The simple answer is corruption
Government made incompetent by ideological and practiced delusion, engaging with willful billionaires who take advantage of gullible, and transactional jurisdictions
By Gordon Cartwright, D Ranch, Foothills County
The Coal policy was a carefully made business and planning decision developed by a government elected by all Albertans. The Lougheed conservative government initiated unprecedented province wide public hearings, concerning future land use. This was at a time, when climate change was not widely talked about in public, though the topic had been introduced to the oil and gas industry, and the wheels were set in motion for the industry to begin their campaigns of tobacco science and misdirection.
What was picked up by the media at the time was the Club of Rome's publication, Limits to Growth. The Lougheed government invested in Oil Sands, it recognised the potential of the oil industry, and it made provision to harvest royalties,— a dividend on the liquidation of Albertan's assets, to build a legacy Heritage fund.
The second part of government leadership was to introduce a land use planning framework, that would rationally set in place priorities, to prevent collateral damage and conflict from competing agendas, that develop with the tumult and transient opportunities of volatile markets.
The Alberta land use hearings were not a public referendum, but a chance for all Albertans’ interests and concerns to be heard. It took years to analyze and curate the best information to determine policy and set in place an evolving framework to protect the interest of Albertans present and future.
There was a clear recognition in the process that the safe keeping of water and regenerative assets would have a mandated priority for protection, because they were essential to a healthy and enduring economy, long beyond the boom and bust rollercoaster of non renewable resource markets.
Lougheed has been regarded as one of the greatest Premiers in Canada. He understood that his first priority was to act as a CEO to lead a team of players, to protect the interests of the citizens of Alberta. He established legal clarity for the province to collect royalties on provincial resources. He then began the process of consultation with shareholders of Alberta to develop a planning framework for the prudent management of assets and the constraint of liabilities, all to protect the balance sheet of the province. He was not the kind of politician to abdicate responsibility by using referendums to determine policy.
In the Lougheed era, the province was vibrant, and Albertan's were engaged and energized. But subsequent administrations betrayed that legacy. The new generation of politicians began to look after the shareholders of corporations, not the shareholders of Alberta, who own the resources. As Ralph Klein stated of his leadership, he would find a parade and get in front of it. Lougheed was a leader who would organize and lead a parade.
Governing by referendum is a lazy way of governing that does not serve democracy, or the interests of citizens. Responsible governments leaders bring together qualified people to make considered decisions for the benefit of our citizens. The duty of good political leaders is to make sound decisions, and stand on their record. This means occasionally going against public opinion, but always with the intention of serving the public interest with the best information to determine rational policy. It is important that governments listen to constituents, including industry, but it is important that government decisions are made for the long-term interests of citizens, not corporate shareholders.
The irony, and tragedy is that the most powerful lobbyists have derived their influence from liquidating our provincial resources. It is often said that the objective of capitalism is to build a larger pie for all to benefit. But this is not true. Resource corporations liquidate public capital and distribute wealth to shareholders around the world, then leave us with environmental liabilities, impaired assets. Boom times, lead to shoddily built and haphazard infrastructures that are costly to maintain or replace.
The leaders of these corporations are always at an advantage over their general shareholders in understanding the health and direction of the company, and use of options and other tools to enrich their compensation, which has grown ever wider from their workers.
The other irony is that resource companies would accuse Lougheed of being a socialist, for wanting to accrue wealth for Albertans. Norway began their Sovereign fund a decade after Lougheed set up Alberta's Heritage Trust Fund. Today the fund managed by the Norges Bank stands at 1.8 trillion dollars. Industry players will say, “but they are socialists!”
Corporations, actually, are a mechanism for socializing risk and returns to shareholders. They are not immune from incompetent or malign management, and though they hold shareholder meetings, most shareholders don’t cast their votes.
The ploy of using the socialism argument is entirely disingenuous. Instead of capital accruing to the citizens of Alberta whose assets are liquidated, wealth especially flows to corporate leaders who go to great effort to shelter their gains, often in foreign tax havens. With weak governments, they have called for reduced royalties, for subsidies, for government spending on infrastructure, and lobbied against regulation that protects citizens and environmental assets that we depend upon for health and quality of life.
So who are the socialists? How can they claim they are building a larger pie, when wealth disparity is growing, and the standard of living is declining, even as we have record energy production and resource liquidation on both sides of the border?
In recent elections incumbent governments have been falling around the globe, mostly in reaction to the increased cost of living. Many of those increases have resulted from supply demand imbalances caused by covid, by wars, and increasingly by devasting droughts, floods, fires and supercharged storms.
Climate events destroy assets, disrupt regional flows of goods and services. They are becoming more frequent, more severe, and encumber ever larger portions of GDP. As Mister Painter promotes coal mining to increase his tax base, climate risks brought about by fossil fuel interests erode the tax base of many jurisdictions, and require government spending to rescue and restore devastated communities.
Since climate science was first introduced to the fossil fuel industry, members of that constituency have worked assiduously to shape a political landscape to serve their interests. Our modern conservatives don’t make decisions on what is in the best interests of the province, or any economic calculus to prioritize resource development. Politicians have abdicated their responsibility to Albertans, in favor of self-serving corporations, and ideological narratives to drive public sentiment.
No doubt a former provincial Environment Minister Robin Campbell after becoming the head of the Canadian Coal lobby, convinced his colleagues to initiate conversations with foreign corporations, with a promise to overturn Alberta’s Coal Policy, - policy set in place, after years of consultation with Albertans.
Robin Campbell, Jason Kenney and colleagues in an ideological impulse, set governance aside, to promote Alberta as a refuge for Fossil Fuel conservatives. They became involved with a mining dominatrix for one final fling of metallurgical coal development, and a thorough screwing for Albertans.
In the 1970’s, before climate change was a significant conversation and a political wedge, and before we had well developed research of prior drought cycles, Albertan’s confirmed and supported the Lougheed government in giving water resources the highest priority for protection.
We know from research, and now from experience, that in drought cycles the South Saskatchewan River system is over allocated. Despite this reality, plans are afoot to expand agriculture, and secondary processing. Part of this relies on increased use of aquifer bank accounts. We might contemplate the fields of solar panels being put on agricultural areas of California, where water reserves have been exhausted.
So how is it possible that water licenses can be allocated to develop coal for the benefit of foreign corporate interests, to the detriment of our own watershed and regenerative industry?
The simple answer is corruption, — government made incompetent by ideological and practiced delusion, engaging with willful billionaires who take advantage of gullible, and transactional jurisdictions.
If this nonsense progresses further, the citizens of Alberta need to marshal resources and counter-sue any legal recourse Australian companies are seeking for lost opportunity.
Even if the metallurgic coal industry had a future, this development will end badly for Albertans, and the lesser shareholders, who will be bust, when the executives have made their gains and pulled the plug. Gina Rinehart and her henchmen have been complicit in pressuring to overturn policy forged in an earlier time, when Albertans and their government recognized the value of water and regenerative resources, which have only become more important to the future of our province.
When companies offer benefits to communities and politicians to overturn policy, it is usually called bribery. In legitimate governments bribery is not rewarded, it is punished.
The referendum of the local community is a political ploy, that has no merit. The development of the project would undermine the legitimacy of our government and create economic liabilities that will ripple through the province, and across the world.