5Legislating Conservation: Success and Failure
(2007–2009)

Conservation means development as much as it does protection. I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use the natural resources of our land; but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob, by wasteful use, the generations that come after us.

—U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt (1910)¹

Following Stelmach’s surprise victory in the 2006 PC leadership race, he was sworn in as the thirteenth premier of Alberta. His first task was to assemble a cabinet. Based on my strong showing of support in the leadership race, it was obvious that Stelmach would have to include me in his new cabinet. The question was, which ministry? Many of my key supporters were hoping for Finance, Energy, or Health (the latter based on my campaign promises to bring in more publicly financed but privately delivered health care). When Stelmach named me as the new minister of sustainable resources development (SRD), they were disappointed. I was not.

During the extended 2006 leadership race—and the unofficial campaigning that went on through all of 2005—I had become acutely aware of Albertans’ concerns over the helter-skelter pace of development with no apparent plan or guidelines. The pressures of hypergrowth were visible everywhere. Alberta’s population had jumped from two million to three million in just twenty-five years and was projected to reach five million by 2026. (Most recently, in 2023, we are the fastest-growing province in Canada with a population of 4.7 million.) More people mean more activities on the land. The number of cars and trucks on Alberta roads had spiked from 1.6 million to 2.6 million over the same time. Registered all-terrain vehicles (ATVs) had quadrupled—from 17,000 to 82,000.

The surge in population and recreational activities was being driven by economic growth. The price of oil had jumped from $28/barrel in 2000 to $140 in 2008, and natural gas prices spiked from under $3/mcf in 2000 to over $12 in 2008 (both before collapsing by 2009). The number of drilling rigs operating in Alberta reached record highs in 2007—26,000, double the number two decades earlier. Capital investment in oil sands projects reached record levels—$32 billion in 2008, up from $7 billion in 2000. In less than a decade, oil sands production had doubled from 668,000 barrels/day in 2000 to over 1.3 million in 2008.² [Note: Over the next fifteen years, by 2023, oil sands production grew to over 3.4 million barrels/day.]

Alberta’s growth surge was not confined to the energy sector. The number of cattle in feedlots had jumped from 2.8 million to 6.4 million. The forestry industry was booming, with the amount of lumber growing from 1 billion board-feet to 3.2 billion in two decades. In the 1980s, Alberta produced no oriented-strand board (OSB). By 2007, Alberta was the third largest source of OSB in North America, with over 3 billion square feet produced annually. Forty thousand people were moving to Alberta every year, and new subdivisions on the outskirts of Calgary and Edmonton, Red Deer and Lethbridge, and Grande Prairie and Fort McMurray couldn’t be built fast enough to house them. The Boom was booming, and there was no end in sight.

Since arriving in Alberta in 1981, I had spent a lot of time with family and friends in the outdoors—camping, fishing, hunting, skiing, and hiking. For me, the “Alberta Advantage” was not just about annual GDP growth, but also our recreational quality of life supported by Alberta’s amazing mountains, foothills, and prairies. During the last years of the Klein government, there were growing demands for a provincial land use plan to protect this part of the Alberta Advantage. I was also educated toward more sustainable land use policies by Harvey Buckley, my campaign manager in Foothills-Rocky View in the 2004 provincial election. Harvey had founded Action for Agriculture, a group that advocated for policies that protected agricultural lands from loss to urban sprawl.³ Harvey in turn had introduced me to Brad Stelfox, whose ALCES PowerPoint presentations made a graphic case for the need for such policies in southern Alberta.⁴

By the end of the 2006 leadership race, every candidate—including Stelmach and me—had committed to pursuing more sustainable land use policies if elected leader. So I was quite pleased to be named the new SRD minister and that my ministerial “mandate letter” explicitly tasked me with the development of a new land use framework for the province. (Having Fish and Wildlife officers guiding me to some of the best / hardest to access fishing holes in the province turned out to be icing on the cake!)

Over the next three years, framing and implementing a land use policy was my primary ministerial focus—culminating in the Alberta Land Stewardship Act (ALSA, 2009) and the first of its seven regional plans—the Lower Athabasca Regional Plan (LARP). In addition to ALSA, I initiated—or tried to initiate—a number of other policy changes involving conservation, stewardship, hunting, and fishing. Some succeeded and some failed. In this chapter, I briefly describe each of these initiatives, and explain their respective success or failure. This format is intended not just to preserve a historical record of what was achieved (or not) during my tenure, but also for the benefit of future Alberta governments and ministers. Those who want to pursue policies that promote stewardship of Alberta’s natural capital can hopefully learn from my experiences.

Below is a chronological listing of the ten policy initiatives covered in this chapter.

• OH Ranch Heritage Rangeland Status (2008): Success
• Sunday Hunting and Provincial Hunting Day (2008): Success
• Hunting, Fishing and Trapping Heritage Act (Bill 201) (2008): Success
• Land Use Framework (2008) and Alberta Land Stewardship Act (Bill 36) (2009): Success
• Alberta Land Trust Grant Program (2009): Success
• Kids Can Catch Trout Pond / Bow Habitat Station (Livingston Fish Hatchery) (2009): Success
• Hunting for Habitat (2010): Failure
• Recreational Access Management Plan (RAMP) (2008): Initial success, but later cancelled
• Upland Birds Alberta (UBA) (2010): Success
• Micrex Mine/Livingstone Range (2010): Success

To explain the relative success or failure of these policy initiatives, I’ve identified seven factors listed (roughly) in order of their importance.⁵ They were not mutually exclusive, but rather interacted to make it more or less difficult to achieve policy innovation in this policy area. For example, a policy initiative that entails new budgetary expenditures is more likely to be scrutinized by the premier’s office and other ministers.

• Support/opposition/indifference from the premier’s office
• Support/opposition/indifference from other ministers
• Budgetary implications
• Instrument of change (order-in-council, ministerial order, or statute)
• Stakeholder support/opposition
• Partisan political advantage/disadvantage/irrelevance
• Support/resistance/indifference from caucus

Support or opposition from the premier’s office was decisive. Opposition meant defeat. Support meant success, while indifference meant it was possible. Stelmach’s refusal to take our advice on the Marie Lake horizontal-drilling issue ended the conversation.⁶ Conversely, his support for ALSA (delivered in caucus through Deputy Premier Ron Stevens) stifled eleventh-hour opposition from some rural MLAs. Similarly, the premier’s support for the OH Ranch Heritage Rangeland decision helped to override opposition from Minister of Energy Mel Knight. Lack of opposition from the premier’s office—i.e., indifference—contributed to the success of the policies I initiated unilaterally through ministerial orders (MOs) and orders-in-council (OCs).

Support or opposition from other ministers could be a factor. My failed attempts to cancel the Government of Alberta’s (GOA’s) biofuel subsidy program was led by ministers who had biofuel projects in their ridings and/or canola farmers who benefited financially from the program. Conversely, I was able to thwart Minister Mel Knight’s support for the Micrex mining project in the Livingstone Range by leaking to the media. But ministerial support/opposition may be completely irrelevant if the premier’s office wants to go in the opposite direction. Examples include Stelmach’s Marie Lake decision (see note 6 in this chapter) or my failed attempts to block or revise the North West Upgrader project (see chapter 7).

Support or opposition from caucus members was mostly irrelevant. Caucus was indifferent to most of these initiatives, which was fine for me. The exception occurred when caucus opposition was allied with opposition from a minister, as in my attempts to cancel biofuel subsidies. In the several instances where some caucus members voiced opposition by themselves—such as the final approval of ALSA—it was quickly suppressed by the premier’s office.

Budgetary implications for any new policy initiative are critical, especially in times of fiscal restraint and budget deficits. With the exception of RAMP, none of the policy innovations I advanced entailed new expenditures, which made them easier to get through cabinet and caucus. RAMP was initially approved when we were still running large budget surpluses. By 2010, when we were facing our third consecutive deficit—and I was no longer minister of SRD—RAMP was cancelled. The Land Trust Grant program was self-financing, and I was able to cover the expenses for the Kids Can Catch trout pond with a private sector fundraiser and a matching federal grant.

Instrument of change is also important. Policy change through a ministerial order (MO) is the easiest to achieve. A minister, working with his deputy minister, can unilaterally issue an MO that implements a minor regulatory change under existing legislation. An MO does not require cabinet notification or approval. More significant policy change under an existing statute usually requires an order-in-council (OC). An OC must be approved by cabinet and signed by the Lieutenant Governor. An OC does not have to be introduced or approved in the Legislative Assembly. Whether a regulatory amendment is made by an MO or an OC is determined by the enabling authority in the applicable statute, not the scope of the amendment. Major policy change falling outside existing legislation—or entailing changes to existing legislation—requires the Full Monty: cabinet and caucus approval; introducing a bill in the legislature and passing three votes; and then royal assent and proclamation by the Lieutenant Governor. Each of these stages represents a potential veto-point for opponents of the proposed change. Only the Alberta Land Stewardship Act (ALSA) had to run this gauntlet.⁷

Stakeholder support also played a role in achieving (and blocking) policy change in this field. There were components of the Alberta PC electoral coalition that strongly supported these initiatives. These included our blue-collar, hunting and fishing, gun-owning supporters, but also more educated, more affluent, more urban PC supporters. Groups like Nature Conservancy of Canada, Ducks Unlimited, Trout Unlimited, Pheasants Forever, and Delta Waterfowl were enthusiastic supporters of ALSA, the OH Ranch, the Land Trust Grant program, RAMP, Open Spaces, Upland Birds Alberta (UBA) and the Kids Can Catch trout pond. An important exception was the Alberta Fish & Game Association (AFGA). The AFGA loved my removal of the century-old, blue-law ban on Sunday hunting in central and southern Alberta and my expanded youth hunting opportunities. But they strongly opposed my Hunting for Habitat initiative, which they saw as a threat to Alberta’s tradition of “free public hunting.” With our polling numbers dropping during 2010, the premier’s office requested that we drop Hunting for Habitat.

