, “might be there in the background, but I don’t see it from this decision.”

Fluker points to the lack of public consultation and notice as concerning aspects of the regulator’s most recent decisions. 

“If we’re going to relax or waive [requirements], at a bare minimum we have to at least give public notice,” he said. “In this case, the regulator has decided to even do away with that.”

These decisions, he said, amount to “unilateral amendments to a list of monitoring requirements which are easily associated with some pretty significant public interest concerns.”

“And they’re suspended for the foreseeable future with no end date, no public notice, no discussion at all.”

Without public consultation, he said, there’s no chance for input as to “whether or not the essential/non-essential line is being drawn in the right place.”

For Spink, the regulator’s decisions reflect its priorities. “To my mind it is another blank check to industry and reflects a real lack of priority on/for the environment,” he said in an email.

‘You really don’t know’

In April, The Narwhal reported on a series of ministerial orders stemming from Alberta Energy and Alberta Environment and Parks that effectively suspended much of companies’ routine environmental reporting.

For Olsgard, the suspension of monitoring is far more concerning than what previous ministerial orders had laid out with regards to reporting. “As long as they were still collecting the monitoring data, they had a repository that could be requested by the regulator or stakeholders,” she said.

“Then we had those assurances that we would understand what had happened in the environment during this time. But now that we’ve relaxed monitoring, you really don’t know.”

Fluker agrees. “This is clearly, I think, much more problematic from an environmental regulation perspective,” he told The Narwhal.

“Monitoring is often how problems are obviously initially detected.”

“Some of this certainly looks like it’s more of a cost-saving measure than it is a health measure,” he added.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

The benchmark prices for Alberta and North American crude traded in the negative for the first time on Monday as the coronavirus pandemic wipes out demand and stockpiles accumulate. 

Western Canadian Select, the measuring stick for Alberta’s oil, fell below $0 — a situation that prompted Alberta Premier Jason Kenney to weigh in.

Western Canadian Select oil is now trading at negative prices.

Killing & delaying pipelines landlocked us.#Covid19 collapsed demand.

The Russian-Saudi price war surged supply, filling up inventories.

The future of hundreds of thousands of Canadian jobs is at stake. pic.twitter.com/n2pGHsh30E

— Jason Kenney (@jkenney) April 20, 2020

The North American benchmark — West Texas Intermediate — fell even further, with futures contracts trading at minus US$37.63.

As we enter a world of negative oil prices, here’s a look at what you need to know.

Negative oil prices, explained

The pandemic has reduced demand for oil as people spend less time driving or flying and companies slow down operations, reducing the number of goods that need to be shipped.

You’d think companies could just hold on to their oil if the prices they’re fetching aren’t worth it.

But too much oversupply around the world can mean storage options simply run out. That’s exactly what’s happening now — and a key factor in why prices are now dropping into the negative.

Here’s how Bloomberg explained the unprecedented collapse: “with the pandemic bringing the economy to a standstill, there is so much unused oil sloshing around that American energy companies have run out of room to store it. And if there’s no place to put the oil, no one wants a crude contract that is about to come due.”

Those crude contracts are what futures traders traffic in as they try to turn a profit. But now, there are no buyers for those contracts that designate Cushing, Okla., as the delivery point.

Cushing is a critical storage location for crude, but available space there is filling up fast as demand plummets. According to some estimates, Cushing’s remaining storage capacity could be maxed out in a matter of weeks. 

The situation has left futures traders with nowhere to park the crude to fulfill their contracts, which has sent markets spiralling.

Alberta oilsands production is being reduced

Alberta’s major weaknesses in the oil markets — being landlocked and the quality of its crude — were already on display before this crisis. 

Western Canadian Select plunged as low as US$5.97 per barrel in December 2018, according to data from the Government of Alberta. And it hit low single digits again in March of this year.

The price drop has prompted some companies to respond by cutting some production and reducing spending.

(If you’re wondering why companies don’t just halt operations entirely, experts say that’s simply too expensive in the oilsands.)

Less spending, less production and low crude prices are all bad news for oilsands workers. That’s why the federal government has announced $1.7 billion in funding to provide jobs cleaning up old, inactive oil and gas wells. 

While that’s good news for the environment and the economy, it also raises questions about handing a bill to taxpayers that is intended for industry.

How did we get here?

Beyond the COVID-19 pandemic, another key factor was a price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia that flooded the market with cheap oil at exactly the wrong time.

And despite a deal being reached to cut Saudi production, the aftereffects of the spat are still being felt as demand remains at record lows globally. But that reduction on the part of the Saudis failed to do enough to address the supply glut.

As stockpiles continue to accumulate, it’s clear the challenges for the oil industry aren’t going away anytime soon.

With files from Sharon J. Riley

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By Vanessa Corkal, policy analyst, and Aaron Cosbey, senior associate, at the International Institute for Sustainable Development.

In times of unprecedented crisis, government leadership means being bold. But as Canada and its provinces prepare to roll out record-breaking emergency responses to help the newly jobless and throw lifelines to drowning sectors, it’s becoming clear that not all support is created equal.

Alberta Premier Jason Kenney has said unemployment could rise to at least 25 per cent, or upwards of 500,000 workers. To bolster Alberta’s economy, he called for the federal government to commit at least $20 to $30 billion in liquidity for oil and gas producers. This came on the heels of the province’s announcement of almost $8 billion in equity infusion and loan guarantees for the Keystone XL oil pipeline. There have also been calls for the federal government to purchase oil and gas sector accounts receivable at a discount.

There’s no question that people across Alberta need urgent help. In the accommodation and food service sector alone, nearly 100,000 workers have already lost their jobs, and similar numbers seem likely in retail trade. The oil and gas sectors have seen thousands of layoffs and postponed labour as the province’s companies limit production and shelve all plans for expansion, upgrades and maintenance.

But is injecting tens of billions into oil and gas corporations the right kind of help? As well as addressing immediate needs, strategic emergency response should have two critical features:

1. It should address the root causes of the crisis and reduce vulnerability to future crises;
2. It should take advantage of the dynamism that crisis creates to build back better and achieve important public policy goals that may have been harder to reach in more settled times.

Would the proposed assistance address the root causes of the crisis? Alberta’s economic hardship started before COVID-19 and is grounded in over-dependence on those inherently cyclical commodities. But rather than pursue diversification that could shelter Albertans from the pain of future shocks, these sorts of investments double down on the status quo, hitching the wagon firmly to volatility and uncertainty.

There will be future shocks, whether it’s another 2008-style financial crisis, a climate-induced crisis such as the 2016 Fort Mac fires, or — dare we say it — another COVID-19-style pandemic. Placing heavy bets on the oil and gas sector nearly guarantees we will be here again, with similar social and economic pain for people across the province.

Bets like these assume the oil and gas sectors will return to business as usual after COVID-19, that demand will be strong for decades in spite of increasing climate change mitigation efforts, that pipelines will be built despite sustained opposition or political delays, and that Saudi Arabia and Russia will back down and reverse measures designed to do exactly what they are doing — squeeze out high-cost producers like the U.S. and  Canada.

Even if all those assumptions prove right, and the bet pays off, that success doesn’t address the underlying problem of over-dependence — it aggravates it.

Would the proposed assistance take advantage of the opportunity to build Alberta back better? We know that, whether through market forces or government policies, Canada’s oil and gas sector will eventually decline, hopefully to be replaced by more diversified and sustainable economic drivers. As the head of the International Energy Agency, the United Nations Secretary-General and others have recently argued, our response to the current crisis must accelerate this urgently needed transition. If Alberta is to rebuild its damaged house after this unprecedented crisis, why not build a stronger house?

