Benchmark prices have been set in the water market, but it remains broadly opaque
Rising demand, dwindling supply: southern Alberta’s water dilemma
As water scarcity intensifies, farmers, cities and businesses in southern Alberta are under pressure to find sustainable water solutions.
Just south of the town of Taber, Alta., known for its potatoes, corn, and rich soil, the crew at North Paddock Farms finish their lunch, slide on their gloves, and get to work.
Russet Burbank seed potatoes drop onto a sizing belt, where they’re sorted and cut. Nearby, massive storage bins are full to the brim of potatoes, due for the nearby McCain Foods and Lamb Weston plants.
The work is underway on April 24 despite the stress that looms over the entire operation this year. This farm, which grows potatoes, canola, Timothy hay, wheat, flax, fava beans and garlic using irrigation, is part of the St. Mary River Irrigation District (SMRID), the biggest of its kind in Canada.
In April, the district said farmers would get eight inches of water — half the allocation they get in a good year — with a dry winter affecting snowpack and reservoir storage.
That’s not enough for Alison Davie, one of the owners of the farm operation. She says they need at least 18 inches to grow their potato crop.
Alison Davie grew up on North Paddock Farm, located near Taber, Alta., and is a lifelong lover of farm life. Davie and her husband Michael took over operation of the farm from her parents 10 years ago. But they’ve never faced down drought conditions like those facing southern Alberta this year. (Monty Kruger/CBC)
For that reason, North Paddock Farms is looking to buy more water.
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The 2024 wildfire season roared to life across Western Canada this weekend as crews battled multiple out-of-control blazes
Multiple fires broke out across Western Canada this weekend amid a persistent and severe drought affecting British Columbia and Alberta.
B.C. fire crews are working to extinguish several out-of-control fires in the Cariboo Fire Centre, while officials issued an evacuation alert for some neighbourhoods in northern Alberta amid a new out-of-control blaze that sparked near Fort McMurray on Sunday.
CANADA’S WILDFIRES: Visit The Weather Network’s wildfire hub to keep up with the latest on the active start to wildfire season across Canada.
Several B.C. fires burning out of control
The B.C. Wildfire Service reported an out-of-control wildfire on Saturday about 45 km south of Quesnel.
The fire quickly spread from 50 hectares on Saturday to more than 1,600 hectares by Sunday evening. Officials suspect the blaze, named the Burgess Creek Fire, was sparked by human activities.
Provincial fire officials reported more than 120 active wildfires across B.C. by Sunday evening, the vast majority of which are considered ‘holdover’ fires still smouldering from the previous season.
Seven of the ongoing fires are considered out of control, while three more are being held by crews.
Evacuation alert issued for community in Alberta
Crews in neighbouring Alberta responded to a wildfire spreading near Fort McMurray late Sunday afternoon. The out-of-control blaze southeast of the city is one of more than a dozen active wildfires in the province that crews are working to extinguish.
Local officials issued an evacuation alert for the Saprae Creek Estates “due to the potential of the nearby wildfire spreading towards the community,” the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo posted on its website Sunday.
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More than 65 per cent of Canada abnormally parched or in drought at the end of March
An out-of-control wildfire, dubbed Wildfire MWF012, is seen burning west of Saprae Creek on April 21, 2024. PHOTO BY ALBERTA WILDFIRE
Wildfires erupted across Canada’s main oil producing province of Alberta and an evacuation order was issued as the region braces for a repeat of last year’s unprecedented season.
Members of the Indigenous first nation community of Cold Lake Number 149, northeast of Edmonton on the Saskatchewan border, were told to evacuate, according to a notice issued at 4:49 p.m. local time. Other regions west of the Cold Lake blaze were put on standby, with three wildfires in the province listed as out of control as of late Monday.
More than 65 per cent of Canada was abnormally parched or in drought at the end of March, leading the nation to brace for another smoke-filled summer. Unusually hot, dry weather contributed to the country’s worst-ever wildfire season last year, darkening skies over New York and other U.S. cities and prompting Alberta oil and gas drillers to shut as much as 300,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day of production.
An evacuation alert for residents of Saprae Creek, about 25 kilometres southeast of the oilsands capital of Fort McMurray, was cancelled. Massive forest fires burned down swathes of Fort McMurray eight years ago, forcing thousands of residents to evacuate and temporarily shutting more than one million barrels a day of oil production.