Environmental groups like Sierra Club and the Alberta Parks and Wilderness Association also supported ALSA and the Land Trust Grant program. However, because their members tended not to be PC supporters, their support did not carry much weight inside caucus and cabinet. It was a very different story with ALSA. After its passage in 2009, there was a serious backlash from rural, ranch-farm interests because of ALSA’s perceived threats to property rights. Because these rural voters were an integral part of our electoral coalition, their opposition was taken seriously. Bill 10, enacted in the 2011 legislative session, amended several sections of ALSA to try to address these concerns.

Partisan political advantage or disadvantage played almost no role in any of these policy innovations, with the important exception of ALSA, and subsequently Bill 10. As noted above, there was a strong backlash against ALSA because of its alleged infringements on the property rights of farmers and ranchers. As explained below, the new Wildrose Party was both the cause and the effect of this backlash. Through social media and organized public meetings, the Wildrose Party sparked concerns about property rights and ASLA, and then harnessed the growing opposition to ALSA to recruit new supporters.

In recent years the “environment” understood as climate change policy has become a sharp divider between left- and right-of-centre political parties. However, during my tenure as MLA and then minister (2004–2012), it had not yet reached this point in Alberta politics. In 2007, we did enact Canada’s first carbon tax—the Specified Gas Emitters Regulation (SGER)—but this policy change was carried by the energy and environment ministers, with no involvement from SRD or me.

The following table summarizes how these seven factors influenced (or not) the relative success or failure of the ten policy initiatives.

OH Ranch: Heritage Rangeland (2008)

My first significant conservation project was to persuade cabinet that the Crown grazing leases on the historic OH Ranch west of Longview should be given “Heritage Rangeland” status and thereby placed off limits to any future development, including oil and gas drilling.⁸ This did not sit well with either energy department officials or their minister, Mel Knight.

As the minister of SRD, I was responsible for the management of all Crown (public) lands, which include grazing leases. Grazing leases are public lands—usually native grasslands—that are leased to cattle ranchers for an annual rental fee. Ownership remains with the Crown/GOA, but the day-to-day use of the leased lands is given to the lessee for grazing cattle, per regulations that are mutually agreed to prior to signing the lease agreement. The Crown/GOA owns all subsurface minerals (i.e., oil and gas) on public lands and can sell access to these minerals to oil and gas exploration companies. The latter, however, have to negotiate with the leaseholder for surface access and compensate the lessee for surface disturbance, loss of use, nuisance, etc. If the leaseholder and the energy company cannot reach a mutually acceptable agreement on compensation, the decision is referred to the Surface Rights Board, whose decision is binding on both parties. The leaseholder keeps the surface compensation payments.

Five months after becoming SRD minister, I was approached in May 2007 by Jim Smith, who was representing Daryl “Doc” Seaman. Doc was an icon of the Calgary oil patch. Coming off a farm in Rouleau, Saskatchewan, and four years of service as a bomber pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II, Doc was a self-made millionaire. He was a key player in bringing the NHL Flames hockey team to Calgary in 1980 (the year before I arrived in Calgary). In 1986, the OH Ranch was about to be sold to the Department of National Defence, which planned to use the ranch for an artillery range. Doc intervened to save the historic ranch, and now, twenty years later and approaching the end of his life, he wanted to protect the natural integrity and beauty of the OH for perpetuity.

Jim explained that Doc had been in discussion with the GOA for several years but had made no headway under the previous minister in the Klein government. I was immediately receptive. I had hunted elk on the OH with my friend Barry Cooper in the 1980s, when it was still owned by the Kingsford family, and I knew what a gem it was. Doc’s proposal also fit well with where I was headed with the Land Use Framework, which identified protection and preservation of native fescue grasslands as a high priority. I also knew Doc through politics. He had been an early supporter of the Reform Party and had made a donation to my successful effort to win the Reform Party nomination for Alberta’s 1998 Senate elections. He had also written a cheque to my PC leadership bid in 2006.

Doc wanted to do a deal with the GOA. He was willing to place conservation easements on the deeded portions of the ranch (lands that he owned) if the government would designate the grazing lease portions of the ranch as “Heritage Rangeland Status,” with the same restrictions on surface access that he would place on the deeded lands. The home ranch west of Longview was roughly equal in deeded (9,500 acres) and leased (7,000 acres) area, but the other properties that were further east were heavily weighted toward grazing leases (22,000 acres to 12,000). Nearly all of the lands comprising the ranch had been evaluated by Environment Canada and had been determined to be eligible under the federal Ecological Gifts Program as ecologically sensitive. There was virtually no cultivation on any of the properties, and all were rich in different varieties of native fescue and wildlife.

The stumbling block was that Doc wanted to place broader restrictions on future oil and gas development than would normally apply. Conservation easements on deeded lands do not preclude surface access for oil and gas development. On grazing leases, designation as “Heritage Rangelands” curtails future issuance of subsurface mineral interests but existing holdings are honoured. Doc wanted new restrictions placed on management of existing holdings and no new oil and gas exploration. This is why he had made no progress with the previous minister. Energy department bureaucrats had gone into “turf protection” mode and said allowing these additional restrictions would set “a dangerous precedent” of sterilizing land for future oil and gas development. The result had been several years of stalemate.

Why did it turn out differently this time? Having a more sympathetic minister at SRD obviously helped. After my initial meeting with Jim Smith, I met with Doc twice at the OH—once to discuss the terms of his proposal, the second time for a guided horseback tour of the ranch, along with Minister of Parks Cindy Ady. I was already on board, and Cindy concurred enthusiastically.

But there was still a problem: Minister of Energy Mel Knight’s vocal opposition. This is where support from the premier’s office made the crucial difference. Even as early as 2008, Stelmach was aware of his political vulnerability in Calgary and southern Alberta. Doc Seaman was an icon of the Alberta oil and gas industry, a co-owner of the Calgary Flames and a long-time financial supporter of the PC Party. Standing shoulder to shoulder with Doc would help Stelmach in Calgary PC circles, and there was no partisan downside. The project fit nicely with the land use framework initiative that all opposition parties supported at this stage. Another plus was that there were no immediate budget implications. All that was required was cabinet approval of my order-in-council. The stars were all aligned.⁹

On a sunny Saturday afternoon, September 13, 2008, several hundred of Alberta’s oilpatch and ranching elites gathered for a barbeque at the OH Ranch to watch Premier Ed Stelmach stand shoulder to shoulder with Doc Seaman and announce his government’s support for the new Heritage Rangelands status for the Crown lands on the OH Ranch.¹⁰

Doc died shortly thereafter, in January 2009, leaving $110 million to the Calgary Foundation. The OH was purchased by another Calgary millionaire philanthropist, Bill Siebens. Siebens then donated the Longview properties to the Calgary Stampede Foundation, a gift valued at $11 million, the largest ever made to the Stampede. Today, the ranch is used to raise stock for the annual Calgary Stampede and for field trips for primary school students in southern Alberta. Doc got what he wanted, and the rest of us are the beneficiaries.

Sunday Hunting and Provincial Hunting Day (2008)

One of my first priorities as the new SRD minister was to repeal the ban on Sunday hunting. I started hunting in Alberta the year I arrived—1981. And for twenty-five years my hunting friends and I had been frustrated by the fact that we were effectively limited to only one day a week of fall hunting.

Like most Albertans, I worked Monday through Friday. In those early years, we also had three children under the age of ten. Getting away early on Fridays was not easy. Successful hunts depend on prior scouting. Whether it’s birds or big game, you need to know ahead of time where they are and when they come. You also need to get landowner permission on privately owned farms and ranches. This takes time, and we did not have much.

Living in Calgary meant that we were usually looking at a two-hour drive to get to wherever we were headed—whether it was Stettler, Oyen, Hanna, Brooks, or Warner. This meant that most of our hunts consisted of getting up at 4 a.m.; driving several hours; finding where the game were; getting permission from the landowner; setting up; hunting all day; and then driving another two hours in the dark to get home. Not exactly a relaxing weekend.

Now I could do something to change all this. And it turned out, this was not too difficult. As I quickly learned, I was only the most recent in a long line of ministers who wanted to open up more Sunday hunting. The ban on Sunday hunting in Alberta dates back to when Alberta became a province in 1905. It was just one example of the “blue laws” that prohibited most commercial and entertainment activities on Sundays. But in recent years, this ban has been steadily rolled back. In 1969, the government opened Sunday hunting in the Green Zone—roughly north of Peace River, Slave Lake, and Athabasca—for big game. The next year the same areas were opened for upland game birds, and in 1987 for waterfowl. Almost all of these lands were Crown forests, which meant that the policy changes did not affect many private landowners or municipalities. The Alberta Fish & Game Association (AFGA) continued to push for more Sunday hunting, and more Wildlife Management Units (WMUs) in northern Alberta were opened in the 1980s. But when I arrived, there was still almost no Sunday hunting allowed from Edmonton south to the Montana border.¹¹

In my first month as the new SRD minister, I told my deputy minister that extending Sunday hunting to central and southern Alberta was a priority for me. To his credit, he facilitated the changes. Alberta’s hunting rules have the legal status of administrative regulations. This means that they can be changed unilaterally by the minister, via ministerial order, in consultation with the relevant civil servants in the department. These officials consulted with both hunters and landowners. Of course, the AFGA supported the proposed changes, and most landowners did not object. An exception was made for some Crown grazing leases in the southern foothills areas that often still have cattle on them in November. With these exceptions, I signed Ministerial Order 08/08 on May 7, 2008, and in September, Sunday hunting came to central and southern Alberta. For the next few fall hunting seasons, I rarely had to pay for my own beers in small-town bars in southern Alberta.

