Crowsnest Pass mayor Blair Painter says relations with the neighbouring Municipal District of Ranchlands have been “cold” in recent months.
They’re about to get colder.
My Backyard
In late November, 70 percent of Crowsnest citizens who participated in a non-binding referendum voted in favour of the Grassy Mountain coal project.
No surprise there, given the money that was being spread around the community by the coal company.
Australian mining giant Hancock Prospecting, under its subsidiary Northback Holdings, is pushing for exploratory drilling with plans for open-pit metallurgical coal mining on Grassy Mountain in the Oldman River headwaters.
As TheRockies.Life reported, Northback Holdings enthusiastically supported the referendum and even offered to drive Crowsnest Pass residents to the polling booth.
Mine Your Own Business
The proposed mine is close to the MD of Crowsnest Pass but lies entirely within the MD of Ranchlands. Citizens downstream of the project won’t enjoy the economic benefits of a mine, but they will surely pay the environmental costs.
Ranchlands has gone to the Alberta Court of Appeal to challenge the Alberta Energy Regulator’s (AER) controversial decision to review the Grassy Mountain proposal as an “advanced coal project.”
“I find that a serious, arguable issue is established,” wrote Justice Kevin Feth last August in his decision to allow the appeal.
This tale keeps getting stranger. It also raises troubling questions around who is in the driver’s seat regarding resource management in the province – the Alberta government or foreign corporations?
In the latest absurd twist, Crowsnest Pass now proposes annexing the area around Grassy Mountain, which it tried and failed to do in 2013.
In an interview with CBC News, the Crowsnest Pass mayor said the town needs room to expand.
“Our municipality is quite narrow. We were looking for avenues to move to the north. South is a park,” he said. “We need more housing. So there’s a bunch of different reasons why we feel it would maybe be good to do that [annexation].”
Critics aren’t buying that argument; they say the annex proposal is not about housing. It’s about a town desperate for a return to the boom – and bust – days of coal mining. As The Tyee reported, it’s also about ”Foreign miners undermining Albertan democracy” to get their way.
The Downstream Pushback
Ron Davis, Reeve of MD of Ranchlands, called the Crowsnest Pass referendum “preposterous” and the case for annexation weak.
“We’re very concerned that one municipality can try and determine what happens in another municipality. In this case, the Crowsnest Pass is trying to decide what happens in our municipality, and we don’t feel that’s the proper way to go about it,” Davis said. “They’re trying to amp up their popular vote in their community, suggesting that this project should go ahead. Of course, we don’t agree with that type of democracy, I guess.”
It’s worth repeating that in 2021, a Joint Review Panel (made up of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency and the AER) rejected an application for coal mining on Grassy Mountain from Benga Mining, a previous Hancock subsidiary.
In its decision, the panel noted:
- significant adverse environmental effects on surface water quality, westslope cutthroat trout and its habitat, whitebark pine, rough fescue grasslands, and vegetation species and community biodiversity; and
- significant adverse effects on the physical and cultural heritage of some First Nations
The fact that this coal project keeps resurfacing and consuming court time and provincial government resources is not only an embarrassment – it’s a waste of public money.
It’s money that could be well spent forging a different economic future for Crowsnest Pass and protecting the headwaters of drought-stressed rivers in southern Alberta.
