Alberta is a province renown for its political dynasties.

Since its founding in 1905, only five parties have ruled, with the Progressive Conservatives reigning for a staggering 44 years between 1971 and 2015.

But when it comes to oilsands policy, the province’s compass has been set by two premiers: Peter Lougheed and Ralph Klein. Both took distinct approaches, with Lougheed emphasizing managed development assisted by public funding, while Klein allowed industry to largely set the terms of engagement (including far lower royalties and the fast tracking of environmental reviews).

It might seem like ancient history. But it arguably matters more than ever given the complex politics of the current Alberta NDP government, which is juggling a cap on oilsands emissions while also advocating for increased production.

Enter “Betting on Bitumen: Alberta’s Energy Policies from Lougheed to Klein.” It’s a brief 36-page report written by Gillian Steward, a Calgary-based columnist for the Toronto Star, and published via the Parkland Institute and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA). In it, Steward explores the distinct approaches to oilsands development of Lougheed and Klein, helping to contextualize the ongoing actions by the Alberta NDP government.

DeSmog Canada talked to Steward about the report and her findings.

What compelled you to write this report?

I think there’s a lot out there about the current situation regarding energy policy, the NDP government, what they have to do or what they shouldn’t do. But I think people, in many ways, have lost track of how we got where we are. It’s kind of a long and windy road, but it’s really interesting and I just think it’s part of the history and it puts into context what’s happening now.

A key part of the report concerns Peter Lougheed’s legacy, something which many Albertan politicians will harken back to. Do you sense that politicians who talk about Lougheed necessarily recognize the true legacy of Lougheed?

I don’t think people recognize how much government intervention there was in terms of really kickstarting the development of the oilsands. The government put in a lot of public money, a lot of organization, and not just a one-shot deal: it went on for a long time. I think the fact the oilsands then became so valuable and so much of the technology became so important, particularly the in-situ, is really because of all the public money that was spent during the Lougheed era. That was basically all money that the corporate sector didn’t have to pay. Not that they didn’t pay anything, but they were in many ways subsidized by the government of the time.

With that in mind, do you still think it’s fair to characterize Lougheed’s legacy compared to later premiers as more adversarial — or at least not quite as friendly — with the oil and gas industry?

I think that’s true. He was certainly not an enemy of the industry or anything like that, but I think he knew how to assert his authority over the sector. He raised royalties significantly early on in his tenure and he basically said ‘this is what we’re going to do and this is how we’re going to do it.’ It wasn’t that he didn’t cooperate with the industry, but he certainly let them know who was in charge. At one point, the industry was so mad with him that they revoked his membership in the Calgary Petroleum Club. They were not necessarily happy, particularly with his position on royalties.

I think because he came from that world, he understood it and was in a better position to advocate for the people of Alberta as opposed to always advocating for the industry.

Do you have any sense of why Lougheed was able to do that? Was it because of really firm convictions or economic conditions? Is there something you attribute his decisions to?

I think there’s a couple of things there. One is I think he was actually quite visionary. I think he thought in terms of the big picture, as well as being someone who was pragmatic enough to know how to get to the big picture. Also, it was a different time in the sense where government intervention in various programs was more accepted than it is now: that really fell off in the ’80s. It was a more accepted economic or public policy practice then than it is now.

One of Ralph Klein’s first moves was to sell off the Alberta Energy Company, which was a big part of Lougheed’s legacy. What motivated that decision?

Again, I think there were a couple of things there. One is that compared to Lougheed, the Klein government had really swung more to the right. They saw Lougheed as almost being too pink for them, too socialist, in the sense that he did use government money to subsidize business. They believed that government should get out of the business of business.

The other reason was they needed the money. Klein was faced with debt and they didn’t want to raise taxes. They were looking to raise revenues. That was one way to do it.

Is it strange to you that companies and associations don’t acknowledge the role that government intervention has played over the years?

There’s no question that through the Alberta Oil Sands Technology and Research Authority, which was funded by the Lougheed government, really pushed the technology along in many ways. In-situ development was one of the main products of that: what it meant was that corporations didn’t have to spend all that money developing it. Public money went into developing it.