For Alberta and the federal government, this should mean investing tens of billions of dollars in sectors that can bring long-term prosperity for Alberta’s workers and families, such as hydrogen, health sciences, renewable energy, clean transport, sustainable agriculture, innovation in oil and gas well reclamation, and prevention of fugitive methane emissions, building on the province’s world-class institutions and infrastructure, and the strengths of its people.

The coming economic downturn will swallow up the unprecedented torrents of fiscal support we’re assembling, and still call for more. But let’s remember that this spending can be a historic force for positive change to ensure that when we come out the other end, our society is more equitable, sustainable and resilient — ready for whatever the future might throw at us.

10 things you need to know as a barrel of Alberta oil is valued at less than a bottle of maple syrup

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This is the first article in a two-part series. Read part two,  featuring the voices of Indigenous activists in Edmonton, here.

When Alberta Premier Jason Kenney announced his government would be creating a “war room” during the spring election campaign, a local activist group, Climate Justice Edmonton, saw an opportunity. 

Kenney’s war room — later rebranded as an independent corporation named the Canadian Energy Centre — would be allocated $30 million in government money to “respond in real time to the lies and myths told about Alberta’s energy industry,” according to the United Conservative Party (UCP) platform. 

The day after the election, on April 17, Climate Justice Edmonton launched its counter-attack — an online fundraising campaign for “A ‘War Room’ to Beat Kenney’s War Room.” 

The group’s initial goal was “30 hundred dollars” to combat Kenney’s $30-million investment in the war room. They laid out their plans: town hall meetings to work on a green new deal in Alberta, support for art and high school climate strikes and a “rapid-response fund to protect our allies and frontline communities as they come under attack from Jason Kenney’s politics of austerity and hate.”

As Emma Jackson, an organizer with Climate Justice Edmonton, tweeted at the time, “lots of $$$ = lots of chips = lots of well-fed organizers to stop pipelines and build a more liveable future for us all.”

https://www.instagram.com/p/BwXqYJKg5qv/

Climate Justice Edmonton organizers aren’t shy about their opposition to new pipelines and their calls to wean the province off fossil fuels, or the importance of recognizing Indigenous rights and the goal of creating a transition plan for workers in Alberta’s extractive industries.

As Climate Justice Edmonton members watched the donations roll in — $1,000, $2,000 — they realized the campaign was gaining traction. “Oh my god, we’re rich,” Jackson remembers thinking. 

The group would go on to far exceed their “30 hundred” goal, raising nearly $20,000 for a “war room” of their own — and they’ve been busy ever since.

Climate Justice Edmonton isn’t the only activist group working on climate-related issues in Alberta. Groups like Beaver Hills Warriors, Indigenous Climate Action, Edmonton Youth For Climate and Extinction Rebellion Edmonton have all been active in recent months.

The Narwhal met with organizers with Climate Justice Edmonton to talk about their motivations, their vision and life in Alberta under the new UCP government.

Climate Justice Edmonton organizer Farid Iskandar says activism is the antidote to the flaws of electoral politics. “There is an inherently disproportionate power structure and the only thing that could stop the wealthy ruling class is for everyone else to get together,” he says. Photo: Abdul Malik / The Narwhal

Emma Jackson is advocating for a Green New Deal for Alberta. “This sort of, like, luke-warm, centrist politics is never going to be the answer,” she says. Photo: Abdul Malik / The Narwhal

‘You got us here, how are you going to fix this?’

Shortly after Alberta’s new government took power, it scrapped the province’s carbon tax scheme. Kenney had planned to celebrate at a gas station in Edmonton, but cancelled the event due to thick smoke cloaking the city from early-season wildfires up north. 

The city was choking. Downtown buildings, normally visible from across Edmonton’s river valley, blurred in a grey haze, then disappeared. The end of the block disappeared. A not-small number of people donned handkerchiefs and masks over their noses and mouths. All of this, people were saying, and it wasn’t even summer yet. It was May.

Stephen Buhler, a 28-year-old volunteer with Climate Justice Edmonton, remembers that day well.

Stephen Buhler works as a machinist in Edmonton, creating parts for the oil and gas industry. He’s frustrated with the lack of climate action in the province, and has found joining Climate Justice Edmonton to be “the most rewarding work ever.” Photo: Abdul Malik / The Narwhal

“It went black,” he said. “It was our second coffee break and it got its spookiest.” Buhler was at his job in Edmonton where he works as a machinist supplying parts for the oil and gas industry. 

“I was just dizzy and mad and furious,” he remembers. “I had so many emotions that day. I’ve probably never really experienced anything like that. I just wanted to shout at someone, ‘You got us here, how are you going to fix this?’”

At the same time, he knew, Kenney was cancelling the carbon tax. To him, it felt like a double slap in the face — like things were getting worse with the climate, and the province was doing even less about it. 

“I was mad and defeated,” he tells me. “But I didn’t want to break down crying at work.”

Buhler already drives a Prius to the truck-filled parking lot outside the shop where he works, and had been worried in the past about how his coworkers would receive his left-leaning views. 

He didn’t, he tells me, want to “get copies of the Edmonton Sun thrown at my head” in the break room. 

Still, he says, “I‘m definitely not the only person in oil and gas who feel this way.”

Buhler, who comes from an oil and gas family, laments the fact that his job is linked to fossil fuels, but he knows that in this province, it’s the reality for many workers looking for jobs. 

“What Alberta lives off of has created this,” he says of the early fire season. “In an ideal dream situation, we all just would have made wind-turbine parts that day.” 

After work on that smoky day, Buhler went to a Climate Justice Edmonton meeting. “It was good to go there and be like, ‘okay, other people are worried about this too.’ ”

“You know we’re not going to fix this tomorrow, but we are going to fix it.”

https://www.instagram.com/p/B5gOH5iAWBe/

For Buhler, volunteering with Climate Justice Edmonton has been “the most rewarding work ever.” His role, he says, is to help wherever he can, whether it’s helping to paint signs or build art or organize an event. 

“At the end of the day, I feel like I’m actually doing something worthwhile,” he says.

‘Dazed and disenchanted’ with electoral politics

For the organizers The Narwhal spoke to, there are few other options. Activism is the main path forward they see — to get people together, and to have their voices heard.

For Farid Iskandar, this is a realization he came to after spending time working on political campaigns.

“I started my life and politics from the pragmatist electoral side of things and I’ve moved further to the left as I’ve gone along,” he tells me. “I used to think how we change power is you win government. Then you go in and do things.”

Now, he says, “I understand that, like, sitting in meetings with politicians and asking them to do stuff is not going to get you anywhere.”  

“There is an inherently disproportionate power structure and the only thing that could stop the wealthy ruling class is for everyone else to get together.”

He’s concerned that this is true no matter what party is voted in — left or right, pro-labour or anti-union. “There are external powers that are going to be put up against them,” he says.

“You have to build the power outside of the electoral arena,” Farid Iskandar told The Narwhal. Photo: Abdul Malik / The Narwhal

Iskandar studied engineering in university, including a project focused on open-pit mining, and volunteered for Rachel Notley’s leadership campaign in 2014. As her time as premier went on, he became increasingly disillusioned with the decisions her government was making, particularly around the oil and gas industry and pipelines. 

He was, as he would write in an op-ed in the National Observer, “dazed and disenchanted” by her leadership.

That led him to activism. “You have to build the power outside of the electoral arena,” he says now. “The electoral piece can only be, like, a small part of the strategy.”

That philosophy is part of why, in 2018, Iskandar and 11 others climbed the Ironworkers Memorial Bridge in Vancouver in the middle of the night and clipped themselves on to the structure’s sturdy steel trusses with carabiners and cables. 

Activists climb the Ironworkers Memorial Bridge in Vancouver to protest the Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion. Photo: Tim Aubry / Greenpeace

They were there to send a message.