The Hunting, Fishing and Trapping Heritage Act was mostly symbolic. It did not change any existing policies or practices. It simply gave legal recognition and status to the long-standing role of these outdoor activities in Alberta. The AFGA had asked—unsuccessfully—the preceding four SRD ministers for such legislation. When they came to me, of course, I said yes. The legislation was brought forward as a private member’s bill, Bill 201 (2008), by Len Mitzel, the MLA for Cypress-Medicine Hat. I knew Len before coming to Edmonton through my hunting and farm friends in southern Alberta, so I was happy for him to carry the bill. It was introduced on May 15, 2008, and received Royal Assent less than a month later—surely some sort of record!

There was no opposition in any of its three readings in the Legislative Assembly. But we did have some fun supporting it. At committee of the whole, I had this to say:¹²

Now, moving away from liberals and coming closer to home, I want to pick up where I left off last time, with the Calgary Herald article of April 19, the going green section and recommendation 4, “Eat local”. … The average meal on a Canadian’s plate travels thousands of kilometres to get from wherever it starts to your plate. … Fruit and vegetables from Mexico and South America, lamb from Australia, wines and fizzy water from France, olives from North Africa, rice from Asia: for each of those items it’s burning up thousands of litres of gas and diesel to bring that food to our plates. So heed what the Calgary Herald says: eat local.

Then I got personal:

Compare what the alternative is, particularly what the hunting and fishing heritage act provides opportunity for: a tasty mule deer from Milk River Ridge, a delectable pheasant from Brooks, an elk from Ya Ha Tinda, a tasty roast mallard from Stettler, or perhaps a juicy moose roast from McLennan or the Peace River area. Eat local. Nothing is more local than our local fish and game.

Then I got professorial:

Dr. Lee Foote, one of the outstanding wildlife biologists at the University of Alberta … has pointed out the following merits of wild game and wild fish from Alberta: it’s locally produced without artificial insemination; there are no antibiotics, no steroids, no artificial growth hormones; its production required no land clearing, no fencing, no fertilizer or feedlots; the animal was never confined, transported, or kept in crowded conditions; the lean meat, before it goes into the oven, was never wrapped in plastic or Styrofoam packaging, and no nitrates or sulphides were applied to prevent discolouration. Once again, eat local.

And I closed by invoking the Lord’s blessing:

[W]hen we have friends over at our house for a wild game dinner, I begin the meal by asking our guests to bow their heads and give thanks for our meal, and I end by saying: let us prey, p-r-e-y.

Four months later, on September 13, I announced Provincial Hunting Day—an annual celebration of Alberta’s hunting heritage to be held on the fourth Saturday of September. Its purpose is to promote hunting and public awareness of the important role that hunting and hunters play in wildlife management and conservation. As part of Provincial Hunting Day, I added a new youth hunting opportunity. This policy allows resident Alberta youth, ten to seventeen years of age, who have passed the Alberta Hunter Education Instructors’ Association (AHEIA) hunter safety course, and who are accompanied by a licensed adult hunter, to hunt upland birds without a licence. In conjunction with Alberta Hunting Day, the AHEIA now organizes other hunting mentoring opportunities for first-time hunters across the province.

Land Use Framework and Alberta Land Stewardship Act (2009)

The Alberta Land Stewardship Act (ALSA) was my most important policy initiative at SRD. It may have been the most significant—certainly the longest—piece of legislation enacted during the Stelmach years. There was no trouble getting this on the new government’s agenda. The push for greater land use planning predated my appointment; was endorsed in principle by all candidates during the 2006 PC leadership race; and was the number one task in my ministerial mandate letter. Some public consultations had already been held by the previous minister. My challenge was to move it from talk to policy.

I spent my first six months at SRD getting up to speed on what the civil servants had already done; meeting with affected stakeholders—environmental activists; municipal governments; and affected businesses such as oil and gas, ranching and farming, and forestry. There were a lot of moving parts and very different if not conflicting interests. My civil servants had done a good job of identifying the many pieces of this policy puzzle but lacked any overarching narrative to explain why this was needed now or any plan on how to knit it all together. By the summer of 2007, we decided to move forward in two stages. The first would be to articulate the need for and the outlines of a new land use framework for Alberta. The second would be to translate this policy document into actual legislation.

Stage one culminated in my presentation to the annual general meeting of the PC Party in Jasper in November 2008. I had decided that the best way to sell the package to cabinet and caucus was first to sell it to our party’s base. Using Brad Stelfox’s ALCES slides, we developed an effective PowerPoint presentation that graphically portrayed Alberta’s explosive growth over the preceding several decades. Alberta had reached a tipping point, I argued, where sticking with the old way of doing things would no longer yield the results we wanted. This was the paradox, I told party members: if we want to keep what we value in Alberta, we have to change the way we make decisions about land use. This worked. My land use framework session was the most heavily attended event at the AGM and was well received. This was duly noted by the premier’s office and paved the way for strong support for the draft legislation that followed.

Six months later I introduced Bill 36, the Alberta Land Stewardship Act, for first reading. It was a monster bill—150 pages long, almost two inches thick. It amended twenty-five other existing statutes, and explicitly overrode any contrary provincial statutes. But behind its length and complexity, it has seven basic components.

1. Seven Regional Plans Based on Alberta’s Major Watersheds

The Act proposed seven regional plans based on Alberta’s major watersheds. In central and southern Alberta, water is our scarcest resource. Eighty percent of our water is in northern Alberta (the Peace and Athabasca watersheds), while 80 percent of our population is concentrated in the narrow, twenty-mile-wide Highway 2 corridor running from Edmonton to the US border. Using watershed boundaries to define our regional plans would facilitate assessing our land use decisions for their cumulative effects on our major rivers and lakes. It would also facilitate the stewardship of the hundreds of streams and rivers that constitute the Eastern Slopes—the headwaters of the major rivers, the Bow, the North Saskatchewan, the Red Deer, and the Oldman—that support our major cities and our irrigated croplands.

This may seem intuitive, but it was a tough sell to my caucus members, who thought in terms of the legal boundaries of the counties and municipalities they represented. After much discussion, I persuaded the majority of caucus of the wisdom of using watershed boundaries. Going forward, water quantity and quality will be one of Alberta’s biggest challenges. Defining the regional plans based on our major watersheds will be an important factor in successfully meeting these challenges. (Note: The recently (2024) announced water-sharing and water-consumption reduction agreements are all within the boundaries of the South Saskatchewan Regional Plan.¹³ This illustrates the value of the watershed approach to meeting the challenges of future drought and water shortages in southern Alberta.)

2. Cumulative Effects Management

Rather than the traditional one-off approach to approving a new upgrader, dam, pipeline, or subdivision, the cumulative effects approach mandates that decision makers look at development proposals in conjunction with other future developments and how they will interact over time. In what is also known as the “triple bottom line” approach, regional plans are mandated to structure future development decision making in a way that optimizes economic, social, and environmental effects over time.

We emphasized that the goal of cumulative effects management is not to block growth, but to facilitate “smart growth.” That is, by minimizing the environmental footprint of today’s development, we can leave more room for future growth. A good example of this is urban planning that encourages greater density and public transit, thereby minimizing the amount of adjacent agricultural land that will be lost. While applying cumulative effects analysis will not be easy or without controversy, I strongly and successfully resisted requests from some stakeholders to adopt a “quadruple” bottom-line model—adding culture or spirituality. I deemed this too ambiguous and therefore unmanageable.

3. Regional Advisory Councils

Each regional plan is to be built based on the recommendations from an advisory council appointed by the SRD minister. These councils consist of twelve to eighteen people, drawn from the communities in the region, and representing key private and public sector stakeholders. These would include representatives from the region’s important industries/employers and several mayors, reeves, and municipal councillors. The latter are considered important not just for their input, but also for future compliance. Under ALSA, local authorities continue to make decisions to meet local needs, such as municipal development plans, area structure plans, land use bylaws, subdivisions, and development standards. But these must now be consistent with ALSA’s new regional plans. In instances of conflict, regional plans override local decision making. During the consultation stage of the Land Use Framework, loss of local control emerged as a major concern. The inclusion of regional office officeholders on the advisory councils is intended to address this concern.

4. Conservation and Stewardship Policy Tools

ALSA strengthens existing tools and creates new tools for the conservation and enhancement of environmental, natural, scenic, and aesthetic values.¹⁴ It strengthens the administration and enforcement of conservation easements on private lands—restrictions that a landowner voluntarily places on future development and use of his or her property. It expands the purpose of conservation easements to include the future protection of agricultural lands from residential subdivision. A new policy tool—the conservation directive—is created to allow regional plans to impose similar restrictions on the future development of private lands. As these directives are non-voluntary, ALSA creates an explicit right to landowner compensation for any decrease in market value of affected lands—making Alberta the first province in Canada to provide this kind of protection to property rights. ALSA authorizes the use of conservation offsets to limit or mitigate the adverse environmental effects of any new development such as a subdivision. It is now common practice in Alberta for residential developers to work with Ducks Unlimited to offset loss of urban wetlands with new rural wetlands. ALSA also authorizes regional plans (or local authorities) to use transfer of development credits to concentrate rural-residential development in a manner that consumes less agricultural land and shares the monetary benefits equitably among local landowners who choose to participate.

