Albertan country music icon Corb Lund showed up in Edmonton yesterday to drop off a citizen initiative application at the offices of Elections Alberta for a referendum petition seeking permanent protection of the Eastern Slopes of the Rocky Mountains from coal mining.
In other words, much like what we had from 1976 when Peter Lougheed was the Progressive Conservative premier of Alberta until the United Conservative Party Government came along with its weird MAGA-style obsession with burning coal, no matter what the cost to the environment or the people who live downstream from the pollution source.
The citizen initiative question Mr. Lund submitted, if it’s approved by Elections Alberta, would read: “The Government of Alberta shall prohibit by law any and all new coal mining activities, including new approvals and permits, within the Eastern Slopes of the Rocky Mountains.”
And never mind which Australian billionaire wants to strip mine the stuff or whether they want it to burn to run a generator or to make steel, a distinction the UCP uses to imply strip mining metallurgical coal is somehow less environmentally destructive.
Mr. Lund expressed some surprise to find himself cast as a coal-skeptical environmental campaigner. He’s not opposed to all resources development, he said, as some of his songs indeed illustrate. But the Grassy Mountain Coal Project that the UCP is so determined to allow to proceed makes no sense from any perspective, he asserted.
“I understand wanting jobs, but that’s not a magical formula to, you know, abdicate all responsibility for other people who use the water,” Mr. Lund told a couple reporters outside the Alberta Legislature after his visit to Elections Alberta’s offices. “There’s 200,000 people using that water downstream, not only for drinking, but for multi-billion dollar food processing industry in Lethbridge. So the whole thing seems like a terrible idea!”
But why did the singer from Taber, who would really rather be writing songs and establishing an international reputation, decide to go the petition route? Well, after fighting the Grassy Mountain Coal Project for five and a half years and never managing to kill off the zombie plan dispute strong public support, that’s what Premier Danielle Smith advised coal mining opponents to do.
“I was at the town hall June 11 in Fort Macleod when the premier said, ‘If you guys don’t want to have coal, you should start a citizens initiative.’ So I’ve been thinking about it ever since.”
And why now? Well, the answer to that one will surprise no one who follows Alberta politics. Mr. Lund said he got up at 3:45 a.m. yesterday to drive to Edmonton from Lethbridge because “there’s a lot of Zeitgeist in the air about more referendums and more recalls, and we’ve been hearing rumours that the government might pull the plug on the process entirely, or make it so egregiously difficult that it’s impossible.”
“We wanted to get our application in before they changed rules. That’s why I drove up here.”
The premier, of course, is feeling cornered by recall petitions filed by citizens angered by her government’s misuse of the Constitution’s Notwithstanding Clause and miscellaneous other UCP policies. If even one or two succeeded, it would chip away at her government’s majority in the Legislature, not to mention its already unravelling credibility.
If that really has become the spirit of the moment in Alberta, we can probably thank former deputy premier Thomas Lukaszuk’s demonstration that a determined band of volunteers could gather almost half a million verifiable signatures in three months in defence of Alberta remaining part of Canada.
So the threat of repeal of its once-vaunted citizen initiative legislation by Ms. Smith’s government is real, and that includes retroactive repeal just to make the whole thing stop, even though that would make the UCP look both foolish and incompetent.
So what will Ms. Smith do? Her MLAs, after all, have to be screaming at her to do something to make the threat and distraction of repeal petitions go away.
Well, that remains to be seen. But Mr. Lund is right to put the pedal to the metal.
Meanwhile, Ms. Smith has another choice to make with the announcement yesterday by the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees that Licensed Practical Nurses, Health Care Aides and other health care support workers it represents will strike on Saturday morning at 8:30 sharp.
With essential services agreements required by NDP-era labour law requiring nearly 80 per cent of the AUPE members to stay at work, hospitals and other health care facilities are supposed to be able to operate during a strike. But with the health care system on its knees thanks to the UCP’s ideologically driven effort to dismantle Alberta Health Services, that is far from certain.
Already so-called elective surgeries in AHS and former AHS facilities – pretty essential for the people who’ve been waiting for them – are being cancelled.
“This is going to have an impact,” AUPE President Sandra Azocar told a news conference yesterday. “It’s not going to be business as usual. … Every single aspect of our health care system will be impacted by this.”
So having already used the Notwithstanding Clause four times to deprive groups of Albertans of their constitutionally protected fundamental rights, will the UCP Government dare to do it again?
Obviously, they’re feeling the heat and would like to avoid it. Finance Minister Nate Horner insisted it’s “highly unlikely” the government will use section 33 of the Constitution this time, The Canadian Press reported yesterday. But as he also said before forcing Alberta teachers back to work, Mr. Horner added, “it’s a tool that the government has, but it’s certainly not something that we’re focused on.”
Chances are good, though, that the government’s attitude will change when politicians realize how hard it is to run the health care system even with only 20 per cent of its striking LPNs and HCAs permitted to walk their picket lines.
As Opposition Leader Naheed Nenshi observed of the UCP: “Albertans would be justified in asking themselves if they are engineering yet another strike so that they can use the Notwithstanding Clause again, now that they’ve gotten a taste of this power.”
