Review process in Alberta needs to be revised

By Letter to the Editor on June 23, 2021.

Editor:
The Grassy Mountain Joint (federal/provincial) Review Panel, in response to a wealth of input from from Albertans and Canada’s multidisciplinary science community, has made a decision.
It rejected all the applications Benga Mining made for its Grassy Mountain Coal Project, determining the proposed project’s “… significant adverse environmental effects on surface water quality and westslope cutthroat trout and habitat outweigh the low to moderate positive economic impacts.”
The Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) went on to report this: ” … the project is not in the public interest.”
The decision noted, it was the people of Alberta, not the Government of Alberta, who, in what’s felt like a lifetime of uphill grassroots effort, exposed the proposed Grassy Mountain Coal Project for what the Joint Review Panel has now determined it is.
In the wake the AER’s decision, there’s this huge takeaway: The process of reviewing proposed industrial projects in Alberta needs to be revised to ensure that the people of Alberta don’t need to put their lives and livelihoods on hold to invest thousands of hours and their own hard-earned money to analyze and evaluate what-logic screams-an elected government is relied upon to do: assess, accurately and holistically, a proposed project’s true value before it’s imposed upon the land and its people.
Thanks to the people of Alberta and the AER’s review of their input, a black curtain has been lifted. Today, the sun shines down upon the people of Crowsnest Pass, on Grassy Mountain, and throughout Alberta’s Eastern Slopes.
Birds are singing, the future’s bright, and in the wind there’s a vision of hope. The streams, clear and cold, are beckoning.
The picture: Long-range health, wealth, and prosperity bask in the beauty of an intact Rocky Mountain landscape.
David McIntyre
Crowsnest Pass