Albert’s oil-patch is a zombie, the walking dead. The companies that extract oil there owe more money than they can pay, more than they can borrow, more than they can earn. If they were made to pay their lawful debts, they would all go bankrupt, and, in so doing, would end the extraction of one of the dirtiest, worst sources of oil in the world.
Now, there’s an argument that all the oil companies are busted, Alberta or no. If they were made to pay for the damage they’ve done to our world, the millions their deadly products have killed and the billions they threaten, they would all be cleaned out.
But that argument depends on making those companies pay for those debts, which are not legal debts, but moral ones. Big Oil has proven itself remarkably adept at avoiding those moral debts . The costs that Big Oil imposed on all of us are diffused, the profits they gained through their crimes are concentrated into their hands, so it’s very hard to hold them to account.
The economics researcher Blair Fix has written a long companion piece to The Big Cleanup, a report by his collaborator Regan Boychuk for the Alberta Liabilities Disclosure Project (ALDP).
In his essay, Fix examines the power relationships that have allowed the oil companies to go on risking our civilization and our species with impunity. He observes that many environmentalists claim that if the true costs of the oil industry were borne by the extraction companies, they’d all be bankrupt already.
A few months ago I received an intriguing email from researcher and activist Regan Boychuk. For the past 15 years, Boychuk has been studying the oil-and-gas industry in Alberta (Canada) and he wanted to know if I would join his project. I immediately said yes.
Some backstory. You can think of Alberta as the Texas of Canada. Alberta is endowed with a vast trove of oil that it has been exploiting for the past 75 years. And like Texas, Alberta’s politics are dominated by the oil industry.
Oh, and Alberta is where I grew up.
Back to Regan Boychuk’s work. Boychuk has a vision for an Alberta in which the oil industry goes extinct by being forced to clean up its own mess. As it stands, Alberta has about 300,000 oil-and-gas wells waiting to be cleaned up at the oil companies’ expense. The problem is that oil companies are not forced to save for the clean-up expense, and accounting tricks allow them to make the clean-up liability look negligible in their corporate accounts.1 It’s an open secret (implicitly endorsed by the Alberta government) that defunct wells will never be cleaned up. If they were, the oil industry would go bankrupt.
And that’s exactly what Boychuk wants. His dream is to kill 3 birds with one stone:
Show that the oil-and-gas industry is insolvent;
Clean up every well in Alberta;
Fund full employment and a transition to a sustainable Alberta economy.
To hasten this big-picture goal, Boychuk asked me to help by estimating production curves for every oil-and-gas well in Alberta. After much head scratching and many lines of code, that’s what I’ve done.
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What Kenney wants mined is such poor quality ‘it won’t make the cut’ for global markets, panel told.
Alberta’s proposed coking coal projects are often compared to the Elk Valley mine in BC, but the amounts and quality aren’t at all the same, say two industry veterans. Photo via Wikimedia.
Half a dozen mining proposals to extract low-quality coking coal in the eastern slopes of the Rockies don’t make any economic sense and shouldn’t be allowed, say two Alberta coal experts with more than 70 years’ experience in the industry.
In separate written submissions to Alberta’s Coal Policy Committee this summer, a retired geologist and a mining engineer testified that the market value of metallurgical coal seams in Alberta will never be able to compete with the quality of coking coals in B.C.’s Elk Valley mined by Teck Resources.
“These speculative mines don’t meet the requirements to be viable by any economic analysis,” said Cornelis Kolijn, a semi-retired process mining engineer with extensive experience in metallurgical coal, coke making and product development around the world over 40 years.
The Kenney government reluctantly created Alberta’s Coal Policy Committee after it initiated a political scandal by abruptly rescinding long-standing coal development rules in 2020 without public consultation.
Those rules prevented mining in much of the eastern slopes, but Australian coal miners learned of their removal before Albertans did.
Public outcry then forced the government to reinstate its coal policy and create a five-member committee to investigate the future of coal mining in the eastern slopes.
All summer long it has been hearing submissions from Albertans, First Nations, environmentalists, ranchers and Australian coal companies. It will make its recommendations in the fall.
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Approving the Grassy Mountain Coal Project could enable industrializing Alberta’s sensitive and vital eastern slopes.
Ranching on the eastern slopes of the Canadian Rockies in southern Alberta near the proposed Grassy Mountain Coal Project. Locals told a joint panel they fear the mine will harm their way of life, tourism and key water sources. Photo: Callum Gunn.