We don’t ever hear much about them acknowledging public money for that. When the report from the National Task Force on Oil Sands Strategies was released, they used the in-situ technology as a reason to really move ahead fast. But they don’t acknowledge where it came from or why it had become so important.

You point to the National Task Force and its final report as a watershed moment for the direction of how oilsands was managed by the government. Yet we rarely hear about it. Why do you think that specific task force and report was so significant in Alberta’s history?

Basically, it coincided with Klein’s first years in power and it outlined a way to move forward on oilsands development that allowed for the government to pump up the economy, which meant they could increase government revenues. That’s what they were looking for. They were looking for some kind of plan where they could increase government revenues but not through taxes. By heating up the economy, they were assuming they get more taxpayers even though they hadn’t raised taxes.

It just came at the right time for them. They were in debt, we’d just come out of a recession, all that kind of thing. By accepting what the task force recommended, which is basically ‘let us push ahead, don’t put too many obstacles in front of us, there will be lots and lots of investments’ and then at the same time the oil price started to go up. I don’t think anybody could have predicted it at the time that it would go as high as it did. But it was a nice coincidence given they had really unleashed the development in the sense that they allowed the industry to do it the way they wanted to do it. By taking away a lot of environmental regulations, by making a lot of the oilsands royalties so low, they encouraged development. But then at the same time, the price went up.

You also identified how the news media helped spread the findings of that, especially the legitimization of the panel even though it was very industry-stacked. Why did that happen? And do you sense that has changed since in terms of how the media reports on oilsands?

I was really surprised when we did that survey of the coverage at how rarely the news reports explained what this task force even was. It was called a government-industry task force, which lent it credibility which to my mind it didn’t really have because it was 85 per cent industry. And only a few reporters bothered to examine what the source of this report was and where it came from and who put it together. It just gave it a credibility by saying it’s a government-industry task force. It just sounded like they got together and agreed on this.

I think so much of the reporting on the oilsands today is basically business reporting. Industry would argue that it’s mostly about the environment, and there’s so much coverage about environmental issues. But really, it’s mostly business reporting about the oilsands. Even when you look at the sources that reporters are relying on, they’re very often industry sources like CAPP or the various companies. Even with environmental stories, the sources inside them are still very often industry or government sources.

I was involved with doing some research a few years ago on journalists that were covering the oilsands: we were looking at their use of sources. And the most trusted sources were academic sources. But it was also clear that reporters depended on the industry a lot. And CAPP is organized to provide a whole bunch of data. That’s what they do.

This is obviously written within the context of the new Alberta NDP government. You conclude the report by identifying that Premier Rachel Notley has an outlook that is closer to Lougheed than it is to Klein. She had the chance to raise royalties, which she effectively passed on and has publicly pushed for new pipelines and oilsands expansion. Why did you conclude that Lougheed was more of her muse than Klein?

I think in some ways because she’s trying to separate herself out from the industry. Not completely, for sure. I think the fact she’s using revenue from the carbon tax and putting it into renewable energy projects is a way to subsidize the start-up of an industry, much as Lougheed did with the oilsands. She doesn’t have the kind of revenue that he was dealing with in those days. But she is trying to use public money for that.

She also has a working relationship with the industry to a certain extent in that she had them on the stage when she announced the Climate Leadership Plan, and they were mostly Canadian companies. They were homegrown companies, except for Shell. Which is something that Lougheed also tried to do: he really wanted to make oilsands development Alberta-centric. I think she’s trying to do that too.

I think the other thing she is doing that he didn’t do is she’s consulting much more in a general way with a wide variety of stakeholders, which Lougheed didn’t really do at all and Klein only consulted the industry stakeholders. She’s trying to widen that, I think, and make it more diverse.

Is there anything you wanted to add?

I just think it’s important to know the history and context so people understand why we are where we are. That it didn’t just spring up overnight, that it’s complicated and the politics of it are really complicated. In many ways, you can’t expect a new government to undo everything that’s been done in the last four decades when it comes to energy policy.