5. Political, Not Judicial Enforcement

ALSA explicitly limits the extent to which anyone other than property owners seeking compensation can use lawsuits and the courts to enforce or block regional plans.¹⁵ The Act explicitly states that “[a] regional plan is an expression of the public policy of the Government and therefore the Lieutenant Governor in Council has exclusive and final jurisdiction over its contents.” For further clarity, it states that the Act does not create any legal cause of action or confer jurisdiction on any court to enforce regional plans.¹⁶ The model for this type of “privative clause” is the Workers’ Compensation Act, which also insulates its administrative policy decisions from judicial review.

One of my priorities for ALSA was to prevent its administration and enforcement from being hijacked by anti-development environmental interest groups. I was familiar with how environmental advocacy groups in both Canada and US routinely use litigation to win judicial orders for policy changes that elected governments do not support. I thought that this was wrong—both in theory and practice—and accordingly sought to structure ALSA so that elected governments in Edmonton, not federally appointed judges, would be the primary policy drivers. This aspect of ALSA was an easy sell to both cabinet and caucus, but it was subsequently seized upon by NDP MLAs as a critical fault in the legislation.

Ironically, less than four years after the adoption of ALSA, Ecojustice successfully sued the federal government under the federal Species at Risk Act (SARA) to protect sage grouse habitat in southeastern Alberta. Ottawa was forced to issue an emergency order prohibiting the building of new fences or roads and making excessive noise from sunrise to sunset during the sage grouse mating season.¹⁷ There was no compensation for the adverse economic impacts of these restrictions on some affected property owners. If the same restrictions had been imposed through the South Saskatchewan Regional Plan under ALSA, there would have been compensation.

6. Compensation to Landowners for Regulatory Takings

ALSA’s sixth pillar was to create a legal right to government compensation for landowners who suffer an adverse financial impact from new restrictions imposed by a regional plan and/or conservation directive. This type of loss is described as a “regulatory taking,” as distinct from the older, more explicit form of taking—expropriation—under the ancient common law doctrine of eminent domain. Under eminent domain, a government has the legal right to take property from a private landowner for a public purpose—such as a new dam or highway—but is required to compensate the landowner for such a taking at the fair market value of the affected lands. All Canadian governments—federal and provincial—have conformed to this legal practice since Confederation. A regulatory taking, by contrast, does not affect the legal title or ownership of the land, but reduces its market value by placing new restrictions on how it can be used or developed—or not developed—in the future.

As an active member of the federal Reform Party a decade earlier, I had strongly opposed the Liberals’ new Species at Risk Act (2003), because it did not include mandatory compensation for regulatory takings. SARA simply stated that the minister responsible “may” provide “fair and reasonable compensation” for any losses suffered.¹⁸ Now tasked with building an analogous regulatory system at the provincial level, I insisted that it include explicit compensation for any regulatory takings imposed by regional plans and/or conservation directives.

ALSA does this in Division 3, sections 35–43, which state that landowners have a legal right to compensation for “decrease in market value” and/or “injurious affection”; a right to be notified in advance; a right to appeal to either the Land Compensation Board or the Court of Queen’s Bench (now Court of King’s Bench); and a right to a further appeal to the Court of Appeal of Alberta; and the explicit liability of the provincial Crown (Government of Alberta) to pay such compensation. This explicit compensation for regulatory taking was a first in Canada, and a necessity for Alberta, where so many critical habitats and watersheds are on private property. Subsequently, however, a successful political campaign was waged by the Wildrose Party against ALSA precisely on the property rights issue.¹⁹

7. Ten-Year Sunset Clause

ALSA’s seventh and final pillar is a ten-year sunset clause for each regional plan, and a mandatory review for each plan at its five-year mark. This requirement reflected our party’s commitment to preventing unnecessary or counterproductive regulations. Legally, the sunset clause means that a regional plan expires after ten years unless it is renewed. Practically, it means that a regional plan must prove itself to be worthwhile or disappear. The five-year review requirement simply operationalizes the principle of constant improvement. It acknowledges that almost all public policies have unintended consequences, and provides a safeguard.

On June 2, only two months after its introduction, Bill 36 passed third reading with unanimous support from both the government side and the official opposition Liberals. How did such a far-reaching piece of legislation move through both caucus and the legislature so quickly? Strong support from the premier’s office was the single most important factor. When several rural backbench MLAs raised last-minute objections just prior to third reading, they were quickly quashed. Chairing caucus that day, Deputy Premier Ron Stevens curtly cut off further discussion with the simple comment “The Premier wants this.” Also important was that ALSA did not require any major new expenditures, so it was not competing for budget dollars with minsters responsible for health or social services.

I also received strong support from my staff at SRD. My deputy minister and assistant deputy minister, Eric McGhan and Morris Seiferling, both devoted hundreds of hours to help make ALSA a reality. In terms of stakeholder support or opposition, all of the organized interests that supported our party—energy, forestry, ranching, and farming—either supported ALSA or were neutral. Some oil sands interests were nervous about potential loss of access to future leases, but they realized that Alberta and the industry were developing a reputation problem, and both had to do a better job in managing the impacts of oil sands growth.

For the same reasons, ALSA had strong support among the more affluent, more urban PC supporters. Groups like Nature Conservancy of Canada, Ducks Unlimited, Trout Unlimited, Pheasants Forever, and Delta Waterfowl all supported ALSA. The Wildrose Party’s campaign against ALSA had not yet been launched. The NDP members—all four of them—voted against it because of its anti–judicial review provisions, but their votes did not reflect any organized opposition. The organized environmental groups in the province—Sierra Club, Alberta Wilderness Association, Pembina Institute—all might have wished it went further, but they all supported it. In short, the stars aligned. It was the right policy at the right time and the right place—something that does not happen often in politics in Alberta or anywhere else.

Alberta Land Trust Grant Program and the Waldron Ranch (2009)

The Alberta Land Trust Grant Program should be one of the more important and enduring policy legacies of my time at SRD.²⁰ It is also one for which I deserve almost no credit. The concept was brought to me by the civil servants in SRD who spotted a “sell high, buy low” opportunity in the way we manage Crown lands.

Rapid population growth had been driving the expansion of Alberta’s cities and towns for several decades. As a consequence, there were numerous parcels of Crown land that were now inside urban municipal boundaries. While their original agricultural value was largely lost, they now had substantial commercial value for urban development. The proposal was to sell these parcels to create a dedicated pool of funds that could then be used to purchase private land in rural settings with high environmental value. It was such an eminently sensible proposal that I immediately accepted it. While there is normally a strong political stigma attached to selling Crown lands to the private sector, I could see that it would not apply in this case. The urban lands we would be selling would have low environmental/recreational value, while the rural lands we would be acquiring would have high environmental/recreation value.

Following the adoption of ALSA, the Public Lands Act was amended in 2010 to create the Alberta Land Stewardship Fund (LSF). The Land Stewardship Fund was to be used to assist land trusts to acquire and manage conservation easements on privately owned land. While the LSF can still be used to purchase environmentally valuable private lands, the new option of conservation easements was a significant improvement, since it is much less expensive to pay for an easement on private land than it is to purchase the same lands. A land trust that applies for a grant from the LSF must provide two-thirds of the final funding for the project. Most of the projects that receive funding from the LSF also qualify for federal tax credits under the federal government’s eco-gifts program. This creates additional incentives for Alberta ranchers to participate in the stewardship practices supported by the Land Trust Grant Program.

Under the LSF, the placement of a conservation easement on private property is completely voluntary. It cannot be done without the owner’s written consent. While the new restrictions on future development lower the commercial value of the affected property, this loss is offset by the land trust’s payment to the owner. Neighbouring landowners are usually supportive, since the new restrictions make the land more affordable to other agricultural users by eliminating demand from residential and recreational real estate buyers.

There is no better example of this than the conservation easement that the Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC) was able to negotiate with the owners of the Waldron Ranch in 2013. The Waldron is one of the oldest and largest ranches in Alberta, dating back to the 1880s. Located south of Longview along both sides of Highway 22, the Waldron consists of over 30,000 acres of largely undisturbed native fescue grasslands in the Eastern Slopes of the Livingstone Range. It is spectacularly beautiful and rich in wildlife—deer, elk, and moose; grizzly bears, cougars, and wolves; and various species of upland birds. To purchase it would have been prohibitively expensive, as it had a market value estimated at $75 million.

In return for placing a permanent conservation easement on their lands, the NCC compensated the landowners (a co-operative of cattle ranchers) with $37.5 million, $12.25 million of which was a grant from the Land Stewardship Fund. The Calgary Foundation contributed another $1 million and the federal government $4 million. At the time, this was the largest conservation easement in Canadian history, and it will protect the Waldron against any future development, subdivision, cultivation, or drainage of its numerous wetlands. More recently, the GOA partnered with the NCC to support an even larger project, the historic McIntyre Ranch on the Milk River Ridge south of Lethbridge, conserving 54,539 acres.

As of 2023, the LSF has awarded $106 million worth of grants to ten different Alberta land trusts for projects that now conserve more than 250,000 acres of land. These LSF grants have facilitated land trusts in leveraging an additional $315 million for these projects. To purchase these same lands would have cost close to $1 billion. So, for roughly 10 percent of fair market value, the Land Trust Grant Program has protected and preserved some of the most valuable and most beautiful landscapes in Alberta.²¹

It should be noted here that both the Waldron and the McIntyre successes contribute to the goals for conservation on private lands in the South Saskatchewan Regional Plan (SSRP)—the plan that was developed for southern Alberta after the adoption of the Alberta Land Stewardship Act. The conservation outcomes and goals for private land in the SSRP are aligned with the LTGP and LSF. And as illustrated here, in practice, the two policies—ALSA and the LSF—have had positive reciprocal effects on each other.