“I was, like, really scared before we got on the bridge,” he remembers. “I have a fear of heights.”

Seven members of the groups would suspend themselves from the bridge, dangling over the Burrard Inlet. They were blocking the route of an oil tanker waiting at Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline terminal to carry oil from Alberta across the ocean, while displaying art created by Indigenous artists. The rest were there to support them from above.

Activists dangles from the Ironworkers Memorial Bridge in Vancouver to block tanker traffic from Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline terminal. Photo: Greenpeace

Iskandar is now committed to activist movements at home in Alberta, and sees potential for a growing allegiance of workers and people concerned about the environment. 

“We have a common enemy in Jason Kenney, so I’m hoping there will be more talk between labour and environment,” he says.

Banners down their pants

Climate Justice Edmonton has worked on a number of different actions to get their message across in Alberta.

One of them is known as bird-dogging — or showing up to political events and causing a disruption.

So when Justin Trudeau came to Edmonton in February 2018 for a town hall meeting, Emma Jackson was there with other Climate Justice Edmonton members.

It was, however, a bit awkward — she had a giant banner stuck in her pants.

It was a “nice silky fabric,” she remembers, but it was still tricky to smuggle into a crowded gymnasium packed with people and security detail.

That banner was one of three that Climate Justice Edmonton held up in the town hall, each with a message about the Trans Mountain pipeline, the climate and Indigenous rights. 

Climate Justice Edmonton organizers hold up banners they snuck into a town hall meeting with Justin Trudeau in Edmonton in February 2018. Photo: Jason Franson / Canadian Press

As Trudeau answered questions about the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, Jackson and others unfurled their banners behind him, much to the delight of photographers — the images appeared in papers across the country.

Jackson has a long history in organizing and politics. “My dad made me read the communist manifesto when I was in, like, grade nine,” she says.

She came to Alberta to do her masters in sociology — her research was focused on post-fire Fort McMurray at the University of Alberta. Jackson grew up in Ottawa — the daughter of a federal civil servant and a labour activist — and moved to New Brunswick for her degree.

Jackson came to Alberta to work on her masters in sociology, which focused on life after the wildfire in Fort McMurray. Photo: Abdul Malik / The Narwhal

She had long been developing a political identity that had little patience for centrism. 

“This sort of, like, luke-warm, centrist politics is never going to be the answer,” she says. “So it demands that we put forward like a really bold vision of what we want the province to look like.”

Her vision is something of a Green New Deal —  respecting Indigenous rights, ensuring a just transition for workers and ending the reliance on fossil fuels.

The banner that had been in Jackson’s pants — ”No Jobs on a Dead Planet” — went on to do something of a tour around Canada, displayed as concerned communities met to talk about pressing climate issues.

“That banner was in my pants,” she remembers thinking when she saw it in churches and halls across the country.

Coal for Kenney

Climate Justice Edmonton was formally created in a group in January 2018, just a few months after they dropped a 50-foot banner over the North Saskatchewan River in Edmonton. 

The banner, which read “No Kinder Morgan,” and dangled off the High Level Bridge, was a response to the pipeline politics in the province. 

Climate activists look on from above after hanging a banner off of Edmonton’s High Level Bridge that connects the university area with the downtown core. Photo: Elauna Boutwell

A banner protesting the Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion hangs over Edmonton’s North Saskatchewan River in October 2017. Photo: Hannah Geldman

These days, Climate Justice Edmonton is at work on their latest action — delivering coal to Jason Kenney, UCP ministers and MLAs across the province. 

“There are people from all across the province that are signing up to deliver coal to their UCP MLA offices,” Jackson says.

It won’t be real coal, of course. They’ve printed out what she describes as “shitty legislation” produced by the UCP and volunteers have used it to craft papier-mâché lumps of coal.

“We all have a really dark sense of humour,” Jackson says. “Especially with climate change it can feel so heavy and insurmountable to people that for us at a personal level we have no other option than to keep laughing.”

So when the internet recently stopped working at the house Jackson and others work out of, they joked it was the war room, imagining “the UCP broke in and stole our internet router.”

Humour has to play a role in climate activism, organizers say. Photo: Abdul Malik / The Narwhal

‘Incredibly hostile’

Though they can laugh about the antics of the UCP government, Climate Justice Edmonton members do worry about some of the tactics of the Alberta government

Jackson has been called out on Twitter on more than one occasion by the executive director of issues management for the Premier of Alberta, Matt Wolf, who has described her online as “someone who has worked to sabotage our economy.” (A spokesperson for the premier’s office did not respond to The Narwhal’s request for comment.)

“I struggle with it,” Jackson says of deciding how much to engage, or even follow, these sorts of tweets.

The first time Wolf tweeted about her, a friend forwarded her an email sent out by the UCP that she says included her name and photo. 

“People know what your face looks like,” she says of having the governing party distribute her photo to its supporters, noting it was a time when the Yellow Vest movement was gaining steam.

“It is incredibly hostile,” she tells me. “In some ways I think it’s so desperate. It’s a signal that they’re losing.”

https://www.instagram.com/p/BwcjoQ-gpN-/

Overall, she’s perplexed by the UCP’s allocation of $30 million toward the Canadian Energy Centre.

“You claim to be fiscally conservative and you’re going to pour $30 million into, like, tweeting,” she says.

‘Celebrity magnetism’

In mid-October, Climate Justice Edmonton sent out a tweet that would be seen around the world when it was retweeted by Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg. 

“IT’S OFFICIAL,” read the tweet. “GretaThunberg will join a #ClimateStrike on Treaty 6 territory in amiskwaciwâskahikan.”

Thunberg would be joining a Friday climate strike in Edmonton, hosted by a coalition of local activist communities: Climate Justice Edmonton, Beaver Hills Warriors, Indigenous Climate Action, Edmonton Youth For Climate and Extinction Rebellion Edmonton.

From the moment she arrived, Thunberg attracted plenty of attention.

Estimates ranged from 4,000 to 10,000 attendees, swarming around the front steps of the Alberta legislature. The premier’s wing in the legislature, for its part, appeared to pull its blinds and leave up its signs proclaiming “I [heart] Canadian Oil and Gas.”

Edmontonians gather on the steps of the Alberta legislature for a climate strike featuring speeches from Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, Indigenous activists and artists, and local climate activists. Photo: Sharon J. Riley / The Narwhal

It was a lot of work to organize. Climate Justice Edmonton only learned about the visit the week before, and had a lot to do: recruiting and training dozens of marshals for the march. Media requests coming in constantly. Booking the legislature.

All of this came at a particularly busy time for Jackson and others — only days remained before the October federal election.

Greta Thunberg’s “celebrity magnetism,” Jackson says, brought in a lot of people — and drew a lot of political interest.

Though the crowds were exciting, the sudden political interest was frustrating to Jackson. Politicians who “have never once reached out to any young climate organizers in this entire province,” she says, wanted to meet with Greta.

“You’re not actually meeting people doing things in your own community,” she adds — like the Climate Justice Edmonton organizers who have been ringing alarm bells about the climate crisis long before Thunberg arrived.

‘Climate enraged’

Each of the organizers The Narwhal spoke to was worried about the climate crisis, without a doubt. And the policies of Alberta’s UCP government — not just the war room, but also the public inquiry into the funding of environmental groups — has some of them more angry than worried.

“I don’t really get climate anxious,” Buhler says, describing a feeling that has become increasingly part of the modern lexicon. “I just get, like, climate enraged.”

But despite Climate Justice Edmonton’s early pronouncement of a “war room” of their own, they don’t see themselves as at war with regular voters — no matter who they voted for.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B5jN2WWAeaq/

“I don’t demonize people who voted UCP,” Iskandar says.

