High River mayor targets coal-lickin' premier in eviscerating response to Northback's selenium sleight-of-hand

Craig Snodgrass emerges as sanest voice in Alberta as he commits his political career to saving landscape and waters from crazed coal-licker Danielle Smith

Sucking up the Australians’ slurry. (AI image, or is it?)

Northback CEO Mike Young brought his sleazy sleight-of-hand selenium show to High River Council April 14. He was elegantly eviscerated by Mayor Craig Snodgrass who chose the occasion to express political disdain for separatist premier Danielle Smith.

The hapless Young, who actually volunteered to appear in the intellectual lion’s den of Alberta anti-coal sentiment, was bloodied in a brutally uneven fight. Pity would have been in order if he had not so shamelessly performed his shabby “no worries, mate” selenium show. Why his boss Gina Rinehart lets him show himself in public is a secret known only to the Australian mining dominatrix herself. Young, fresh off two miserable failures at previous energy schemes in Australia, is the anti-coal movement’s biggest asset, with his sorry attempts to treat elected officials like idiots.

After recently making a complete fool of himself before Fort Macleod Council, Young tried to slip the same not-very-slick selenium trick past the High River city fathers and mothers. He pointed to three existing mines with “proven management technology.” Selenium removal ranged from 94 to 99 percent, Young said, as though those results were acceptable. Snodgrass, in his usual calm, measured locution, nabbed the magic wand from Young’s hand and stabbed him with it:

“You say you are going to remove 95 to 99 percent of the selenium, but that still leaves ten to 20 times what is safe for aquatic life. That remaining five to one percent is still too much. You say you will meet the government standards, but we all know you will just pay the fines as a cost of doing business.”

The mayor also called out Young’s assurance that selenium-leaching mine waste would not be dumped on the Gold Creek side of Grassy Mountain to spare the federally protected pure strain of Westslope cutthroat trout.

“You can’t go into Gold Creek because of the Westslope cutthroat trout. So you are going to go into Blairmore Creek which has a hybrid version of cutthroats which keeps them out of the species at risk. There’s a game being played as to which watershed you care going to affect. The problem is that both of them go into the Crowsnest River which goes into the Oldman and then all the way to Hudson’s Bay.”

Then, after telling the bleeding Young that his real fight was not with him, Snodgrass twisted his rhetorical shiv into Smith’s pro-Australia, anti-Canada UCP regime.

“I know the NDP did absolutely nothing (to stop the Australian coal buccaneers), but it was the UCP of Jason Kenny that created this gong show.”

“I don’t get it that in this province we have a government that is willing to allow a foreign country to come in, blow up our mountains, pack them into trains, send them to Vancouver and then to wherever-in-Hell across the ocean, China primarily.

“The landscape destruction alone is where I stop. These are precious places. If we don’t have our Eastern Slopes, we have nothing. It will screw our water, and then we are done.”

Snodgrass promised to “fight til I’m dead” against mining the Eastern Slopes for coal. So far, at the hands of High River’s genteel mayor, it is Mike Young and his coal-lickin’ lady-friend in government who are dying the death of a thousand cuts.

For the morbidly curious, you can witness the entire slaughter on YouTube.

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