At a boisterous town hall, UCP coal mining plans clash with Alberta ranchers' water concerns

Southwestern Alberta rancher Norma Dougal made the trip down to Fort Macleod from her property in the Porcupine Hills to give the provincial government a piece of her mind on Wednesday.

Dougal has been worrying about the government’s decision to permit coal mining on the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains and the impact it could have on her water. 

So, when the rare opportunity arose in the form of a United Conservative Party town hall session, she arrived more than an hour early to hear from Premier Danielle Smith, Energy Minister Brian Jean, Environment and Protected Areas Minister Rebecca Schulz, Agriculture and Irrigation Minister R.J. Sigurdson and local UCP MLA Chelsae Petrovic. 

The Fort Macleod & District Community Hall was packed to capacity with nearly 500 people, with the premier and cabinet ministers facing near-constant jeers from a majority of attendees who came to express their frustrations, and cheers from a substantial minority who supported the government. 

With southwestern Alberta already facing extreme-to-severe drought conditions, Dougal said she’s worried that coal mining will only make matters worse for farmers and ranchers.

“Water is a huge issue for us, so the thought of giving any of that water to new users — especially industrial users up in the headwaters of our area, which is where all of our water comes from — just seems like a really bad idea,” said Dougal, who has been a vocal critic of the government’s decision to open up the eastern slopes to coal mining in her capacity as a co-director of the Livingstone Landowners Group. 

John Smith, who co-owns a cattle ranch between Nanton and the Rockies with his wife Laura Liang, added that “to use the little bit of good, clean water we’ve got and make it dirty with coal mining is an extremely bad idea.”

Inside the Town Hall

When attendees entered the town hall, they had to leave behind any signs they were holding at the entrance, although they were able to bring in smaller placards reading lie and false that they raised when cabinet members said something untrue.

A reporter and videographer from the CBC, as well as a reporter from the Lethbridge Herald, weren’t allowed into the event, forcing the journalists to watch the event through a few attendees’ streams on social media. 

Security cited capacity restrictions, although journalists with CTV, Global and The Canadian Press, as well as Canada’s National Observer, were able to enter the building after it reached capacity. 

The event was organized amid a local outcry over a series of decisions by the government that could lead to more coal mining in the region: Jean, the energy minister, announced in December that the government intends to modernize its coal policy by the end of 2025 so mining is permitted under certain circumstances. 

The following month, he lifted a moratorium on coal exploration and mining on the eastern slopes that previous energy minister Sonya Savage implemented in 2022 in response to intense public outcry against former premier Jason Kenney’s removal of a decades-old coal policy that restricted mining on the eastern slopes.

From the outset of the event, Jean was combative with the audience hecklers, repeatedly accusing them in his introductory remarks of “listening to lies” about mountaintop removal and the risks of water pollution.

Jean claimed that selenium, a chemical leaked into watersheds from coal mining that causes deformities in fish, can be removed from water.

“BC is doing it, and folks, let's face it, they're no geniuses, but they're bringing selenium out of the Elk River,” Jean said.

During the question-and-answer session, retired University of Lethbridge geographer James Byrne, whose research focused on water management, said the amount of selenium that can be removed from water is minuscule. 

“The selenium removal techniques are not well-refined and they're not supported by referee literature,” said Byrne. “You need some really important independent reviews, and I'd like to see how you're going to do that, because you don’t have good science.” 

Teck, the company that owns the mines on the BC side of the Rockies, was fined $60 million by a BC court in 2021 for polluting the Elk Valley with selenium.

In her opening remarks, Premier Smith took a more conciliatory tone than Jean, although the premier and her energy minister both argued that their decision to re-open mining applications was beyond their control.

“I wasn't here, guys. I'm brand new,” Smith said in response to hecklers.

In response to an audience question, Smith likened her approach to coal mining to her decision to impose a seven-month moratorium on renewable energy projects in 2023 before imposing restrictions on where they can be located.

“There’s a lot of landowners who want to ban wind turbines and solar panels, and we're not going to do that either,” she said. 

The Grassy Mountain Saga

Much of the audience’s anger centred around Australian billionaire-owned mining company Northback’s efforts to resurrect an abandoned open-pit coal mine on Grassy Mountain near Crowsnest Pass, which a recent Alberta government scientific study found is still poisoning fish 65 years after it was abandoned. 

Northback’s proposal was rejected in 2021 by a joint federal-provincial review panel, which determined that the mine would be “likely to result in significant adverse environmental effects” on the Oldman River watershed while providing “low to moderate positive economic impacts on the regional economy.” Northback’s appeal of the decision was rejected in March this year.

Municipal leaders in Crowsnest Pass held a non-binding plebiscite on whether the Grassy Mountain exploration should proceed, despite the proposed mine being located in the neighbouring Municipal District of Ranchlands, resulting in 72 per cent approval.

As Canada’s National Observer previously reported, the company appears to have spent more than the $2,063 in election signage it reported to Elections Alberta as campaign spending, including hosting events and a social media ad blitz.

In May, the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) approved Grassy Mountain’s exploration-related permits in a decision that focused squarely on the environmental impacts of exploration, not mining. This came a month after Northback executives met privately with top AER officials, according to reporting in The Tyee.

 ‘Predetermined outcome’

Former Lethbridge mayor Chris Spearman, who attended the town hall in his capacity as a spokesperson for the Water for Food Group, told Canada’s National Observer that he’s “never been involved in an economic development project where one project is set up to harm all the others.”

“So many people are ranchers and farmers. They're supplying their products a lot of the time to the food processors. It's a whole, integrated economy,” Spearman said outside the event. “Everybody's counting on having good, clean water and this jeopardizes everything.” 

Inside the event, Spearman asked the premier if she would commit to a province-wide referendum on coal mining, just as she did for a referendum on Alberta independence. 

“You feel free to go ahead and do that, absolutely,” Smith said, emphasizing that she recently passed legislation lowering the threshold for referendums.

Country singer Corb Lund, who’s been an outspoken critic of efforts to mine for coal in the eastern Rockies, was also in attendance. 

He told Canada’s National Observer after the event that the town hall “felt like an exercise in having a predetermined outcome and just answering questions around that.”

“The problem with that format is you're not allowed follow-up questions,” Lund said, adding that this made it difficult to challenge what he called the government’s “bullshit” claims in the moment, specifically mentioning Jean’s claims about removing selenium from water.

He noted that some of the most vocal opponents of the mine are “generational ranchers” — people like Norma Dougal, and his friends John Smith and Laura Liang — not people who can be dismissed as “left-wing enviro-maniacs.” 

Opposition to Grassy Mountain has created unlikely alliances between rural landowners and environmentalists “because it’s a dumb idea and everyone can see it’s a dumb idea,” said Lund. 

“It's annoying that five or six years later, we're still fighting the exact same mine.”