“I sympathize with them,” he says. “I think there’s actually a lot in common with people who shitpost me on Facebook — we’ve all been screwed by the same structure.”

In some ways, these are the same people the group is trying to reach.

“Climate Justice Edmonton tries to put forward the message that these are multi-billion companies,” who are active in the oilsands, Jackson says.

“Those companies ultimately care way more about their financial bottom line than they do about you and your family,” she adds.

They’re hopeful that this message will inspire more Albertans to pay attention to their vision for the future of the province — and the planet.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

There’s a huge oilsands project that’s getting a lot of attention these days — and it’s not the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion.

A massive new oilsands mine project — widely thought to be the largest Alberta will ever build — is awaiting final federal approval from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet.

The Teck Frontier mine would cover 24,000 hectares — an area twice the size of the City of Vancouver — and would produce 260,000 barrels of bitumen each day at its peak. The proposal includes plans to produce oil starting in 2026, and to continue on producing right through to the 2060s.

Having been under review for several years, the mine’s fate now rests in the hands of the federal government.

And as the February deadline for a final decision approaches, pressure is mounting on all sides of the issue.

Increasingly, the Frontier mine is being seen as a bet on the long-term economic viability of the oilsands themselves.

At the same time, critics say its approval would be in direct opposition to Canada’s climate commitments.

This comes just as a new report out from the Global Gas and Oil Network found that Canada is second only to the United States in planned expansion of the oil and gas industry.

“New oil and gas development in Canada between now and 2050 could unlock an additional 25 [gigatonnes of carbon dioxide], more than doubling cumulative emissions from the sector,” the report found.

Teck would make up nearly 20 per cent of those additional emissions.

We rounded up what the major players are saying about the mine — and it should come as no surprise that opinions are polarized on whether it should move forward.

1. Alberta Premier Jason Kenney thinks it’s essential for the Alberta oil and gas industry

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Alberta Premier Jason Kenney is for the mine. All for it.

He sees its approval as a vote from Ottawa for — or against — Alberta oil.

“If this project does not proceed, it would be a clear indication that there is no way forward for this country’s largest natural resource,” Kenney said this week in a speech in Ottawa.

It “must be done,” he said of the Frontier approval, citing Teck’s estimate that the project will create thousands of jobs.

He also cited the conditional support of Athabasca Chipewyan Chief Allan Adam — who he noted has taken James Cameron, Jane Fonda and Leonardo DiCaprio on tours of the oilsands — for the project. (Buuuut that comes with a caveat, more on that in #5.)

As The Globe and Mail put it this week, Kenney is “pitching Ottawa’s options on Frontier as the environment versus Canadian unity.”

2. Teck Resources isn’t sure it will ever make economic sense to build the mine

Teck Resources previously told The Narwhal it “is committed to advancing Frontier in a socially and environmentally responsible manner” and has projected huge economic returns for Canadian governments at all levels should the project go ahead — to the tune of $70 billion in royalties and taxes.

But the company’s 2018 annual report, released this February, is less confident.

“There is uncertainty that it will be commercially viable to produce any portion of the resources” to be mined at the proposed Frontier site, according to the report.

That raises questions about whether the mine will ever be built, even if it is approved.

3. A review panel recommended the federal government approve the mine, despite ‘significant adverse environmental effects’

The joint federal-provincial panel, comprised of three appointed members, recommended earlier this year that the federal government approve the mine proposal, noting “the Frontier project will provide significant economic benefits for the region, Alberta and Canada.”

The panel cited Teck Resources’ estimates of how much tax and royalty revenue will be generated by the project, and projections for job creation during construction and operation.

The panel also noted “significant adverse environmental effects,” including the removal of 3,000 hectares of old-growth forest, effects on biodiversity, significant impacts on local wildlife species like wood bison, Canada lynx and woodland caribou, and the disturbance of 14,000 hectares of wetlands — including the “irreversible” loss of 3,000 hectares of peatland, a highly sensitive and important carbon sink.

4. The federal Green Party wants the mine rejected because it hampers Canada’s ability to meet its climate commitments

Earlier this week, the federal Green party called on Trudeau and his cabinet to reject the Frontier Mine project.

“Going ahead with construction of the Frontier mine would contribute six megatons of CO2 per year from production alone,” Green Party interim leader Jo-Ann Roberts said in a press release.

“This would seriously compromise our ability to reach the emissions reduction targets set out in the Paris Agreement,” she said.

Canada reaffirmed its target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80 per cent by 2050, compared to 2005 levels, at the Paris climate conference in 2015.

That translates to 150 megatonnes of total emissions nationwide by 2050. The Teck Frontier mine is expected to produce between four and six megatonnes per year, depending on who you ask, which would mean this one oilsands project would eat up three to four per cent of all of the emissions allowed across the entire country in 2050.

Former Green Party leader, Elizabeth May, who is in Madrid for the COP25 summit, echoed Roberts’ call.

“There is absolutely no wiggle room in the global carbon budget for any kind of expansion of oil and gas production,” May said in the press release.

5. A prominent First Nations chief is having second thoughts

Teck has announced that it has secured approval of all 14 local Indigenous groups, but Athabasca Chipewyan Chief Allan Adam recently told CBC he’s not pleased with the steps the company, or the province, have taken to mitigate environment damages associated with the project.

“This would be the first time that the Alberta government is killing its own oilsand project,” he said this week.

“We are not just going to take hot air anymore.”

He’s not alone. Indigenous youth from Canada attending the COP 25 summit in Madrid have also recently expressed concerns over the Frontier mine, which would be just 25 kilometres south of Wood Buffalo National Park.

“This is taking us in the wrong direction,” Eriel Deranger, a member of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and executive director of Indigenous Climate Action, told CBC in Madrid.

6. Economists worry about the long-term viability of the mine

The Frontier mine project is based on higher oil prices than the world is currently seeing — and is premised on the notion that oil prices will increase in the long term.

“Prices are forecast to be US$80 to US$90 per barrel by 2020, and increasing thereafter,” Teck said in a 2016 submission to the review panel. Currently, the West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil price is just below $60 USD per barrel.

In its low-price scenario, Teck assumed an average WTI price $76.51 per barrel and a high-price scenario of $115 per barrel.

Economists say that if the world does take mitigating the climate crisis seriously, that could have an impact on world oil demand — a sizeable impact.

It “would require not only do we not see business-as-usual growth in world oil demand — roughly over one per cent per year — but that we would see anywhere from a 20 to 50 per cent decline in world oil demand over the next 30 to 40 years,” economist Jeff Rubin told The Narwhal last year.

And a reduction in oil demand would reduce oil prices. That, Rubin said, “would shut-in production in places like the oilsands… because their cost of production would no longer be supported by oil prices.”

Gordon Laxer, a political economist and professor emeritus at the University of Alberta, points out that other oil-producing states can produce oil much cheaper than the Alberta oilsands.

“Saudi Arabia produces oil for just a tiny fraction of what Alberta does,” he told The Narwhal last fall. “That oil will have a much longer lifespan than sands oil.”

7. A recently retired Suncor CEO projected last year that new large-scale projects are unlikely to be built in Alberta’s oilsands

Late last year, the province’s latest oilsands development, the Fort Hills Mine, had its grand opening. (Teck has a 23 per cent share in Fort Hills, its first foray into the oilsands. The Frontier mine would be its second.)

At that celebration, Suncor now-retired chief executive Steve Williams predicted a slow future for the oilsands, telling an interviewer that “it’s unlikely there will be projects of this type of scale again.”