Next month, a provincial-federal joint review panel on the massive Grassy Mountain Coal Project in the southern Canadian Rockies will table a decision that could determine the fate of Alberta’s famed eastern slopes.
If the panel gives the contentious metallurgical coal mine a green light, the doors could open for other existing proposals that could industrialize nearly 1,000 square kilometres of the Rockies and threaten the region’s scarce water supplies.
Or the panel could rule against it, reflecting what it heard from writer and local resident Sid Marty in a public hearing last fall. Mountain top removal in the Rockies, said Marty, is “the wrong development, in the wrong location, in the wrong century.”
Much hinges on the panel’s report and recommendations that will be submitted to federal Minister of Environment and Climate Change Jonathan Wilkinson next month.
For starters, the Alberta government of Jason Kenney has strongly championed Australian metallurgical coal developers as an important new source of jobs and revenue that could replace shrinking oilsands developments in the province.
All the steel-making coal would be shipped to Vancouver-area terminals for export to China or India.
In addition, the province and the Coal Association of Canada, directed by former Alberta Tory environment minister Colin Campbell, have tried to sell open-pit coal mining as a form of “reconciliation” that can enrich First Nations.
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What does the UCP do now that Vivian Krause says she never said Canadian enviro groups were being used by US oil interests?
Premier Jason Kenney based his ‘Public inquiry into anti-Alberta energy campaigns’ on the theory the province was being targeted to benefit US interests. Photo via Alberta government Flickr.
What is the United Conservative Party’s position, pray, about Vancouver blogger Vivian Krause’s bombshell assertion she always understood the environmental conspiracy to landlock Alberta’s oilsands she promoted so energetically had nothing to do with the U.S. oil industry advancing its interests at Canada’s expense?
Wherever it came from, the notion big American corporations and foundations were bankrolling Canadian environmental charities to achieve a market advantage over their supposedly more ethical Canadian counterparts was at the heart of Premier Jason Kenney’s successful crusade to unite the right, drive the Alberta NDP from power, and restore Conservative rule in Wild Rose Country.
Whatever the UCP’s favourite researcher has been saying — and there was vigorous public discussion about that last week — her statement that she has never accused environmental organizations of being used by U.S. oil interests to landlock Canadian bitumen arrived with the force of a thunderclap.
“‘No evidence’: Researcher behind ‘anti-Alberta’ inquiry backs off assertion,” said the headlines on the Edmonton Journal, Toronto Star, Global News, CTV and other websites, all of which published a short, early story by the Canadian Press.
If nothing else, this certainly suggests mainstream Alberta news media, mostly sympathetic to the UCP, had always assumed the conspiracy theory originated with Krause, whose work was championed by the UCP and fossil fuel industry groups like the powerful Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.
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The Brutal Legal Odyssey of Jessica Ernst Comes to an End
The Alberta landowner fought an epic battle against fracking interests.
Jessica Ernst became a high-profile critic of hydraulic fracturing, injecting liquid at high pressure to force loose oil and gas out. ‘The system dismissed my case, but I don’t think I lost in the court of public opinion.’ Photo by Colin Smith.
After 14 years of battling Alberta regulators and the fracking industry over a water well contaminated with methane and chemicals, Jessica Ernst says she feels incalculable grief and anger.
On April 1, 2021, her tortuous legal crusade — which included a controversial detour to the Supreme Court of Canada — came to an end with no resolution. What one Alberta lawyer dubbed “the legal saga of the decade” is over.
Court of Queen’s Bench Judge J.T. Eamon accepted applications from Encana and the Alberta government to dismiss the case due to inactivity on the file for three years.
“It was inevitable,” says Ernst who was informed three weeks after the dismissal. “The rules are the rules.”
After Toronto lawyers Murray Klippenstein and Cory Wanless quit the case in August 2018 without warning, Ernst was left hanging.
“My lawyers knew I couldn’t find a replacement lawyer in Alberta when they quit,” said Ernst. “They even wrote me that and added that I would fail as a self-represented litigant.”
She not only had no lawyer, but incomplete legal files to work with, Ernst says. Klippenstein told The Tyee in 2019 that he would return them to Ernst, but she maintains his firm only returned some correspondence but not the complete files. And so the lawsuit languished.
Although Ernst tried to find another lawyer, she says that she couldn’t find a suitable candidate for various reasons, including conflict of interest. Most big law firms do business in or with the oil patch.
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The Supreme Court ruling is good news for anyone invested in a habitable planet. But fixing the climate is going to take more.