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"Transparent,” “credible, “world-class” — those are just a few of the words that have been deployed to detail the aspirations of the one-year-old organization tasked with monitoring the air, water, land and wildlife in Alberta.

But there are a lot of questions about whether the Alberta Environmental Monitoring, Evaluation and Reporting Agency (AEMERA), funded primarily by industry, has lived up to its goal to track the condition of the province’s environment.*

Unlike the Alberta Energy Regulator, which the new NDP government is considering splitting into two agencies to separate its conflicting responsibilities to both promote and policy energy development, AEMERA hasn’t spent much time in the public spotlight — yet.

Last October, Alberta’s auditor general slammed the agency for releasing its 2012-2013 annual report in June 2014, well after when it should have been released. The auditor general also said the report “lacked clarity and key information and contained inaccuracies.”

Many of the agency’s projects were missing several details and the auditor general cautioned such omissions “may jeopardize AEMERA’s ability to monitor the cumulative effects of oil sands development.”

And that’s a pretty big problem. Because if Canada is to feasibly establish a strong environmental record, it’s going to need stringent monitoring in Alberta, especially in the Lower Athabasca region where the bulk of the province’s energy industry operates.

The Birth of A Really Long Acronym: AEMERA

AEMERA was dreamt up in 2011 as a means to coalesce the dozens of monitoring organizations working in the province under one banner, firewalling the result from government and industry to avoid conflicts of interest.

Martin Olszynski, an assistant professor in law at University of Calgary who specializes in environmental law, notes that at the time of the agency’s inception, international pressure was limiting market access for oil.

“When someone went to check on the monitoring system, it turned out it was a mess,” Olsznynski says. “We weren’t getting the data that we needed.”

AEMERA — with the Joint Canada-Alberta Plan for Oil Sands Monitoring serving as the transition agency for the three years prior to its official birth — was crafted to solve that problem.

Yet Bill 31, the piece of legislation that conjured up the arms-length agency in late 2013, faced considerable criticism from the get-go. Opposition parties pleaded for more than a dozen amendments.

Many of the proposed tweaks would have addressed the tight relationship between government and the monitoring agency. Amongst other things, the legislation suggested the environment minister would appoint the board and choose when data was released to the public.

Shaun Fluker, an associate professor of law at the University of Calgary, wrote in a 2014 post that the latter provision “arguably undermines the whole structure and suggests that politics can and will override science and transparency on environmental monitoring and reporting.”

All the proposed amendments were shot down. Lorne Taylor, former environment minister under Ralph Klein and renowned anti-Kyoto Accord activist, was appointed as chair of the board. Little has changed since.

Unlike other agencies, AEMERA doesn’t mandate quotas for groups or interests on the board. As a result, Bigstone Cree elder Mike Beaver is the sole indigenous representative on the agency’s seven-member board.

Traditional Ecological Knowledge, a method of integrating indigenous worldviews into policymaking, was listed as a priority in AEMERA’s founding document — yet the auditor generals’ report noted that just three of 38 of AEMERA’s projects surveyed involved Traditional Ecological Knowledge.

Val Mellesmoen, spokesperson for AEMERA, says the organization is working hard to foster strong relationships with indigenous people. In mid-June, the organization appointed a Traditional Ecological Knowledge panel to focus on such issues.

Insufficient Funding for Mobile Air Monitoring Van

Then there’s the overarching issue of funding. Exactly $50 million was decided upon as the max that industry would contribute per year, a number that features a “conspicuously round nature,” Olszynski says.

In late March, news broke that the Wood Buffalo Environmental Association — historically the recipient of the largest amount of money for monitoring — couldn’t afford the $500,000 price tag for a new mobile air monitoring testing van on account of a lack of funding.

Andrew Read, policy analyst at the Pembina Institute, says there’s no public information available as to why $50 million was chosen as the funding cap; he has submitted multiple requests to the federal government (which coordinated the interim monitoring framework prior to AEMERA’s takeover), but hasn’t received any clarification.