8. Canada’s new Minister of Environment and Climate Change, Jonathan Wilkinson, is still figuring it all out

Though he’s only a few weeks into his new post as Minister of Environment and Climate Change, Jonathan Wilkinson is already facing questions about his government’s upcoming decision on the Frontier mine.

“The issues around greenhouse gases associated with the project are absolutely relevant to the decision that the federal cabinet will need to take,” Wilkinson told The Globe and Mail this week.

“Any decision [cabinet] needs to take will certainly be in the context of the commitments we have made on the climate plan.”

Wilkinson acknowledged that he’s heard Kenney’s calls for the mine to be approved, loud and clear.

“Premier Kenney has made it very clear that the Teck project is important for him, but ultimately we’re going to have to try to find a way to navigate through a decision and project that has a number of challenges,” he told The Globe and Mail.

“I can’t prejudge the decision of the federal cabinet, but what I can tell you is that the issue around the greenhouse gases associated with that project will be very much relevant to the decision that cabinet will take.”

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The Government of Alberta announced Tuesday it is beginning consultation on the emissions reduction system it hopes will replace the province’s existing carbon pricing for large emitters — but The Narwhal has learned no organizations working on environment or climate change issues have been included on the government’s list of stakeholders

Minister of Environment and Parks Jason Nixon said at a news conference that the government is now “seeking feedback on an improved way to manage emissions” — the province’s proposed Technology Innovation and Emissions Reduction (TIER) system, which focuses on heavy emitters.

Nixon told reporters that government representatives will meet with approximately 150 stakeholders this week in Calgary, including representatives of the oil and gas, agriculture, chemicals, mining, forestry and electricity industries.

A list of the stakeholders obtained by The Narwhal does not include any public interest groups.

The Pembina Institute, a clean energy think tank started in Drayton Valley, Alta., in the 1980s, told The Narwhal it was not invited to participate in the consultations.

“It’s highly unusual,” Simon Dyer, executive director of the Pembina Institute, said in an interview.

Dyer said he heard first about the consultation in a news story following the government’s announcement.

“It’s a worrying signal about how this government is going to collect input from stakeholders,” he said.

Jess Sinclair, press secretary for Alberta Environment and Parks, told The Narwhal by email that “because the [emissions reduction] framework is designed with heavy industry in mind, we are beginning the consultation process focusing on affected industries.”

“That said, we are happy to engage with other interested parties in the spirit of collaboration, should they approach us and have relevant information to share.”

Sinclair provided The Narwhal with a list of “companies we’re currently consulting.” They include the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) and other industry associations, the so-called ‘Big Five’ oil giants and dozens of other companies. (The University of Alberta and the University of Calgary are both also included, as a result of their roles as producers of their own electricity).

Dyer is concerned that the government isn’t seeking out stakeholders who are specifically concerned about environmental impacts.

“It’s just appropriate when you’re developing regulations that will result in impacts on both company performance and greenhouse gas management that you should have stakeholders who are interested in environmental outcomes involved, to ensure those views are represented,” he said.

Pembina Institute part of previous consultations

Last week, Premier Jason Kenney announced he was allocating $2.5 million toward a public inquiry he said would “investigate the foreign-funded campaign to landlock our energy.”

“Alberta will no longer allow hostile interest groups to dictate our economic destiny as one of the most ethical major producers of energy in the world,” Kenney said when he announced the inquiry, and named the Pembina Institute as one of the inquiry’s potential targets.

But Dyer told The Narwhal he believes the Pembina Institute is well-positioned to provide perspectives on responsible energy development.

“As Canada’s leading clean energy think tank with core expertise in climate regulations for industry, we would hope they would reach out to us, but we’ve received nothing so far.”

Along with the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), the Pembina Institute co-chaired technical consultation sessions on oil and gas regulations initiated by the previous government. In the past, industry has lauded the Pembina Institute’s work, including the work of Ed Whittingham, the group’s former executive director who became a target of the United Conservative Party during the recent election.

The new United Conservative Party (UCP) government, Dyer said, has been less willing to engage with environmental perspectives.

Trevor Tombe, an associate professor of economics at the University of Calgary, told The Narwhal by email that the nature of the consultation depends on the goal of the proposed changes.

“If the changes they actually have in mind are of a more technical nature, rather than fundamentally changing [the existing regulations], then limited engagement may be entirely appropriate.”

But, he added, it’s not yet known how extensive the UCP’s changes will be.

“The government has not been entirely clear around what their goals for reform actually are.”

Proposed system ‘applies specifically to industry’

Dyer said that not only has the Pembina Institute been shut out of consultations on the emissions reduction program, but every single request to meet with the new government has been rejected or ignored.

Sinclair, the press secretary for Alberta Environment and Parks, told The Narwhal by email “we are not currently engaging NGOs” when it comes to the proposed emissions reduction system.

“However, should a group like Pembina reach out with information relevant to the [emissions reduction] program, we are happy to engage with them.”

Nina Lothian, the director of the fossil fuels program at the Pembina Institute, sent a letter Wednesday to the government to request the group be included in future consultations.

“As experts in industrial carbon pricing and climate policy, the Pembina Institute would like to formally request inclusion in the engagement workshops on the proposed Technology Innovation and Emissions Reduction (TIER) system,” she wrote.

“In the future, as is customary, we’d appreciate being included in discussions related to energy and environment issues from your department, and notification of important public policy announcements and proposals.”

Dyer told The Narwhal that the Pembina Institute has offered “to meet and to present our views and correct much of the extreme misinformation that’s on the record about our work.”

“Since the new government has come to Edmonton, we’ve reached out to the premier and we’ve reached out to his ministers, and every UCP MLA,” he said.

Not one, Dyer said, agreed to meet.

Syncrude operation in Alberta’s oilsands north of Fort McMurray. Photo: Louis Bockner / Sierra Club BC

‘Somewhat ironic’ new rules

Nixon said at Tuesday’s news conference that Alberta’s provincial carbon tax was a “failed ideological experiment,” and his government plans to implement an improved system for emissions reduction.

Nixon made the announcement during a week of Calgary Stampede festivities. He was joined by Minister of Energy Sonya Savage and Minister of Agriculture and Forestry Devin Dreeshen.

The UCP government says it will replace the current system with its new emissions reduction proposal on Jan. 1, 2020.

The government bills the program as an “improved way to manage emissions from large industries like oil and gas.”

Others aren’t so sure.

Environmental groups have critiqued this type of policy approach and pointed to research that indicates a broadly and uniformly applied carbon pricing system is more likely to incentivize change — and spur innovation.

Tombe, the economics professor, told The Narwhal he’s “pleased to see the UCP support carbon taxes.”

“Though the coverage is narrower, it still covers 50 per cent of Alberta emissions with a price on emissions. This is a large departure from their political rhetoric,” he said.

Tombe remains skeptical of some parts of the plan, however. “It may propose to give larger subsidies to dirtier firms and smaller subsidies to cleaner ones,” he noted.

“This is unfortunate, and undermines some of the effectiveness of large-emitter climate policy in Alberta.”

Dyer is concerned it’s not necessary — or worth the effort — to “reinvent” emissions reduction regulations.

“The existing regulations drive innovation and they reward the cleanest operators,” Dyer said.

“It’s somewhat ironic that a week after the premier has said he’s concerned about negative attention on the oilsands, that Alberta would signal that it’s considering relaxing these rules in the long term.”

Dyer says strong emissions regulations increase the competitiveness of Alberta oil.

“We believe stronger regulations will help the industry compete and [help] Albertans’ communications efforts in the future about responsible oilsands development,” he said.

The public can provide online feedback on the government’s proposed emissions reduction system until Aug. 2, 2019.

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The vast majority of approvals for Alberta’s oil and gas wells will soon be automated, reducing waiting times for drilling companies to as little as 15 minutes, The Narwhal has learned.