‘There’s no court we can appeal this to,’ Alberta Premier Jason Kenney said on Thursday, before vowing to continue his fight. What taxpayer-funded mischief will Canada’s conservative leaders get up to next? Photo by Sean Kilpatrick, the Canadian Press.
Canadians worried about the survival of the country had cause for relief Thursday morning with news the Supreme Court of Canada had ruled 6-3 the federal government is entitled to impose a national carbon-pollution pricing system — in other words, to act like the government of Canada.
Had the court done what a cabal of climate-change-denying provincial Conservative premiers had hoped to achieve, one almost wonders what the point would have been of remaining a confederation.
Thursday’s ruling settles that question for a generation, if not longer, at least as far carbon pricing goes. Quite possibly for a lot more than that, too.
Even Alberta Premier Jason Kenney crankily admitted at a morning news conference that “there’s no court we can appeal this to,” while vowing, naturally, to make a political fight of it.
It remains to be seen how that will work out, but it seems likely “The Resistance,” as Canada’s conservative leaders used to like to think of themselves back when they were riding a little higher, will try to think up more taxpayer-funded mischief as long as there is a Liberal government in Ottawa.
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David Climenhaga , TheTyee.ca, carbon tax, government, canada, conservative party, climate change, carbon pricing, supreme court of canada, alberta, jason kenney
The Kenney government plays word games as it plans to strip-mine the Rockies.
Does this look like mountaintop removal to you? Coal mining underway in Elk Valley, BC, on the west side of the Rockies across from where Alberta plans similar mining. Photo by Callum Gunn.
In Alberta, the government of Jason Kenney has one definition for mountaintop removal, while most people have another.
You might think that excavating the top of a mountain until it’s reduced to a series of carved away “benches” that rise like giant steps to a last shred of a mountain’s peak is “mountaintop removal.”
If so, you disagree with the Alberta government.
Here’s someone else who disagrees with the Kenney definition. Australian coal miners.
While the Kenney government claims mountaintop removal can’t happen in Alberta’s water-sensitive eastern slopes, Benga Mining, an Australian firm owned by Aussie billionaire Gina Rinehart, says that’s the technique it intends to employ — and in a joint federal-provincial hearing no less.
Last week, the Kenney government told the Narwhal in a series of emails that open-pit mining can’t be called mountaintop removal if it only removes, say, 90 per cent of a mountaintop.
By Alberta’s definition, the top of the mountain has to be “completely” removed to qualify as mountaintop removal.
The Alberta Energy Regulator and Kenney spokesperson Kavi Bal both informed the Narwhal that open-pit mining can scrape off the sides of a mountain, devein coal seams and leave a ridge a pockmarked shadow of itself after removing tonnes of toxic debris, and that’s OK: because it’s open-pit mining, and not mountaintop removal.
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Five days after Kenney defended the province’s mining push, the government says it was all a big mistake.
Rancher Renie Blades says she’s glad that the Alberta government admitted its mistake in cancelling the Coal Policy, but calls her response ‘very guarded.’ Photo by Callum Gunn.
After months of ignoring a grassroots protest movement opposing plans to allow open-pit coal mining in Alberta’s Rockies, Energy Minister Sonya Savage said today the provincial government made a mistake and is now prepared to fix it.
In a brief news conference, Savage said the province would reinstate the 1976 Coal Policy, which prohibited open-pit mining on 1.5 million hectares of “Category 2” lands in the eastern slopes of the Rockies.
In addition, Savage said she had instructed the Alberta Energy Regulator that “no mountain top removal will be permitted” in the province and that all future coal exploration on the Category 2 lands will be paused indefinitely until public consultation is held.
Coal exploration by Australian miners on six existing leases in the foothills will not be paused.
Savage’s reinstatement of the Coal Policy directly contradicts statements from Premier Jason Kenney on Wednesday that the Coal Policy was a “dead letter” and obsolete.
The highly unpopular premier also characterized opponents of coal mining as urban snobs even though the majority of the opposition has come from his party’s angry base: ranchers, farmers, landowners and rural towns and municipalities.
The government’s abrupt change of course follows weeks of protests from hundreds of thousands of Albertans from all walks of life and all political parties.
They raised concerns about water security, selenium pollution (a legacy of open-pit coal mines), and the future of the province’s iconic eastern slopes.
Investor presentations signalled the Kenney government aimed to open protected lands to open-pit mining.