Mellesmoen, the agency’s spokesperson, says it was a “gentlemen’s agreement” with the number determined by “an initial estimate that was based on industry providing an overview of what they felt they were currently spending as individual companies.”

Mellesmoen — who previously served as Taylor’s spokesperson when he was an MLA and minister — says there are questions within the agency about the reasoning for the cap.

“Even that funding model needs to be maybe looked at in the long run,” she says.

New NDP Government Could Amend Bill 31

Olszynski says the newly elected NDP could amend Bill 31 to deal with such issues. Prior to being elected as premier, Rachel Notley was an outspoken critic of the monitoring agency, at one point asserting the organization was “nowhere near ready to assume responsibility for the [Lower Athabasca] region.”

The NDP’s platform also pledged to “strengthen environmental standards, inspection, monitoring and enforcement to protect Alberta’s water, land and air.”

This week’s decision to revisit the Alberta Energy Regulator’s mandate represents that focus. The press secretary for Minister of Environment Shannon Phillips didn’t respond to multiple requests for an interview on the subject.

International Experts to Evaluate Oilsands Monitoring

An international panel composed of six scientists will evaluate the performance of the new monitoring system. It plans to “evaluate the extent to which the implementation of the Joint Canada-Alberta Oil Sands Monitoring (JOSM) has improved the scientific integrity of environmental monitoring in the oil sands.”

The panel will deliver its report this fall, which will “help determine the next steps on the oilsands monitoring design and implementation.”

Olszynski emphasizes the uniqueness of AEMERA

“It’s an experiment, an innovative one, an important one,” he says.

Yet there’s much more to be done: stable funding must be solidified, the line between cabinet and organization must be clarified and the data must be analyzed and reported on in a way that regular Albertans can understand. AEMERA also has to expand its monitoring province-wide to fulfill its mandate.

“AEMERA needs to step out and demonstrate that they’re acting in the public interest,” Read says. “We want to see a demonstration of AEMERA actively taking and delivering that unbiased information to the government and providing a perspective on the current state of the environment.”

* Clarification Notice: This article originally stated that AEMERA is funded 100 per cent by industry. While AEMERA gets the bulk of its funding from industry, the agency also receives government funding for general operations and monitoring, evaluation and reporting activities in other areas of the province

Image: Kris Krug via Flickr

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“We will continue to have a strong economy while meeting the 2020 [climate] targets … and we will meet those.”

It was a bewildering statement, like something out of a poorly scripted political drama. The idea that within the next five years, Alberta — the province responsible for over 35 per cent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2012 — would meet its emissions targets would be laughable if it weren’t so pathetic.

But that’s what was said.

And by Diana McQueen, a former minister of environment, no less. By the very person who’s now leading the revision of the province’s oft-delayed climate change framework.

Back in 2008, the Alberta government, then headed by Progressive Conservative leader Ed Stelmach, brought forward a fairly weighty climate change strategy. Goals were set, policies outlined.

“Our targets,” wrote Stelmach, “are based on sound research not wishful thinking.”

The strategy promised that by 2020, the province’s annual emissions would fall by 50 megatonnes below “business-as-usual” numbers — in 2008, that number was  232 megatonnes per year.

But according to Environment Canada’s most recent projections for emissions, Alberta’s annual output will instead grow to 287 megatonnes a year — an overall increase of 55 megatonnes, which means that the target (a 12 per cent increase from the 2005 number) will be missed by a full 27 Mt.

Removing bitumen from the oilsands will account for a great majority of that increase, the report noted. The resulting emissions from that process will practically wipe out all the reductions in Canadian emissions accomplished by retiring coal-fired power stations.

In other words, unless emissions from the Alberta oilsands are dramatically tempered in the next five years, the bitumen extraction industry will come close to single-handedly undoing all the hard work done by the rest of the country to rein in greenhouse gas emissions.

In the next five years, Ontario is projected to reduce its emissions by 37 megatonnes, Nova Scotia by eight, Quebec by six.