The Alberta Energy Regulator confirmed to The Narwhal by email that it expects to begin implementing automated approval for routine well licences later this year, though lobbying records indicate the system could be rolled out as early as next month.

With the change, staff will no longer review most applications from companies seeking to drill a new oil or gas well.

In lobbying records obtained by The Narwhal through a freedom of information request, Richard Wong, manager of operations with the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), said the association anticipates 90 per cent of routine well applications could soon be automatically approved by OneStop, the online tool used to submit requests for permits and licences to the Alberta Energy Regulator.

The Narwhal was charged $643.95 by the Alberta Energy Regulator — an industry-funded corporation in charge of overseeing Alberta’s energy industry — to access the documents. The fee was paid by readers who donated specifically to cover these costs.

When asked for details, CAPP told The Narwhal by email that these approvals refer to applications that are “anticipated to be low-risk and, as such, the approval of each of those applications would be expedited.”

Wong, who shared CAPP’s analysis of the proposed new processes with the Alberta Energy Regulator, wrote in the documents obtained by The Narwhal that CAPP anticipated the move to automation could contribute to between $67 million and $136 million in cost savings, and that the “average business days for those approvals would accelerate … to 15 minutes.”

‘A concern for a whole host of reasons’

Thousands of new oil and gas wells are drilled every year in Alberta, and Premier Jason Kenney vowed during the recent election campaign to speed up approvals for new wells, having promised a “rapid acceleration of approvals.”

Over the past year, concerns have been raised about industry’s ability to pay for the cleanup of the hundreds of thousands of wells already drilled in the province, with internal estimates pegging the bill at $100 billion.

Automated approvals are “a concern for a whole host of reasons,” Mark Dorin, an Alberta landowner who has worked in oil and gas for decades, told The Narwhal.

“I’m not an anti-energy person,” Dorin said. “But it’s about fair, balanced decision making.”

“If we put rules in place, I’d have no concerns about new wells whatsoever,” he said.

Dorin is concerned that current processes do not protect the land where wells are drilled, ensure the safety of sites or provide any guarantee that oil and gas infrastructure will be cleaned up by the companies responsible.

Nikki Way, a senior analyst with the Pembina Institute, is concerned efficiency has been prioritized over safety and environmental quality in the regulator’s roll-out of automated systems.

“We’ve seen the announcements about fast-tracking [licences] and saving money, but where are the systems that incorporate the science and data into these automated decisions, which they’ve promised for years?” she asks.

Way is concerned the regulator doesn’t have the systems in place to safeguard air and water quality in rural communities when the regulator is “fast-tracking even more projects with no human oversight.”

How, she wonders, can Alberta “claim that we have a world-class regulator when it hasn’t prioritized the essential systems that fulfill the second half of its mandate that protects families, their land and our environment?”

‘Processed in minutes’

Other activities under the purview of the Alberta Energy Regulator are already largely automated and handled through OneStop — including reclamation certificates.

The Narwhal previously reported that 97 per cent of applications for reclamation certificates are approved without a visit to the site, and 87 per cent are approved automatically without any human oversight.

For companies seeking to drill new wells, applications that do not flag any of the regulator’s automated “risk assessment rules” can proceed automatically, without any scrutiny by staff.

A video produced by the regulator to introduce OneStop boasts that the previous automation of other types of approvals means that “25,000 pipeline applications processed annually — automatically” and that “low-risk applications [can be] processed in minutes.”

CAPP told The Narwhal by email that “CAPP sees OneStop as a significant opportunity to enable a more predictable regulatory process in Alberta, and to help enable industry competitiveness while maintaining environmental, social and regulatory outcomes.”

In an October 2018 statement about its shift to automated systems, the Alberta Energy Regulator said its “new approach is truly game changing and something that few regulators have attempted.”

Approvals are already speedy

Despite the rhetoric employed by Kenney during the recent provincial election campaign, the Alberta Energy Regulator estimates the current processing time for well and facility applications is just “five business days.”

The regulator has an internal goal that 95 per cent of new routine wells applications are approved within that time frame.

In 2018, 97 per cent of 5,691 new routine wells were approved within five days. That figure was lauded as a “big win” in internal emails sent by CAPP and obtained by The Narwhal under the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy (FOIP) Act.

When asked how long new well approvals would take once the system is automated, the Alberta Energy Regulator told The Narwhal by email that it “cannot provide details about the process or approval timelines at this time.”

Both CAPP and the regulator were careful to note that only “routine” applications would be processed automatically.

Alberta Energy Regulator spokesperson Samantha Peck confirmed by email that “approximately 95 per cent of new licence applications are routine.”

“An application is considered routine when the applicant has met all requirements (including participant involvement), has no outstanding public or industry concerns and regulatory waivers or relaxations are not requested,” Peck said.

But Dorin is concerned that wells like the ones drilled on his land won’t get individualized attention.

“They are always unique circumstances and they should be dealt with on a one-by-one basis,” Dorin said.

“There are no two wells that are the same.”

CAPP: automation a ‘priority’

According to the documents obtained by The Narwhal, the automation of new well approvals is part of the work of the regulator’s “regulatory efficiency council,” a “committee of senior-level energy industry executives and representatives” formed to “help the [regulator] identify, evaluate and prioritize regulatory reductions.”

CAPP correspondence with the Alberta Energy Regulator states that “automation of routine well licence approvals” has been identified as a “priority” to improve regulatory efficiency.

Last summer, Terry Abel, CAPP’s vice president of Canada operations and climate, wrote to the Alberta Energy Regulator then-president and CEO, Jim Ellis, to express his support of automation on a “priority basis,” noting that CAPP is “pleased” with the regulator’s efforts thus far.

The regulator told The Narwhal it “began work to implement well licence applications into OneStop prior to receiving Terry Abel’s August 2018 letter.”

The documents obtained by The Narwhal contain many expressions of gratitude from industry for the regulator’s efforts to increase efficiency.

“Industry has recently seen clear evidence of the [Alberta Energy Regulator’s] staff’s renewed commitment and increased focus on efforts to reduce unnecessary regulatory burden and costs,” CAPP wrote at one point.

“We wish to thank you for the ongoing efforts undertaken by the Alberta Energy Regulator to deliver a modern, efficient and performance-based regulatory system,” Abel wrote to the regulator in August.

Tim McMillian, CAPP’s president and CEO, wrote to the regulator to laud the “collaborative spirit” that had characterized the two groups’ working relationship.

‘Low-risk’

The regulator says its automated system will only apply to what it calls “low-risk” applications for new well licences.

“OneStop uses a complex set of risk assessment rules that automate low-risk (baseline) applications and forwards higher-risk and more complex applications to technical experts for an additional, manual review,” Peck, the regulator spokesperson, told The Narwhal by email.

“This ensures we are focusing our manual efforts on medium- and high-risk applications, and using our existing and continually growing wealth of data to automate low-risk applications.”

“Any applications considered to have a potential impact on the environment or stakeholders are not automated,” Peck added.

The regulator’s website offers an example of a low-risk application: the company reports to the regulator that “the landscape includes a well that produces shallow, sweet gas,” and that the well will be drilled on “flat, private grazing land and the landowner has consented to the activity, [and] no sensitive species are nearby.”

In this scenario, the approval of the licence to drill the well is automated, though the company is subject to audits and inspections.

The Narwhal previously reported that the number of sites visited for some types of audits is far fewer than previously promised, and the number of field inspectors has declined by 16 per cent since the Alberta Energy Regulator took over compliance monitoring from the government five years ago.

Way, the analyst with the Pembina Institute, is careful to point out that the automation in itself isn’t what she’s concerned about — it’s the underlying assessment of risk.

