Who protects Albertans from bad political decisions?

Posted on February 6, 2025 by Sunny South News

Dear Ms. Smith

While you and your minister of Energy Brian Jean are running scared and “protecting” Albertans from legal claims by opening up the Eastern Slopes to coal mining, I must ask a fundamental question. Who is protecting us from the likes of you and Jean and the other industry “friendly” members of the UCP government? I don’t think it is Rebecca Schulz, the minister of anything but the environment.

If the fear of lawsuits from several coal companies has you hiding under the bed, wouldn’t it be prudent to call in the lawyers who serve the government? I find it hard to believe, even inconceivable, that legal opinions on this would be to surrender without a fight. Which is, essentially what minister Jean’s muddled direction to the Alberta Energy Regulator (and to the coal industry) represents.

It is not appropriate, or smart, in the chaos created by your government with flip-flopping over coal policy and the legal challenges created, to abjectly acquiesce to a largely unwarranted fear. While it is possible and conceivable there is much fear about public exposure of the connivance of some UCP ministers in the coal give-away shemozzle, governments have multiple ways of dodging their exposure. Throwing Albertans and the Eastern Slopes under the coal bus indicates no particular intelligence. 

Trading an uncertain legal battle for inevitable watershed disruptions and more coal exploration chaos, is a decidedly poor bargain. When the UCP political “brain trust” is so bereft of strategies that favour Albertans (and their sacred landscapes like the Eastern Slopes), one has to ask— who do we turn to?

While many of us are pondering the answer to that question, which I pose to you, here’s some advice for you and your colleagues who we thought were working on our behalf. You will need to find the spine store. It is just across the street from the one on integrity. There you will find what you lack, which we Albertans expected you to have.

Lorne Fitch, P. Biol., Lethbridge