The government’s adoption of the Alberta Land Trust Grant Program is not difficult to explain. It was self-financing, making no new requests on the annual budget. It complemented the new Land Use Framework and ALSA, enhancing conservation and stewardship of native grasslands and watersheds. Accordingly, it did not induce any concerns or opposition from the premier’s office or other ministers. For the same reasons, there was no partisan downside, and it was supported by all other conservation groups in the province. And, of course, it had the full support of the assistant deputy minister of public lands and his staff, since it was their idea.

Bow Habitat Station and Kids Can Catch Trout Pond (2009)

A river without anglers is a river without friends.

—Lee Wulff (1905–1991),
Famous American Fly-fisherman

Most new ministers inherit at least one train wreck, and I was no exception. Mine was the Bow Habitat Station, a great idea that had imploded during implementation. The concept was to build an eco-interpretive centre adjacent to the Sam Livingston Fish Hatchery. The hatchery is located in Calgary’s Pearce Estate Park, along the banks of the Bow River, just east of downtown Calgary. Pearce Estate is a fourteen-hectare “interpretive wetland” that serves as an outdoor eco-systems classroom for Calgary-area schools. The Sam Livingston Fish Hatchery is one of the largest indoor trout hatcheries in North America. Annually it raises up to three million trout—mainly rainbows and browns—which are then used to stock Alberta’s lakes and rivers for public fishing.

The proposed Bow Habitat Station would complement and expand the eco-education functions of both facilities with hands-on exhibits linking activities that promote healthy waters for fish and other water-dependent species. The target audience is grade-school students during the school year and families and tourists in the summer months. I loved the concept. It complemented our land-use framework initiative, especially its link between economic development and water quality and quantity issues in southern Alberta. The problem was that the contractor for the hands-on exhibits component of the interpretive centre had gone bankrupt. This left SRD with an empty shell of a building. What do you do with a half-built project whose budget has already been spent?

In June 2007, after the spring legislative session was over, SRD staff took me to tour the site. In front of the new but empty interpretive centre was a big, empty hole. I asked what it was for. I was told that there were plans to build a huge water feature—a pond with jets shooting streams of water into the air—not unlike what you see on the Strip in Las Vegas.

I had two immediate reactions. First, that this was a really dumb idea and a waste of money. The second, why not build instead a catch-and-release trout pond? What better way to get kids interested in the eco-system science that was (supposed to be) inside the centre? What kid doesn’t love the excitement of catching a fighting, flopping trout? (Especially if you just put it back in the water and don’t have to kill it or eat it!). I still vividly remember catching my first trout with my grandfather at just such a catch-and-release pond. I was hooked. The pond would serve as a beautiful entry into the interpretive centre. And the hands-on fishing would connect the kids to the ecology. It was a perfect fit, both aesthetically and pedagogically. And with the fish hatchery right there, there would be no shortage of fish for the kids to catch. In sum, I thought, cheap and easy. Right? Wrong.

Okay. Half right: we did have plenty of trout. And the manager of the Livingston Fish Hatchery—Craig Copeland—worked endlessly to help make this idea a reality. But the costs turned out to be substantial. I learned that you do not just build a new big pond in the middle of a city. The entire park was in the Bow’s flood plain and there were major City of Calgary infrastructure issues in the area where the pond would go. In the end, the price tag for the pond was estimated at $750,000.

If I had known the final price tag in the beginning, I probably would have given up on the idea. But ignorance is (sometimes) bliss. I naively assumed costs would be in the $100,000 range. Surely we could raise this amount privately. All we needed was to organize a fundraising dinner, similar to the ones I regularly attended put on by the Calgary chapters of Ducks Unlimited, Pheasants Forever, and Trout Unlimited. And so, we began down that path.

All three of these organizations agreed to help. With Don Pike from Trout Unlimited Canada (TUC) taking the lead, each group publicized the fundraiser to their membership and contributed items and trips for the live and silent auctions that would be part of the fundraiser. We formed an executive committee, with myself and Dave Byler, president of TUC, as the co-chairs. More importantly, I was able to persuade former Alberta Premier Ralph Klein to be the honorary chair of the event. (Ralph loved to fish and loved to party, so it didn’t take much persuading.) Ralph was wildly popular in corporate Calgary, and having him as team captain made raising money much easier. In addition, we had plenty of volunteers from other supporting organizations, including the Bow Habitat Volunteer Society, the Calgary Fish & Game Association, Alberta Conservation Association, and the Angling Outfitters Association of Alberta.

All this organizing and planning culminated on June 17, 2009, in a wonderful evening and dinner/fundraiser at the Hotel Arts in downtown Calgary. The then–Hotel Arts manager, Fraser Abbott, a former student and still a friend of mine, serenaded us into the banquet room with his bagpipes. Over 350 supporters paid $350 a person to join the event. In addition to the silent and live auctions, enthusiasts could pay a beautiful and bountiful mermaid $20 to cast their lures into the adjacent swimming pool to try to hook a floating gift certificate for various overpriced items of hunting and fishing equipment. (It was tough to get Ralph to leave this one!) When the dust settled and the accounts were done, we had raised a staggering $250,000 for the Kids Can Catch fishing pond.

As great as this was, we still needed several hundred thousand dollars more to get the pond built. It wasn’t going to come from general revenues or the SRD budget, as by now—2009—we were deep into deficit territory and headed south. (See chapter 6.) At this point, serendipity intervened. One of my former students, Dustin van Vugt, was now working in Ottawa as chief of staff for Lynne Yelich, then Prime Minister Harper’s minister of western economic development. One of my executive assistants in Edmonton, Tom Kmiec, knew Dustin because they had both worked on my 2006 leadership campaign. Together, they came up with the idea of getting a matching federal grant for the fishing pond. The Harper government had brought in a new federal infrastructure / economic stimulus program—the Recreational Infrastructure Canada program (RInC)—to encourage children to be more physically active. There was one catch. The RInC list of eligible facilities included hockey arenas (of course!), swimming pools, gyms, and tennis courts, but not fishing ponds. Our initial application was rejected.

Not easily deterred, Tom and Dustin amended the application to include walking paths with handicap access, and then persuaded someone in the Ottawa bureaucracy that fishing is indeed “an outdoor-based recreational activity.” To demonstrate the required “municipal support” for the RInC application, we persuaded Calgary mayor Dave Bronconnier to contribute a $50,000 cheque. To prove “provincial support,” I was able to use my influence as minister to help the Bow Habitat Station Volunteer Society (BHSVS) receive a $60,000 grant from the Community Facility Enhancement Program (CFEP). The BHSVS had already solicited a $100,000 contribution from BP Canada Energy, and then chipped in another $11,000 of their own. When the dust settled, a beautiful, big cheque for $243,000 arrived from Ottawa to complete the budget needed to construct the pond.

On Saturday, July 7, 2012, the Kids Can Catch fishing pond opened its doors—and its tackle boxes—to the public. Both it and the Bow Habitat Station have been popular ever since. The Discovery Centre begins taking reservations for school programs in late August, and it is usually fully booked for the entire year by the end of September. The pond site is so pleasant that it is also now being booked for weddings and corporate picnics. The fishing pond is open from May 15 to October 31. You can bring your own gear or rent a pole for $5. They even offer “Learn to Fish Clinics” for families in July and August. In recent summers, the pond has averaged 50,000 fishermen annually.²² The message on its Facebook page sums up exactly what I’d envisioned at the outset: “Just one visit can get kids hooked for life.”

The successful completion of the Bow Habitat Station and the Fishing Pond was the result of several factors. The project was already on SRD’s policy agenda when I arrived. It began in a period of budget surpluses and was completed with a combination of private funds and a federal grant. Having a corporate sponsor—BP Energy—was a big help. No legislation or orders-in-council were required. And it was a motherhood issue—Who could oppose teaching kids to fish? There was no partisan risk.

What began as a policy headache ended up being a positive policy legacy of my tenure at SRD. Trout Unlimited’s mantra is: “A river without anglers is a river without friends.” The Discovery Centre and Fishing Pond are making a lot of friends for the Bow and for Alberta’s other rivers.

Hunting for Habitat (2008)

Conservation will ultimately boil down to rewarding the private landowner who conserves the public interest.

—Aldo Leopold, pioneer of American conservation policy.²³

Shortly after becoming Minister of SRD, I initiated a program to design some new policies that would create financial incentives for private landowners to keep critical wildlife habitat rather than convert it to agricultural use.

Cynics will suggest that this initiative was just another example of my personal interest in increasing hunting opportunities in Alberta. And there is some truth in this. But the primary motivation was my growing understanding of how the future ecological integrity of much of Alberta rested in the hands of private landowners—Alberta’s ranch and farm families. In the White Area of Alberta (see sidebar), 75 percent of the agricultural lands are privately owned. Given the volatility of beef and grain prices, these operators are always under financial pressure to expand their land base by draining wetlands, cutting down woodlots, or clearing brushy slopes. These are precisely the habitats that sustain most of Alberta’s wildlife in southern and central Alberta. There are Albertans like Doc Seaman who have the vision and the wealth to voluntarily preserve these landscapes by placing conservation easements on them. But this kind of altruism is as rare as it is admirable, and provides a weak foundation for the conservation of existing wildlife habitat on private lands.

This dilemma is neither new nor unique to Alberta. It describes what has happened on both sides of the border as European settlers moved west and converted the vast North American prairies to agriculture and livestock. As early as the 1930s, Aldo Leopold, a pioneer of American conservation policy, observed, “Conservation will ultimately boil down to rewarding the private landowner who conserves the public interest.”²⁴ Or, to put it more bluntly, “If it pays, it stays,” and its corollary: “If it doesn’t, it’s gone.” This is the challenge facing twenty-first-century Alberta: how best to protect the public resource of wildlife on private lands.