Alberta could wipe out all of that (and New Brunswick’s contributions while we’re at it).

But McQueen asserts that Alberta will live up to its goals.

McQueen’s Troubling Climate History

It’s not the first time McQueen, the former mayor of Drayton Valley, has made statements that were out of touch with reality.  

In 2011, when McQueen was environment minister, she denounced Kyoto because it “didn’t work for Canada without all the large emitters at the table.”

Then in 2013, McQueen told a Belgian news agency that the province had “taken some very strong movements … with regard to monitoring.”

But the Alberta Environmental Monitoring, Evaluation and Reporting Agency (thankfully reducible to the easy acronym of AEMERA), designed under McQueen’s watch, has been roundly criticized as a failure.

Alberta’s auditor general, Merwan Saher, condemned the agency’s work in his October 2014 report, noting the organization’s report for 2012-2013 took an egregious length of time to be made public. Saher said the report “lacked clarity and key information and contained inaccuracies” and that there was little actual information on the implementation of the monitoring program.

Now that Prentice has slashed Saher’s budget by a cool half-million, we can expect less review of the agency’s shortcomings.  

The agency serves as the primary body to oversee the responsibilities suggested in its title and yet the chair of the board is Lorne Taylor, former environment minister under Ralph Klein, and a serious hater of Kyoto. He gets paid $50,000 a year for that job, which requires a once-a-month, six-hour meeting.

On a side note: AEMERA is now looking for a new chief executive officer! Apply today. Warning: Might be a stressful gig.

Alberta’s False Climate Starts

Other nonstarters have plagued the governing party on its road to meeting 2020 targets.

In April 2013, then-premier Alison Redford hinted at an augmented carbon levy. The Specialized Gas Emitters Regulation (SGER), which has remained untouched in specifics since its inauguration in 2007, charges large emitters (those who emit more than 100,000 tonnes a year) a mere $15 for 12 per cent of all total emissions.

Definitely not a carbon tax. But it’s something, right?

Specifically, Redford briefly proposed a 40/40 framework as an addition of sorts to the regulation: that is, $40 would be charged for 40 per cent of emissions. Not at all in the realm suggested by the Pembina Institute – which recommended a legitimate carbon tax between the range of $100 and $150 per tonne — but again, an improvement! Unfortunately, that concept was quickly forgotten.

But none of the aforementioned examples – the monitoring agency or increased carbon levy – come close to the dashed promises of carbon capture and storage (CCS).

CCS was the foundational element of Alberta’s 2008 climate plan. The province committed $2 billion to the controversial technology.

Interestingly, now-premier Jim Prentice, called CCS a “science experiment” during his campaign for party leader but has since gone on to describe the technology as “game-changing” during a pro-Keystone XL pipeline tour in Washington, D.C.

Prentice did not mention that the remaining $700 million allocated to CCS advancement would be diverted for other purposes.

The abandonment of CCS leaves Alberta with effectively no plan to reduce per-barrel emissions from the oilsands, which have been on the rise since 2011 according to the Canadian Association for Petroleum Producers (CAPP). 

Which brings us back to McQueen.

She stated — as a public servant presumably expected to tell the truth to constituents — that the province she represents will achieve the respectable emissions reductions by 2020.

In reality, the oil and gas sector has increased emissions by more than 100 per cent in the opposite direction. And no one, including McQueen, seems to have any idea about how to turn that around. 

Image Credit: Diana McQueen via Twitter

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The impending closure of a key multi-stakeholder group that provides advice to Alberta and the federal government on the environmental effects of the oilsands was unexpectedly delayed by an injection of money from oil companies.

The funds come at a time when the future – and the purpose – of the organization, which involves the participation of aboriginal, industry, government and environmental groups, is increasingly uncertain. 

The Edmonton Journal reports that the 12-year-old Cumulative Environmental Management Association (CEMA) was to be shut down on January 1, which would have resulted in layoffs, eviction from their offices, and the termination of contracts with scientists working on issues ranging from speedier land reclamation in the oilsands to the improvement of water quality.

