From a point before they were even elected, Jason Kenney and the UCP have taken a policy of aggression to any act that is not a rubber stamp approval of oil and gas projects in Alberta. This week, that came back to bite them, when Teck withdrew its Frontier oil sands mine application, in a letter to the federal environment minister.
Teck cited in the letter their reasons for withdrawing their application. It wasn’t over regulation. It wasn’t a process they felt would block them. It wasn’t adversity or protests, things they indicated they are no stranger to dealing with, and are capable of handling. No, the issues they noted were instead damning of the lack of a viable climate change strategy going forward, and the willingness of governments, like the UCP, to turn their project into a political punching bag used to intentionally drive wedges into our country.
Worse, Jason Kenny seems to have completely ignored the content of the letter, and responded to it with a media release that blamed the withdrawal on federal regulations, and “public safety concerns”, ignoring the fact that Teck’s own letter does not touch on regulation, or public safety once, but comes back to the need for climate change strategies and policies no less than eight times. Kenney has completely missed the point Teck was making, and instead has continued down the exact route that led Teck to withdrawal. He and his government have not learned from their mistakes, and as a result the 7,000 potential oil and gas jobs that the Frontier mine represented are only the start of the pain we will feel due to Kenney’s policies.
Finally, Teck touched on how “global capital markets are changing rapidly and investors and customers are increasingly looking for jurisdictions to have a framework in place that reconciles resource development and climate change”. The fact this does not currently exist in Canada, is a travesty the UCP must answer for. The UCP rejected the climate change strategies implemented by the NDP that were designed to work with, and not against, our oil and gas industry and draw investment to Alberta. Kenney’s rejection of viable climate change policies not only hasn’t helped our oil and gas industry, it has chased away the very investment and jobs he claims to want to attract.
It is clear in Teck’s letter that we could stand to have a bit more of that “social license” that the NDP worked so hard to build, and that the UCP tore down faster than Klein could blow up hospitals.
- Steve Durrell