“The process of automating approvals in the oil and gas industry isn’t inherently a bad idea, if it is matched with checks and balances in that system to ensure that the right information is being considered and integrated into these automated approvals,” she told The Narwhal.

“Our concern is that the [regulator]’s promised programs for that balance have been under-resourced, de-prioritized and all but swept under the rug while the [Alberta Energy Regulator] has gone full steam ahead with automating approvals.”

Dorin said the regulator’s processes are insufficient when it comes to the approval of new well licences.

“They’re just rubber stamping these things like crazy,” he said.

The Petroleum Services Association of Canada has forecast 2,685 wells will be drilled this year in Alberta — a number viewed as low by industry.

Conventional oil and gas wells are drilled thousands of feet below the surface through layers of soil, rock and drinking water aquifers.

As a Government of Alberta fact-sheet put it, the “only way to determine whether a rock formation contains petroleum or natural gas is to drill a well.”

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Last August, long-time Albertan Ed Whittingham took a break from a family vacation to sit in his rental car and make a call on Skype.

Whittingham had seen a job posting in April that had intrigued him. The posting — which had been forwarded to him by a roommate from his university days — was for a position on the board of the Alberta Energy Regulator, the corporation responsible for oversight of Alberta’s energy industry.

The Skype interview went well and his application was successful, but it took longer than expected for all the paperwork to be finalized and his appointment to be announced. It wasn’t for another seven months that he would head to his first board meeting.

That’s when the news broke.

Unbeknownst to Whittingham, the United Conservative Party (UCP) had been at work preparing a press release condemning his appointment. They took umbrage with his past work lobbying for environmentally responsible growth of the oilsands and made use of an oft-repeated criticism of charities of late: the countries of origin of some of the funding of his past employer, the Pembina Institute.

“It’s outrageous that the NDP government would appoint a foreign-funded, anti-oilsands, anti-pipeline activist like Mr. Whittingham to such an important government body,” then-UCP MLA Jason Nixon, now Minister of Environment and Parks, said in the press release.

When the news hit the media, Whittingham was driving from Canmore, Alta. — where he lives with his wife and family — to what would be his first, and only, board meeting at the Alberta Energy Regulator’s office in Calgary.

His friends and colleagues started to see his name in the news almost immediately.

“My phone just went apeshit,” he says.

‘Bears and bunnies’ conservation

By the time I met Whittingham — at his local gun club, tucked beneath the peaks of the Rockies — he had resigned from his post at the Alberta Energy Regulator, following a tumultuous period of being portrayed as the disgraced face of an environmental movement accused of being “anti-Alberta.”

When photographer Amber Bracken and I visit, Whittingham is in what could be called his ‘outdoorsy’ mode — donning a puffy vest and a pair of Carhartts. He’s got a suit and tie hanging in his car, in case he needs to make a quick change for a TV interview he’s doing later in the day. It’ll be about his 20th media appearance of the week, he says.

He gives us a tour of the gun range, where he comes regularly to practise his marksmanship for hunting season. Whittingham is an outdoor and sports enthusiast — he’s a member of his local judo club (where he also coaches kids’ judo) and is a recreational hockey player. He hunts regularly and is an avid skier and mountain biker. “You have a very Canmore vibe,” our photographer remarks.

“I didn’t consult Vogue,”  Whittingham quips.

Whittingham giving a television interview in Dead Man’s Flats, near Canmore, Alta. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

His enthusiasm for outdoor pursuits started at a young age, when he grew up in Newmarket, Ont., a small city with a population of about 80,000.

When he was in elementary school, he remembers, things started to change in his neighbourhood. A fallow field near his childhood home — a favourite destination for adventures with his friends — was surveyed for a suburban development.

His reaction at the time manifested itself in what he now describes as the mischievous behaviour of young boys — “night missions” to pull up survey stakes. “I’ll probably be called an ecoterrorist,” he says, laughing.

His motives were sincere, though he may regret his eight-year-old methods. It was an early experience in what he saw as the importance of conservation.

“That was the first time I experienced ‘ecological grief,’ ” he says. “You really feel that grieving for losing a chunk of nature that you’re attached to.”

This early connection to natural places made it unsurprising when he decided to make his home in the Rocky Mountains. His early work was in what he jokingly refers to as “bears and bunnies conservation.”

“I was a rough-and-tumble conservation activist,” he says of his 20s in Alberta’s mountain parks. That early experience in conservation work, he tells me, made him realize how important it was to understand diverse perspectives, including those in industry.

This belief in a more pragmatic environmentalism — one that embraced myriad perspectives — led him to an MBA in international business and sustainability at York University. Whittingham had previously studied at McGill, UC Berkeley and Sophia University in Japan (he had been an exchange student in Japan as a teenager).

With his MBA under his belt, he moved back to Alberta and began working with the Pembina Institute, the organization he would eventually lead for more than six years.

The Narwhal’s Sharon J. Riley speaks with former Alberta Energy Regulator board member Ed Whittingham, whose friends joked was ‘the most hated man in Alberta’ during the recent election campaign. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

‘Most hated man in Alberta’

In late 2010, Whittingham’s appointment as executive director of the Pembina Institute was announced under a headline that described him as “a bird-watching business guy.”

That’s not the only way he’s been described in recent years.

In 2015, the New York Times dubbed him “one of the country’s most prominent environmentalists.” A 2016 profile in the Financial Post described him as an “environmental movement leader” who “understands business.” A commenter on a 2013 YouTube video that chronicled “Two Days in the Life of Environmentalist Ed Whittingham” — a video with nearly 75,000 views that followed Whittingham as he knotted his tie, met for coffee at Starbucks with a senior advisor from Conoco-Phillips, rode his bike around Calgary and slept on a cot in his office at Pembina — noted “this guy is like the environmental Clark Kent!”

Praise for Whittingham came from within the oil and gas industry, too.

Michael Crothers, president and country chair of Shell Canada, who had regular conversations with Whittingham between 2016 and 2018, told The Narwhal by email that Whittingham “provided a balanced voice to help bridge the divide in the economy versus environment debate.”

“We worked with him the way we like to work with others outside of our sector — with the knowledge that we can accomplish more together, through dialogue and collaboration,” Crothers told The Narwhal.

Whittingham headed up Pembina’s corporate consulting arm before becoming executive director. That arm worked with large oilsands companies, governments and other groups to advocate for responsible fossil fuel development.

Whittingham, pictured here at his home in Canmore, has been described as a “great listener and thoughtful contributor,” by a former executive of Suncor Energy. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

A former Suncor executive — now president and CEO of the Alberta Energy Regulator — described him in 2016 as “a great listener and thoughtful contributor.” (Suncor declined The Narwhal’s request for comment and the regulator told The Narwhal by email that it “cannot comment on the work of any specific director.”)

But the UCP press release kicked off a barrage of public denunciations, Twitter tirades and op-eds about Whittingham.

The Calgary Herald dubbed him an “enemy of Alberta’s oil and gas industry,” and his appointment was deemed “disturbing” by the opinion pages of the Calgary Sun (both newspapers now share a newsroom under the ownership of Postmedia). He was variously described by online commenters as a fox guarding the hen house, a “staunch opponent of industry,” an “avowed opponent of earth jobs … engaged in economic sabotage against earth,” and, by one angry Twitter user, as a “pretentious turd.”

Whittingham didn’t comment publicly during this period. He says the Alberta government and the regulator assured him the attention would blow over.

It didn’t.

It wasn’t long before the UCP’s platform was released. It included the name of just one private citizen, alongside an election promise.

“Fire Ed Whittingham.”

‘This is how your reputation can be taken apart’

Having his name included in the UCP platform ensured that Whittingham’s name became even more well known.

“I became increasingly surprised by how much it took off and what a political punching bag I became,” he says.