Documents show Australian firms seeking open-pit coal mining leases in Alberta got signals protections to sensitive lands would be lifted, clearing the way. The public only found out months later, the day the Coal Policy was rescinded. Photo: Shutterstock.
Australian mining firms seeking to strip-mine metallurgical coal in Alberta’s eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains knew well ahead of Albertans that the government was planning to rescind a law that stood in the way.
The 44-year-old Coal Policy, the result of extensive public consultation in the 1970s, kept 1.5 million hectares of Category 2 lands in the eastern slopes off limits from open-pit mining until the Jason Kenney government abruptly axed it in May of last year with no public consultation.
Alberta’s environment minister has denied that doing away with the Coal Policy “has opened up the eastern slopes for strip-mining.”
But a presentation prepared some time in 2019 by Capital Investment Partners, a firm that owns four private coal companies with extensive leases in the central Rockies, told investors: “Alberta government [is] in the process of changing the coal policy to allow more open-pit mining.”
This statement raises serious questions, said Katie Morrison, the conservation director of the Southern Alberta arm of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, who found the presentation online.
“The CIP presentation really implies that long before Albertans heard about the cancellation of the Coal Policy, the government was consulting with coal companies at the request of coal companies and for the benefit of coal companies,” Morrison told The Tyee.
She added that the presentation “is very clear that the Australians understood the cancellation as a lifting of restrictions that allowed them to mine in areas they couldn’t access before.”
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Levi Williams-Whitney traversed the land to make a video opposing open-pit mining. He has no regrets.
Still from a video made by Levi Williams-Whitney, titled A Hunter’s Perspective: Open Pit Coal Mining in Alberta.
The Kenney government has fined an Alberta hunter $600 for making an anti-coal video, but the young man says he’s laughing.
Last October, Levi Williams-Whitney went for a gambol up Grassy Mountain just north of the town of Blairmore in Alberta’s historic Crowsnest Pass.
Much of the mountain is now owned by Benga Mining (Riversdale Resources), a firm purchased by Australian billionaire Gina Rinehart in 2019 for $700 million.
With the Kenney government’s blessings, Rinehart, an iron-ore magnate and Australia’s wealthiest woman, has proposed to reduce what is now the habitat of mountain sheep, trout and elk into a giant open-pit coal mine. (The mountain top removal project is under a joint federal-provincial review.)
Another bunch of Australian developers want to remove more than half a dozen other nearby mountains from the Rockies to also supply Asian steel markets. They, too, have the government’s enthusiastic support.
Williams-Whitney, an avid hunter and environmental student at the University of Lethbridge, wasn’t impressed with Rinehart’s plans, let alone the Alberta government’s red-carpet treatment for Australian coal miners.
“The video was my way to express some of my frustration and refine my thinking about the issues,” said Williams-Whitney who has hunted for elk in the eastern slopes for years.
So he drove an hour-and-a-half from his home in Lethbridge to the Crowsnest Pass, where underground coal mines, French coal barons and communist unions once dominated the region’s turbulent history some 100 years ago.
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Alberta is poised to let miners destroy mountaintops and vital watersheds grazed for a century.
Mac Blades (foreground) carries on his family’s 100-year ranching tradition on the slopes of Alberta’s Rockies. He and his wife Renie joined a lawsuit to stop open-pit coal mining in the area after restrictions were lifted. Photo by Callum Gunn.
When Jason Kenney’s government quietly abolished the province’s visionary Coal Policy last May to appease Australian coal miners, a shock wave travelled through cowboy country along the scenic slopes of the southern Rockies.
One of those waves arrived at the doorstep of the Rocking P Ranch owned by Mac and Renie Blades.
Another hit the nearby Plateau Cattle Co. owned by John Smith and Laura Laing.
Both families graze their cattle at the base of a fir-topped mountain called Cabin Ridge during the summer months.
Under the province’s 44-year-old Coal Policy the picturesque mountain lay within a landscape known as Category 2. That classification forbade open-pit mining and thereby conserved a precious watershed in arid Alberta.
But in one fell swoop the Kenney government ended that protection by killing the policy and most of its land classification system.
As a consequence the province abruptly opened up 1.5 million hectares of the southern Rockies to mountaintop removal in the middle of the Oldman River watershed, which supplies drinking water to more than a million Canadians. The government is now taking bids for some of that area until Dec. 15.
Australian leaders of coal mining corporations, who had lobbied for the abolishment of the Coal Policy, openly praised the government when their wish was granted.
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