However, oil company stakeholders provided $400,000 to keep the organization funded for a little while longer.

"It is for the first month of 2014 only," CEMA spokesman Corey Hobbs told Fort McMurray Today.

CEMA's uncertain future depends on Alberta's newly appointed Environment Minister Robin Campbell, who can resist pressure from the energy industry to have the organization shut down.

"We are optimistic that Minister Campbell will make a positive decision for the future of CEMA," said Hobbs. "There is no indication from anyone that the province does not support CEMA's research or work in the oilsands."

Managing Impacts

According to Andrew Read, Technical and Policy Analyst with the Pembina Institute, CEMA’s role is to “produce recommendations and provide management frameworks” regarding the cumulative impacts of the oilsands. The group consists of more than 50 members ranging from First Nations and Metis groups, environmental advocacy organizations and industry.

CEMA’s recommendations are based on the monitoring work of other environmental agencies.

According to Read, environmental monitoring agencies and CEMA provide complementary work: “monitoring agencies watch what’s happening in the environment and CEMA develops plans on how we can manage the resultant effects of industry to maintain environmental quality.”

The Pembina Institute withdrew from CEMA in 2008 citing numerous shortcomings with the multi-stakeholder framework, including a continued failure to adequately address environmental concerns.

CEMA has been struggling since 2012, when the Oil Sands Developers Group cut the organization's 2013 budget to $2.5 million for the first six months, down from $5 million the previous year. Then-environment minister Diana McQueen restored the group's funding and ordered a review of its future.

The province’s review, submitted in August 2013, showed industry wanted CEMA shut down. Renewed funding for the organization was refused. In September, industry members called for CEMA to be disbanded and its policy development job shifted to an industry-only group.

"We're very close to losing CEMA," said CEMA executive director Glen Semenchuck. "We've been waiting for five months for the minister to respond. Is CEMA going to survive? I don't know."

An Industry Imbalance?

Helene Walsh, Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society representative to CEMA, says the cuts in industry funding are the result of an increase in non-industry stakeholder input.

“CEMA was largely industry dominated until the organization was restructured a few years ago with the four different chambers [aboriginal, environmental, industry and government] given equal voting power. Soon after that industry started reducing their funding and now they want CEMA to stop its work,” she said.

With CEMA shuttered, it would be difficult to know how non-industry groups, like First Nations, could contribute to cumulative impacts management, says Read.

“Without CEMA, there is a significant vacuum of expertise in the management of cumulative effects in Alberta that balances the needs of all of the stakeholders in the oilsands region. If it were to cease to exist, there would be a significant need for increased government and industry engagement with stakeholders to identify and address the various cumulative effects resulting from oilsands development.”

CEMA was founded in 2001 by former Premier Ralph Klein with the mandate of addressing the oil industry's environmental footprint. It is the only scientific agency that does government policy work by engaging all local stakeholders for consensus decisions.

Moving Ahead, But in the Wrong Direction

Alberta recently established the Alberta Environmental Monitoring, Evaluation and Reporting Agency (AEMERA) intended to harmonize and ensure the credibility of environmental monitoring across the province.

Read said the Pembina Institute is “watching the establishment of AEMERA carefully as it will dictate the credibility of environmental information that is reported by the agency.”

“We are concerned about the substantial powers being granted to the AEMERA board which is appointed by the government and does not require equal or fair representation of all stakeholders. Ultimately without fair and equal representation on the board, AEMERA may suffer from the same credibility issues as past agencies have,” Read said.

In the last year, CEMA released a detailed guidance document on end-pit lakes, and hopes to release a wetland reclamation policy guide and a framework to help industry and government understand Aboriginal traditional knowledge, in 2014.

With no budget for 2014, scientific projects are currently frozen.

Alberta also faces the possible closure of the Wood Buffalo Environmental Agency (WBEA), which monitors air pollution in the oilsands area and is currently running on emergency funds.

