UCP, AER have forgotten who they serve
By Lethbridge Herald on September 12, 2025.
Lorne Fitch
For the Herald
Faith is fragile and it’s fading fast for governance in Alberta. For me it’s not just for the obvious reasons— politically motivated pension schemes and police forces, perverse social engineering, and the systematic dismantling of public health care.
No, the lens I see Alberta through is its natural resource treasures and how they are being squandered instead of stewarded for the future.
It raises the question of who regulates resource development and maintains public trust in the process.
Really, it’s no one. The whole government red tape reduction program represents the corporate desire to have essential environmental guardrails removed. The minister of Environment and Protected Areas has sentenced caribou to extirpation to benefit timber and petroleum interests. But the arbitrary decision by the Chief Executive Officer of the Alberta Energy Regulator to cancel a public hearing over a coal mine near Grande Cache at the request of the company brings this to a head.
Rob Morgan, the AER CEO, is a professional engineer as apparently are most of the AER staff. When a former CEO was asked, multiple times, how many biologists the AER employed, he was unable to answer. Yet decisions made on resource developments are made by people without a background in, training for, or an understanding of biology and ecology.
It’s a regulatory world dominated by engineers. As Winston Churchill intoned, “We want a lot of engineers in the modern world, but we do not want a world of engineers.”
Not to denigrate engineers and the essential work they do but their mantra seems to be, “When in doubt, build it stout.” For biologists the advice is, “When in doubt, don’t do it.”
This is especially evident in coal mining, where monitoring has categorically shown the issues created, the repeated failure of engineered solutions, and an enduring legacy of unremediated problems.
Yet, here we have Rob Morgan, an engineer, making an erratic decision on a process about the development of publicly owned assets and the impacts on other natural resource assets.
Here is a good time to stop and remind ourselves that the assets being developed and others impacted by development are ours. They are held for us, in trust, by the provincial government. In case that isn’t clear, it is Albertans, us, the great non-corporate unwashed, who own them. And we need to have our say in this process, which is often in the form of a public hearing— the one Rob Morgan cancelled because Valory Resources, a foreign-owned coal company requested it.
To simplify his decision it hinged on his assessment that everyone in the area of the proposed mine was in favour of it. Only two non-local environmental groups opposed it. Hence, rather than the bother of a public hearing where questions of the mine proponent might prove embarrassing, better to review this inhouse and avoid a lot of messy scrutiny.
As we’ve seen with other coal mine proposals, the fact that local people may be in support of a wrong thing does not make the thing right.
The AER generally avoids opening up discussions on broad impacts by hewing to the “directly and adversely affected” rule. This means you have no “standing” in a development decision unless you live immediately adjacent to it and can demonstrate some adverse impact.
It also means there is no regional scale cumulative effects assessments undertaken to understand the ability of the landscape to absorb more development.
If a coal mine adds a witches’ brew of toxic pollutants to a river, downstream water drinkers, anglers, naturalists, and downstream businesses who depend on clean water have no standing to intervene. People living downwind from mines lofting cancer-causing polycyclic aromatic compounds over them have no say before the AER.
Albertans who understand that the costs of these issues and their remediation will, inevitably, be borne by them, have no say.
To many, this represents the theft of due process on issues that affect us broadly.
We desperately need a return to a government and a regulator that accept they are servants for Albertans, not of corporate interests. Albertans can be impacted by decisions even if they are not “directly” affected. This needs to be acknowledged as part of due process.
A regulator must not only do the right things in the public interest, it must also be seen to be doing them. To accomplish that there must be transparency, competency, impartiality, and a broad, long term environmental and economic perspective.
These features do not, by and large, currently exist within the AER. The cumulative evidence is that the AER lacks the institutional capacity to effectively make decisions in the broad public interest. At stake is the future of Alberta’s natural resource treasures.
The AER, its leadership, and its political masters have forgotten who they serve. They need to be reminded.
Lorne Fitch is a Professional Biologist, a retired Fish and Wildlife Biologist and a past Adjunct Professor with the University of Calgary. He is the author of Streams of Consequence, Travels Up the Creek, and Conservation Confidential.
24-23
Wholeheartedly agree! The reminding should be done by remembering that these toxic outcomes are intertwined with how one votes.
Not all can agree with Lorne.That’s is why the government does what it does. Serve the people of Alberta. For the benefit of albertans. Just as the Liberals serve somebody. Somebody voted for them. Not me, though. Very little of what libs do and did has my support. There must be a majority? ? That believes what is happening federally is good. I can support UCP decisions. Coal mine? It will be ok. We and our children are not going to suffer on account of it. I use water. There is no legitimate concern for the water. Quality, volume, or otherwise. The crowsnest pass has a history/ legacy in coal. It’s a nice place . Liveable. Healthy. Evidence of coal mining even, in many parts of it.Still a good , healthy place to be.
hey, that’s telling the likes of lorne what is what in the real world. i mean, so well supported and all.
the brunt of our most pressing issues, here and the world over, stems from a new world order approach based on two things: power and wealth. it is an approach that serves the few, especially the top 1% of the top 1%; meanwhile, it undermines the planet’s health and its systems. but, hey, who cares, so long as one’s credit can allow a bunch more stuff of wants.
You fail to understand the New World Order! It is not about power and wealth! It is about power but is a major socialist move which see borderless countries, no one allowed to own their own homes or lands, and control of all resources and political power going to 10 divisional sections of the One World Government! More uneducated fearmongering! Let me guess, you went to the U of L!
Watch for the UN and the WEF to push hard in the next 5 years to move nations towards a One World Government! That is the New World Order you should be afraid of and why the US is pushing hard to stay away from it.
Canada as we know it will disappear and the services you now enjoy will be cut! If you don’t work, there will be no AISH, no EI, no Alberta Works! You will have to beg for your food on the streets.
The One World Government elite will live like kings, while the rest of us peons will be slaves!
What a paranoid and delusional rant.. you better get back on your meds, say what.
So banning a coal mine but getting past cat skiing at Castle and a new chairlift doesn’t faze the elitist crowd. They’ll just siphon more water out of Haig creek for making snow. Sshh don’t tell anyone. Can you imagine there is no outcry for using snow track machines to drive elite skiers up the side of a pristine landscape so a privileged few can ski. With the new lift it will create hundreds if not thousands of additional plebes to scar up the landscape in the name of entertainment. Yet, you won’t hear a peep from the writer or any other of his green friends on this. My fun good, you’re economic opportunities bad.
Yes the NDP fearmongers fail to acknowledge the damage they have done to this province, or the fact that the UCP is trying to listen to the concerns of Albertan’s who respectfully go to Alberta Next Panel and maturely express their response to the ideas presented.
They had their chance, but many didn’t bother going, instead they whine in the coffee shops and in social media, oh woe is me, these big bad UCP people are monsters who don’t listen! They can’t listen if you don’t go and they won’t listen if you act like a radical maniac and be respectful.
“….politically motivated pension schemes and police forces, perverse social engineering, and the systematic dismantling of public health care…..”
This comment lacks any basis and shows how uninformed and uneducated the writer, as most NDP are on the subjects!
What can you expect from people who destroyed our province, cities, municiplaties, families and businesses with their harm reduction and supervised drug consumption sites which they forced on Albertans without any panels or discussions and refused to listen to concerns voiced by those who knew what the impacts would be!
And don’t forget, boys, that Suzuki rode in a plane and Al Gore used plastic straws!