I had been introduced to this line of analysis long before seeking public office by my late friend, mentor, and fellow hunter, Ralph Hedlin. Ralph had a distinguished career as a journalist, businessman, and consultant, but he never forgot his agricultural roots growing up in rural Saskatchewan. Three decades earlier, Ralph had written a study for the Western Stock Growers’ Association advocating that provincial governments should compensate responsible ranchers for their stewardship of valuable wildlife habitat—or what, two decades later, we began describing as “environmental goods and services” (EGS).

Prior to my appointment as minister, SRD’s public consultation on a new land use policy had already identified conservation and stewardship as a distinct issue. In January 2007, I asked my deputy minister to strike a committee to provide recommendations for new programs that would compensate private landowners for the production of EGS. I requested that two of my colleagues from the University of Calgary, Dr. Rainer Knopff and Dr. Cormack Gates, be appointed to this committee. Knopff is a close personal friend. He and I had been graduate students together at the University of Toronto before coming to Calgary. Both he and Gates shared my interest in hunting and my understanding of the micro-economics of agricultural land use, land fragmentation, and wildlife habitat. The result was the “Open Spaces” initiative and the creation of the Land and Wildlife Stewardship Working Group (LWSWG). In addition to Knopff and Gates, the LWSWG included representatives from eleven different stakeholder organizations.²⁵ The LWSWG met eight times during 2007 and issued their final report in November.²⁶ Its recommendations were shaped by two guiding principles:²⁷

1. Wildlife is a public trust resource to be managed in the public interest.
2. Landowners should not bear the full cost of production and use of wildlife without compensation.

The first meant that there could be no US-style “private hunting” in Alberta. The second meant that landowners who allow hunting should receive some type of compensation. The challenge was how to square this circle.

Working in parallel with the LWSWG and SRD officials, Knopff and Gates developed—and I accepted—two new programs to operationalize these objectives: Hunting for Habitat (HFH) and the Recreational Access Management Program (RAMP). Both were adaptations of similar programs found in Utah and Montana, respectively. Both provided new access to properties that were previously closed to public hunting, and both provided a new revenue stream for participating landowners. LWSWG’s research indicated that these programs were popular with both landowners and hunters.²⁸

Under HFH, participating private landowners in Alberta would receive 15 percent of available tags (i.e., hunting licences) for both male and female species in their area. They could then sell these tags privately to the highest bidder to create a new revenue stream for their ranching operation. The remainder of the available tags were to be reserved for public hunters under the existing draw system, with the requirement that participating landowners provide equal access to both private and public licence holders.

Representatives from all the relevant hunting associations in Alberta were on the LWSWG, so it wasn’t too surprising that details of both HFH and RAMP began to leak out into the hunting community well in advance of a public release by SRD. The response was very negative. In January 2008, an ad hoc group calling itself Alberta Resident Hunters for Justice took to the internet to denounce HFH, saying it would end Alberta’s century-old tradition of “free hunting” by introducing paid access hunting for the rich. The group urged members of the Alberta Fish & Game Association (AFGA) to reject HFH at their upcoming AGM scheduled for February in Edmonton.

Sensing trouble, I sent a public letter to the AFGA defending HFH. I emphasized that the “vast majority of tags [would be going] to public hunters through the normal draw process. … Public hunters would have guaranteed access to participating ranches—many of which have been posted ‘No Hunting, No Trespassing’ for decades.” It seemed to me, I concluded, that this was “a darn good trade-off for resident hunters.” It didn’t work. Later that month, the AFGA voted unanimously against the entire Open Spaces program.

Following the AFGA’s rejection of Open Spaces, a rancher from south of Pincher Creek, Blaine Marr, penned a powerful letter to the editor to the Pincher Creek Echo defending HFH. Blaine is a third-generation rancher, a hunter himself, and a former hunting guide. Blaine’s ranch borders the Waterton National Park and is in the centre of one of the most ecologically diverse habitats in Canada. (Full disclosure: I know, as I’ve shot more than a few elk there over the past thirty years.)

The pie that makes up wildlife and hunting programs today benefits many people such as outfitters, sporting goods dealers, taxidermists, meat processors, rifle dealers and many more [e.g., motels, hotels, restaurants, and bars]. There is no slice in the pie for the landowner, yet he bears the largest cost and liability involved in hunting. OSA along with RAMP and Hunting for Habitat Pilot Projects, try to make the pie bigger for everyone and create long term goals to ensure wildlife and hunting opportunities remain. If existing and future landowners can see a benefit for sustaining wildlife and providing hunter access, then we all win.²⁹

I circulated copies of Blaine’s letter to all members of caucus, hoping to revive support for HFH. But it was too late. Our government’s popularity was being eroded by oilpatch opposition to Stelmach’s “New Royalty Framework.” The last thing the premier’s office wanted was another policy albatross around the leader’s neck. With the provincial election just weeks away, Stelmach declared that his government would “revisit” Open Spaces if elected. On March 3, Stelmach and the PCs won a stunning seventy-two-seat majority. Two weeks later, I was asked to pull HFH.³⁰

The AFGA leadership’s opposition to HFH was short-sighted and narrow-minded. Their “free hunting” slogan was absurd. Nothing is for free. In this case, all the costs are borne by the landowners: the opportunity costs of preserving bush, woodlots, and wetlands versus adding arable acres / grazing pasture; the very real costs of the time dealing with hunters (both those who ask permission and those who simply trespass); and the costs of rounding up the cows that have wandered off through fences that have been knocked down and gates that have been left open. It is hardly surprising that more and more ranches and farms are refusing to give hunters permission to hunt on their land. The predictable consequence is that the number of hunters in Alberta continues to decline. HFH offered a self-financing way to protect an important public good on private lands in a manner that would actually increase access and opportunities for Alberta hunters.

I was more than angry with the AFGA. So angry that, in 2009, I broke with tradition and refused to either attend or to pay for their annual “Lunch with the Minister” in Edmonton. But my being angry didn’t change the outcome. HFH was defeated by the negative reaction of the relevant stakeholders and the proximity of the ensuing controversy to the March 2008 election. If we’d had another six months to do the public consultation that had been planned, I believe we could have carried the day and HFH would be a reality today. But we didn’t, and it is not.

Recreational Access Management Plan (2009)

The second prong of Open Spaces—the Recreational Access Management Plan—survived this political maelstrom. I went back to the drawing board, engaged in further consultations with the AFGA and other hunting organizations such as Pheasants Forever, and was able to roll out a three-year pilot project starting in the fall of 2009.

The RAMP pilot was modelled after the successful Montana Block Program and was limited to just two Wildlife Management Units—WMU 108, the Milk River Ridge triangle south of Lethbridge to the Montana border, bounded by Milk River on the east and Cardston on the west; and WMU 300, the area south of Pincher Creek along both sides of Highway 22 down to Waterton National Park. Again, full disclosure: I knew both these areas and many of the landowners from years of hunting there. As my wife will attest, on most weekends in September through November for the previous twenty-five years, I (and many friends and family) could be found at the farm of Howard and Franki Kaupp outside of New Dayton chasing partridge in September, pheasants in October, and deer in November.

Landowner participation in RAMP was voluntary. Participants agreed to make all or some of their land available for public access and to develop conservation plans for the designated lands. In return, they would be compensated financially according to a formula that combined quantity and quality—how much land was made available and how valuable it was on an EGS scale. Maximum compensation was capped at $20,000 annually, and costs were estimated at $500,000/year for three years. Significantly, the compensation cheques came directly from the government, not from participating hunters. This funding arrangement was added to avoid a repeat of the public relations “free hunting” fiasco that had taken down HFH. It would turn out to be the undoing of RAMP as well, but in a different way.

RAMP Year One was a rollicking success. And then it was cancelled. Twenty-nine properties were enrolled, comprising 131,062 acres of private land. A new, online RAMP website provided the location of each property accompanied by a map detailing the main access road and sign-in station. A participating hunter was required to stop there, sign in with date, time of day, hunting licence number, home telephone, and truck licence plate number. These aspects of RAMP were especially popular with young and new hunters, who may not know where they can hunt and are often reluctant to knock on a stranger’s door to ask permission. By season’s end, there were 4,240 user-days and an estimated 1,631 individual hunters and anglers. Follow-up surveys indicated a hunter satisfaction rate of 96 percent.

All participating landowners reported a satisfactory experience with RAMP, and were especially pleased with the improved access control with less disruption (thanks to the sign-in stations) and improved hunter behaviour (the former presumably explaining the latter). Total landowner compensation for Year One was only $90,942.08.³¹ Even the local Lethbridge Fish and Game Association, which had led the charge against Open Spaces a year earlier, embraced RAMP. Indeed, after it was cancelled, they continued to work with some of local participating landowners to keep the sign-in stations in operation. As recently as the fall 2023 hunting season, I was still “signing in” at several of the former RAMP properties.

So why was RAMP cancelled after Year One? For the same reason as HFH: funding. But in this case, the lack thereof. Initially, RAMP was a ministerial priority with low costs in an era of budget surpluses. This all changed with the global stock market crash of 2008 and the ensuing collapse of oil and gas prices—and thus GOA royalty revenues. (See my account of Budget 2008–9 in chapter 6.) A contributing factor was my departure from SRD to become the next minister of finance, and my replacement by Mel Knight. Knight was grumpy about being moved to SRD. He saw his cabinet shuffle from energy minister as a demotion (it was), as he was unfairly made the scapegoat for Stelmach’s New Royalty Framework. He was also a northerner—from the Grande Prairie region—who had little interest in the micro-economics of land use and wildlife habitat on private property in southern Alberta. This is a non-issue in northern Alberta. With his department’s budget under pressure, it was easy for him to cancel the next two years of RAMP. If I had stayed at SRD, I have no doubt that I could have scrounged another few hundred thousand dollars to continue the pilot through Years Two and Three.