“If CEMA were strengthened and aboriginal and environmental groups were truly able to influence the development of the tar sands there would be hope for positive change and improved management that could improve the prospects for healthy water, air, land, wildlife, people and communities,” says Walsh, who also works with Keepers of the Athabasca.

“Closure of CEMA is a step in the wrong direction.”

Image Credit: Kris Krug

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The government of Alberta’s continued reliance on the tar sands as the province’s main economic driver has put Premier Alison Redford in a very awkward position recently. With the market for foreign oil drying up in the US, her government is facing a $6 billion budget shortfall. For the first time in many years, Alberta is being forced to reach out for a little help from its neighbours, but the reception has been chilly.

The trouble began last year, when British Columbia Premier Christy Clark discovered that putting her unqualified support behind Enbridge’s plan to run its Northern Gateway pipeline through the province would constitute political suicide in an election year.

Whatever Clark’s motivations may have been—environmental or political—the result is that now they are in the midst of a struggle that Maclean’s Magazine calls, “the greatest political rivalry since former Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams ordered the Canadian flag removed from every government building in a dispute with the feds over offshore energy royalties.”

Then late in January, Redford met with Ontario’s new Premier Kathleen Wynn and by all accounts, relations were similarly strained. Several municipalities in Ontario have expressed concerns over the environmental dangers involved in Line 9, which was constructed in the 1970s and may not be up to carrying the highly corrosive bitumen being put out by the tar sands.

To be fair, this mess isn’t all Redford’s doing. Given Alberta’s history, it’s not surprising that other provinces might be wary of her advances. As Parkland Institute director Trevor Harrison pointed out last year in an op-ed piece for the Winnipeg Free Press, Alberta’s energy policy has historically leaned towards isolation and contempt for the rest of the country’s wishes.

In 1982 while serving as mayor of Calgary, Ralph Klein ran into a similar problem attracting investors to his city because of the open contempt he showed for the eastern workers seeking jobs in the province’s newly developing oil patch. With characteristic bluntness, he called them “bums" and "creeps” and blamed them for the rise in crime in his city. 

During his 14 years as Premier, the famously cantankerous Klein steered Alberta through much of the oil boom, but showed little interest in sharing or saving the wealth, preferring instead to spread it around in the form of “prosperity bonuses” of $400 to each Alberta resident in 2005. It’s sobering now to think that if that money had been saved, the interest alone might have gone a long way to digging Alberta out of its current financial hole. It’s even more frightening that, while the rest of the world was beginning to accept the hard lessons of climate change and oil dependence last year, the Alberta Wildrose Party promised a new round of bonuses beginning in 2015 should it have been elected.

Klein also had little interest in federal calls for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In 2002, as part of a campaign to keep then Prime Minister Jean Chrétien from ratifying the Kyoto Accord, he famously dismissed warnings about climate change by wondering whether the first ice age was caused by “dinosaur farts.”

The message from the Alberta government has always been, the oil is ours and how we mine it, refine it and sell it is no one’s business but our own. Now that position is simply no longer tenable. In a recent address to the Alberta people, Redford laid out the challenges before the province and promised to find a way out without crippling social programs or, magically, raising taxes.

What she didn't say was that Alberta can no longer afford to make policy as though it were cordoned off from the rest of the country. It needs the help of other provinces to export its oil and that means taking into account the concerns of those who have not been blinded by a couple of decades of short-sighted prosperity.

But it is not enough to simply look for new markets; if Alberta is to free itself from this uncomfortable cycle of boom and bust, Redford must begin to rethink this reliance on the tar sands and find ways to diversify the economy. The question is, can the province let go of decades of rhetoric and take a new road?

In her address, Redford said that oil and gas “are our assets.” I disagree. In the 15 years that I lived in Alberta I learned that, as well as being a province of extraordinary resource wealth, it is a province rich in industriousness. Redford’s constituents are willing to work hard to secure their future, so why does she, like her predecessors, insist upon leading them down a path that puts them at the whim of politics and world markets?

Why not skip that inevitable pain and redirect some of that skill and ingenuity into clean, renewable energy industries that we know have a future? 

Image Credit: Government of Alberta.

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