“I became a sound-byte in stump speeches.”

Whittingham remembers meeting one of his fellow team members at the community hockey league in Canmore, where he plays at least twice per week. One of the league’s members greeted him on the ice by proclaiming, “You’re the most hated man in Alberta!”

It was a joke, but Whittingham, 46, says the sentiment weighed heavily on his wife and kids.

Yuka Ozawa met Whittingham 25 years ago, in Banff. They were both staying at the same youth hostel — a spot that was likely the start for a lot of international marriages, Whittingham jokes.

The couple have two children, Beck, 15, and Alice, 12. Their niece, Kaela, 17, is also part of the family and lives with them in Canmore.

Ozawa says that 12-year-old Alice learned about her dad’s newfound infamy in school, as her class studied current events. Her dad’s photo was featured front and centre on CBC’s website.

“I didn’t know how to deal with it,” Ozawa says of the negative attention.

Ozawa’s eyes brim with tears as she tells me about the strain of hearing the nasty comments about her husband, a man she’s been married to since 1999.

“He’s not two-faced,” she says. “I don’t see anything different out there or inside the house. He is who he is.”

The UCP party’s election platform included the promise to “fire Ed Whittingham” from the board of the Alberta Energy Regulator. Whittingham resigned from his position the day before Jason Kenney and the new UCP government took office. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

Whittingham said he recently watched a John Oliver interview with Monica Lewinski, and felt a kinship, of sorts.

“Talk about someone whose life, whose identity, was completely taken away from them,” he says. “With something like this you get the slightest surface-level understanding. Obviously what she went through was a million times [bigger], on a global scale.”

“But when your anonymity is taken away, when you have people you don’t know saying nasty things and when you have the premier-in-waiting saying you’re anti-Alberta … then it’s like ‘oh this is how it works, this is how your reputation can be taken apart’ … It was a very surreal thing to go through.”

‘Jingoistic’ accusations of foreign funding

Whittingham’s work with the Pembina Institute formed the basis of the bulk of criticism against him. The organization was created in Alberta in the 1980s by residents living near the Pembina River — in the Drayton Valley area — in response to a toxic fire at a sour-gas well.

The Financial Post described the Pembina Institute as “the green group that the oilpatch can work with” in 2016.

A spokesperson for Cenovus, a major Canadian oil company, told the paper in 2016 that the company had “a strong and constructive relationship with the Pembina Institute.” (Cenovus declined to make anyone available for an interview with The Narwhal, as did the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.)

Pembina “collaborated with industry for decades to improve environmental practices rather than demand its demise,” according to the Financial Post.

The Post didn’t stop there, noting that the organization had “deep knowledge of the [energy] business based on science, and knew its way around executive offices.”

In Alberta at least, the organization’s treatment in some media outlets has changed somewhat since then.

Among the most prominent criticisms of Whittingham revolves around the Pembina Institute’s acceptance of some funding from outside of Canada during his time at the helm.

Whittingham points to a poster attacking the credibility of the Pembina Institute, where he used to work. Similar criticism dates back many years and re-surfaced during the recent election. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

Whittingham is vehemently opposed to this criticism, noting that 85 per cent of Pembina’s funding is from Canadian sources.

But that, he says, is besides the point.

“Anyone that uses ‘foreign funded’ as a slur, as a bad thing, I find really concerning — it’s jingoistic, if not bordering on racist,” he says.

“I’m married to a foreigner,” he adds. His wife is from Japan; his parents are from England. It’s personal for him — the idea that “foreign” is necessarily negative.

On top of that, he views the foreign-funding criticism as hypocritical.

“No one’s talking about trying to put national borders on the ability to seek capital — and nor would I ever suggest that. We’re living in a globalized world and we need to bring a globalized approach to these really big-ticket challenges.”

“Climate change knows no borders,” he says.

Whittingham points out that money and capital flow across borders not just in philanthropy, but in business, too.

“To say some foreign-funding is good, like for companies, but to say foreign funding is bad for an international Canada-based organization — I just think it takes us in completely the wrong direction.”

“The fact that more people aren’t challenging that … aren’t pointing out the hypocrisy in that and how troubling it is — that to me has been frustrating and disturbing.”

‘Solutions are global’

Simon Dyer, the current executive director of the Pembina Institute, told The Narwhal that he takes issue with what he calls “spurious” criticisms about foreign funding of his organization.

“Energy is a global issue. The solutions are global,” he says, noting that there is a double standard for public-interest groups when compared to industry players. “The industries that operate in Alberta and Canada have significant foreign investments.”

Dyer told The Narwhal he thinks his former colleague “was, unfortunately, a prop in an election campaign.”

“It was pure politics. It’s got nothing to do with what actually happens on the ground.”

Dyer says the Pembina Institute has long been working “in the middle,” working on solutions to issues about “both jobs and the economy and meeting our international obligations about climate change.”

“Ed was a superb executive director,” Dyer says. “He’s devoted his entire career to working on energy and environment solutions. He’s got deep relationships within the energy sector, specifically the oil and gas sector.”

Whittingham meets up for a television interview near Canmore on May 1, 2019. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

The Alberta Energy Regulator said by email that it works “with a wide range of stakeholder groups, including the Pembina Institute. We believe that each stakeholder group can provide insight and helpful feedback to inform the work of the [regulator].”

Marlo Raynolds, former executive director of the Pembina Institute and now chief of staff for the Minister of Environment and Climate Change Canada, also worked with Whittingham in the past.

“As an environmental advocate, Ed is known for being pragmatic and solutions-focused,”  Raynolds said in an email of their time working together at Pembina, noting Whittingham pushed for a “high bar for environmental performance in Alberta, while taking into account the realities of business.”

“When he was head of the Pembina Institute, he worked to find common ground between the environmental movement and the energy sector, and championed sustainability solutions that also made good business sense,” Raynolds told The Narwhal.

“He’s extremely collaborative; extremely solutions-oriented,” Dyer said.

“I think it’s a real loss to the Alberta Energy Regulator that they won’t have a person of Ed’s caliber and expertise supporting responsible development in the province.”

Skewered for riding a bike to work

Whittingham resigned from his Alberta Energy Regulator post the day before UCP leader Jason Kenney was sworn in as premier.

In response, Kenney tweeted, “It was gracious of Ed Whittingham to resign a day before we could fire him. Our government will never appoint people like him who are avowed opponents of Alberta jobs.”

Others weighed in too, including Jeff Callaway, the former UCP leadership candidate who was allegedly involved in the so-called kamikaze campaign to elect Kenney as leader.

Callaway pointed to a photo of Whittingham riding a bicycle as a reason he shouldn’t have been on the board: “A member of the provincial energy regulator: riding a bike to work. Says it all … ” Callaway tweeted.

For Whittingham, he’s relieved election season is over. He has plans to get on with his life — and his work as a clean-energy consultant — and is grateful to be able to respond publicly to accusations about his character, not only to defend his professional reputation, but to explain the situation to his friends, too.

“When the story broke … there were two audiences I was particularly worried about,” Whittingham says. “I was worried what the guys in the dressing room would say, and what the gun club guys would say,”

“They were all amazingly supportive. Even the ones whose politics were totally in line with the UCP — they know, and they said, ‘Ed, this isn’t you. This is bullshit.’ ”

Update Wednesday, May 15, 9:44 a.m. PST: This article was updated to reflect that Marlo Raynolds is the chief of staff to the Minister of Environment and Climate Change Canada, rather than the ministry itself.

Editor’s note: One of The Narwhal’s editors, Emma Gilchrist, worked in communications at the Pembina Institute from 2010 to 2011. At that time, Ed Whittingham led Pembina’s corporate consulting arm.

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