In fact, I tried. Breaking a cardinal rule of cabinet government that a minister does not interfere in the business of one of his former departments, I contacted several of my civil servants at SRD to try to save RAMP. When Knight found out about this, he sent me a message that any employee of SRD found to be communicating with me would be fired. So I stopped. The bottom line is that having a supportive minister is again a key factor, especially in times of budget deficits.

Upland Birds Alberta and Pheasant Release Program (2010)

Last and perhaps the least of my conservation initiatives was helping to save Alberta’s pheasant release program. Last because most of this happened after I left SRD. And least to those who do not consider this a conservation policy. But to those of us who enjoy pheasant hunting, who have and love bird dogs, and who value Alberta’s outdoors hunting culture and history, this is not least!

My tenure as SRD Minister ended in January 2011, when I became minister of finance. But this did not mean an end to my efforts to promote environmental conservation and stewardship. The catalyst for my involvement in rebuilding Alberta’s pheasant release program was the late Stan Grad. Stan was a successful Alberta-born entrepreneur, initially in the oil and gas business and then as a breeder of purebred bulls. He was an early supporter of the Reform Party and soon became a strong supporter of Ted Morton. Through Stan, I met his extended network of friends and business contacts, many of whom—with Stan’s “encouragement”—contributed financially to my 2006 leadership campaign. As I quickly learned, Stan was also an enthusiastic bird hunter—both upland and waterfowl—as were many of his friends.

While they were disappointed that I didn’t win the 2006 PC leadership, they were still pleased to see me become the new minister of SRD, i.e., the minister of hunting. They were supportive of my other conservation and stewardship initiatives described in this chapter, but they recruited me to become involved in one more project that had not been on my agenda: saving Alberta’s pheasant release program.

When I arrived at SRD, the government’s pheasant release program was on its way out the door—scheduled to be discontinued in 2012. Without the release program, Alberta’s 100-year tradition of pheasant hunting would effectively end, and with it, the spinoff economic benefits that hunter tourism brings to many smaller towns in rural Alberta.

Pheasants are not native to Alberta. They were first introduced in 1908, and then flourished for the next eight decades. While Alberta’s harsh winters take a heavy toll on pheasants, during these early years there was ample habitat to sustain and grow the pheasant population. Post–World War II, Alberta competed with US states like South Dakota as a pheasant hunting destination for hunters on both sides of the border. Hollywood celebrities such as Bob Hope came to Alberta every year to go pheasant hunting. It is estimated that during the 1950s, as many as 140,000 birds a year were being harvested. This hunter tourism—both resident and non-resident—became an important part of the fall economies in southern Alberta communities like Brooks, Medicine Hat, and Taber.

This all began to change in the 1970s and 1980s. By the 1990s, the number of pheasants harvested by hunters had dropped to 20,000 annually. The explanation was twofold: fewer released birds and loss of habitat.

Large-scale, more intensive farming practices took a heavy toll on pheasant habitat—both the quantity and the quality. The original homestead farms that dotted every quarter-section began to disappear, and with them, the windrows of trees and bushes that homesteaders planted as shelters from the freezing prairie winds—cover that also provided critical winter habitat for pheasants and other upland birds. The average acreage of cultivated farmlands doubled and doubled again during these decades. Next-generation, more efficient tractors and combines were (and are!) more expensive. To pay for them, a farmer needed an entire section (today, more than this) to cover these capital expenses. Sloughs were drained, abandoned homesteads bulldozed, fences torn out—all meaning less and less habitat for pheasants and other upland birds.

The second cause was the decline of the GOA’s pheasant release program. In 1945, the GOA built a pheasant hatchery in Brooks. The Brooks hatchery provided the birds for the pheasant release program over the next forty-five years. During the 1980s, 120,000 pheasant chicks were produced annually. Between 1976 and 1989, a total of 641,000 adult pheasants were released, an average over the fourteen-year period of 45,786 annually.

In 1990, the hatchery was sold to a private company. The government continued to purchase pheasants for the release program from the new owners, but there was a steady decline in the number of pheasants produced, sold, and released. By the time I arrived at SRD in 2007, the number of roosters ordered and released had dropped to 11,750—a quarter of what it had been when I started hunting in Alberta in the 1980s.

Predictably, as the number of pheasants declined, so did the number of pheasant hunters. During the 1980s, Alberta hunters purchased an average of about 15,000 pheasant licences annually. By 2006, it was less than 6,000. It was a vicious circle: fewer pheasants meant fewer hunters, which in turn meant fewer licences and thus less revenue to pay for next year’s birds. The end of the program was fast approaching.

This is why Stan Grad and his friends formed a new group, Upland Birds Alberta (UBA), to rescue the pheasant release program.³² I was already working with some of the UBA founders on the Recreational Access Management Plan (RAMP) during my first years at SRD. As explained above, RAMP was a three-year pilot project in WMUs 108 and 320 that compensated farmers and ranchers who volunteered to protect specified habitat and allowing public hunter access. In WMU 108—a triangular area south of Lethbridge to the Montana border, with Milk River on the southeast corner and Cardston on the southwest corner—the focus was on pheasant hunting and habitat. Year One of RAMP was a success—both for hunters and landowners. But then it was cancelled in 2010 because of budget cutbacks after I left SRD for Finance. The RAMP experience—both its success and then cancellation—was a catalyst for the formation of UBA.

In May 2011, I attended a UBA organizational meeting at the Busted Shoulder Ranch just east of High River. This led to a more formal “Stakeholders Meeting” in June at the headquarters of the Alberta Hunter Education and Instructors Association (AHEIA) in Calgary, hosted by Bob Gruszecki, the AHEIA’s director. UBA had hired Ken Bailey to prepare a policy briefing binder that laid out the past, present, and now pessimistic future of pheasant hunting in Alberta. In addition to the AHEIA, participants included ten other conservation and hunting NGOs³³ and three government departments—SRD, Agriculture, and Tourism. There was a strong consensus that immediate action needed to be taken to rescue the pheasant release program. Two decisions were made. The first was to hire Ken Bailey to coordinate and manage UBA business going forward. The second was to hire a third-party consultant to assess the economic benefits of pheasant hunting to Alberta’s rural communities.

UBA subsequently hired Serecon Consulting out of Edmonton to do this study. Serecon released its study in December 2011.³⁴ I was able to facilitate some GOA assistance in completing this study. Alberta SRD mailed out survey questionnaires to all hunters who purchased a pheasant hunting licence in 2010. Alberta Finance helped by modelling the economic multiplier effects from the initial expenditure data derived from the hunter survey.

The seventy-page report confirmed that pheasant hunting tourism creates significant economic benefits to both Alberta’s private sector—restaurants, bars, motels, guides, sporting goods stores—and to provincial and county governments. Over 1,000 pheasant hunters completed the survey. Over 94 percent replied that they would do more pheasant hunting in the future if the opportunities improved. Sixty-one percent said that they would support an increase in the cost of pheasant licences if the additional revenues were dedicated to increased pheasant release.

In February 2012, UBA submitted a formal proposal to the GOA to increase the pheasant release program. Drawing on data in the Serecon study, UBA’s message to the government was clear:

The demise of Alberta’s pheasant release program would bring an end to decades of tradition, meaning the elimination of significant economic benefits for the province and many rural communities. Alternatively, retaining the program, and growing it to the levels of the 1980s, would re-establish Alberta as one of the premier pheasant hunting destinations in North America. … [with] material economic benefits to a wide range of stakeholders.³⁵

But change was already afoot. With me no longer at SRD and the GOA now running large deficits, the pheasant release program was on SRD’s budget chopping block. UBA strongly protested and volunteered to run the program until a more permanent solution could be developed. SRD agreed, and in 2011, off-loaded the administration of the pheasant release program to UBA along with an annual operating grant. Supplemented by some additional fundraising by UBA, this arrangement continued for the 2012 and 2013 fall hunting seasons. This interim arrangement kept the pheasant release program alive, but it was clearly not sustainable. UBA had neither the desire nor the capacity to permanently run the GOA’s pheasant program.

In 2014, UBA recommended to SRD that the pheasant program be transferred to the Alberta Conservation Association (ACA). The ACA is what is known as a delegated administrative organization. Since 1997, the Alberta government has delegated to the ACA certain responsibilities to conserve, protect, and enhance Alberta’s fish and wildlife populations and their habitats for Albertans to use and enjoy. The ACA manages its various programs independently of the government, but it must report annually to the minister on its policies and budget. In this case, SRD sought to delegate the administration of the pheasant release program to the ACA.

The new SRD minister, Robin Campbell, accepted the UBA proposal, but the ACA initially declined because SRD did not offer to provide annual grants for pay for the program. Following further negotiation, the ACA agreed to take over the program, but to return the management of the Aerial Ungulate Survey Program to SRD. ACA would then use the funds previously allocated to the ungulate survey to pay for the management of the pheasant release program. This meant that there was there was no net change in SRD’s annual funding for ACA. It was complicated but it worked.

Under ACA management, there have been significant improvements in the pheasant release program. The number of pheasants released annually has doubled—from 13,900 in 2011 to an average of over 28,000 during the years 2018–2022. Similarly, the number of pheasant hunters has also doubled, averaging over 10,000 annually over the same time compared to 5,700 in 2012. The ACA has revived the 4H Pheasant Raise and Release Program—recruiting farm and ranch children active in 4H. Most recently, this program is raising and releasing 18,000 hen pheasants annually.

The number of release/hunting sites has also been significantly increased—up to forty-one as of fall 2023. These sites are continually re-evaluated and adjusted. There are now more sites in central and northern Alberta than before. The ACA has also initiated new habitat projects with private landowners and municipalities. The Municipal District of Taber has been especially active in upland habitat restoration projects.

The Taber Pheasant Festival has also experienced a dramatic increase in participants. In 2011, its first year, the festival drew 500 hunters with a release of 3,000 birds.³⁶ Most recently, there were 700–800 hunters chasing 5,600 pheasants in forty different release sites on land owned by twenty-five different landowners.³⁷ It is now the largest hunting festival in Canada, lasting an entire week and drawing hundreds of hunters, including many first-time, youth hunters.

In sum, quality pheasant hunting has returned to Alberta. And Stan Grad’s UBA initiative was the catalyst. In addition to Stan, Ken Bailey, and UBA, credit for this recovery also goes to Todd Zimmerling and his team at the ACA. Pheasants Forever, Ducks Unlimited, and the AHEIA also played important roles. I was just a middle man in all of this—helping to connect the key players. But I was happy to be a part of this revival of another great Alberta tradition.

Micrex Mine and the Livingstone Range (2010)

Most accounts of a minister’s career are based on what he or she achieves in terms of new policies. This is understandable and is reflected in the structure of this very chapter. But what the public usually doesn’t see—which is often just as important—are the policies or decisions a minister prevents. For me, this was the proposed Micrex Mine—a proposal to build an open-pit magnetite mine on the flanks of the Livingstone Range. The Micrex file came across my desk the first year I was at SRD—2007—and, as it turned out, was the last thing I did going out the door in December 2010.

Magnetite is a heavy magnetic iron ore used for coal upgrading and steel production. It is not in short supply and so is relatively cheap. To be profitable, a magnetite mine needs to be large to benefit from economies of scale. That is what did not make sense about the Micrex proposal. Their original plan called for a mine to cover thirteen square kilometres of public lands in the Livingstone Range. But by the time I became minister, the proposal had been scaled down to just 5.5 hectares—barely larger than a football field. It wasn’t too difficult to figure out why. At that reduced size, it did not trigger a legal requirement for an environmental impact statement (EIS) under the Public Lands Act. However, Micrex had actually purchased 36 square miles, or 56,909 acres of land. The smaller, revised proposal looked suspiciously like a toe-in-the-door strategy that would lay the foundation for future expansion.

There were good reasons for Micrex to avoid any type of EIS. The Livingstone Range is certainly the steepest and arguably the most dramatic front range in all of Alberta’s Eastern Slopes. If you’ve never experienced it, view the online video provided by the Livingstone Landowners’ Group.³⁸ Or drive down the North Burmis Road, just to the west of Highway 22. Better yet, go for hike there, or take a trail ride with one of the local outfitters.

The proposed mine was in the middle of the designated DU Ranch Heritage Viewscape. It provides home habitat to a prolific mix of bighorn sheep, elk, moose, deer, and the usual mix of predators that feast on them—grizzly bears, black bears, and cougars. The proposed smaller mine site was adjacent to the spring lambing grounds of a resident herd of 200 bighorn sheep. The access roads required by the mine would destroy native grasses and be difficult if not impossible to restore. Storing topsoil on slopes that regularly experience 100-kilometre-an-hour winds would be either impossible or very expensive. The new access roads would also increase hunting pressure on the wildlife mentioned above—especially by Indigenous hunters who are not subject to legal limits or seasons and can hunt year-round. And of course, there are water issues. The Micrex properties cover much of the headwaters of the Connelly Creek watershed, a significant tributary to the Crowsnest River, which flows into the Oldman and then the Bow. Erosion from the mine and the access roads would inevitably degrade water quality.

It quickly became evident that Micrex did not make sense either economically or environmentally. Even at full production, the proposed mine would pay virtually nothing in Crown royalties—several million dollars a year—and create fewer than ten full-time jobs. The bottom line was neatly summarized by a letter to Minister Knight, myself, and other ministers, signed by 125 local residents in the Livingstone Landowners Group:

There is a proven economy in this area already. … It is based on ranching, home businesses, tourism, hunting, fishing, and equestrian outfitting – all things that would be negatively impacted by a mine, no matter its size.

I agreed! And so it’s time again for full disclosure. I know this area and many of its landowners quite well. My colleague and friend, Rainer Knopff, has lived there on and off since 1992. Through Rainer, I met Dan and Puff McKim, who operate the historic DU Ranch, a purebred Hereford bull operation just off North Burmis Road. With Rainer and his sons, I have hunted the Livingstone slopes for elk, moose, deer, and grouse. In the summer, my wife joins us for hikes above the DU ranch and fly-fishing in the Crowsnest River. The McKims are active in the Livingstone Landowners’ Group.

In the 2008 Alberta election, many of these same people helped to elect Evan Berger as the new MLA for Livingstone-McLeod. I had met Evan during my 2003 “More Alberta, Less Ottawa” speaking tour, and he had helped in my 2006 leadership bid. Evan, a third generation Alberta rancher, runs a mixed livestock-grain operation west of Claresholm. I immediately appointed Evan as my parliamentary assistant because I knew he could be a constructive bridge to the rural landowners as we implemented the South Saskatchewan Regional Plan, which included all of Livingstone-McLeod. Evan was an effective advocate for his constituents, almost all of whom opposed the mine.

In my mind’s eye, when I imagined the Micrex Mine, what I saw was a second industrial scar on Alberta’s Eastern Slopes—like the Lafarge limestone quarries and cement plant in Exshaw. The Lafarge plant is located 80 kilometres west of Calgary, at the gateway to Banff, Lake Louise, and the Canadian Rockies, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is the largest cement plant in Canada. It’s located less than a mile from the Trans-Canada Highway, so you can’t miss it as you approach Canmore. And it is just plain ugly and totally out of place—a huge scar on the face of the Rockies, with large stacks belching smoke.

In 1906, when the mine and plant were first opened, it made good sense. Alberta was the poorest of all the Canadian provinces, with a mostly rural population of less than 200,000. And the Lafarge plant has served Alberta well, providing most of the cement that has built the province into the wealthiest province in Canada with a population of 4.8 million. One hundred years later, however, you would never build the same plant at the gateway to a UNESCO World Heritage Site. So I decided that such a thing damn well wasn’t going to happen again on my watch.

The question was how. While I could have engaged either or both the energy and environment ministers (as there was overlapping jurisdiction), I decided the path of least resistance was simply to rope-a-dope it to death with one administrative delay after another. Without initial public-lands sign-off from SRD, it couldn’t go anywhere. While most of the delays were achieved simply by foot dragging on administrative technicalities, there were two potential deal-stoppers for Micrex. One was the then-pending South Saskatchewan Regional Plan (SSRP), being developed under the newly adopted Alberta Land Stewardship Act (ALSA). The SSRP encompasses all the watersheds feeding the Bow, Elbow, Sheep, Highwood, Crowsnest, and Oldman rivers—basically everything south of Calgary and the Trans-Canada Highway. The advisory committee for the SSRP, which I had hand-picked, would never recommend approval of project like Micrex, as it failed both the Act’s environmental (water and wildlife) and economic criteria.

The second trump card that I could have played was to refer the entire project for a full cost-benefit analysis by Alberta’s Natural Resources Conservation Board (NRCB). The NRCB reviews non-oil and gas natural resource development projects and any other development projects referred to it by cabinet. At a minimum this would have added at least another year to the approval process. It was also highly unlikely that Micrex could ever pass a full NRCB cost/benefit analysis, and the Micrex team knew this. Just the referral would have been enough to kill the project.

While I never played either of these cards in my multiple meetings with the Micrex lobbyist, I made her aware that I considered them as viable options. This worked as long as I was minister, but that came to an end in January 2010, when I was moved to Finance. My replacement at SRD was Mel Knight. Mel was a northerner and had little interest in either ALSA or conservation issues in southern Alberta. In the thinly populated north, when someone wants to invest millions of dollars in a new mine, they are welcomed. The Micrex promoters were alert to the opportunity presented by a new minister and were quickly in Mel’s office lobbying for SRD sign-off.

For the rest of 2010, I was much too busy at Finance to pay any attention to the Micrex file. I spent twelve months trying (unsuccessfully) to build a two-step budget process to get us “back in the black” by Budget 2012—an election year. In addition to four painful weeks lost to shingles in May, I was immersed in budget meetings with my officials and Treasury Board (see chapter 7). But as December approached, I was informed by Evan Berger, now minister of agriculture, that Mel was getting ready to approve the Micrex licence. Mel subsequently confirmed this to me, stating that the government could not and should not stop all development in the province until the land use planning process was completed. I responded that while this was true in the abstract, it was completely unacceptable in the specific context of Micrex. But Mel was not persuaded.

The Federal, Provincial, Territorial (FPT) Finance Ministers’ semi-annual meeting was in Kananaskis on December 19–20. So, as I prepared for my second (and presumably last) FPT meeting, I decided to do something I had never done before—leak a self-serving story to the media. There were several cabinet ministers who did this regularly to curry favourable treatment by the legislative reporters. We all knew who they were, and I held them in contempt. However, given that I had already made my decision to resign from cabinet the following month (see chapter 9), I figured I had nothing to lose.

I phoned Kelly Cryderman, then the legislative reporter for the Calgary Herald. Kelly is a cousin of Sonia Arrison, whom I knew through her public policy work at the Fraser Institute in Vancouver. I had developed a cordial professional relationship with Kelly, so I was comfortable asking her for a favour: Would she mind asking me a question about how Minister Knight was handling the Micrex file? She responded, correctly, that this had nothing to do with the FPT meeting and would violate the unspoken rule of ministers not publicly commenting on each other’s work. I replied simply that I was asking a favour.

The FPT meeting in Kananaskis went according to schedule on December 19–20. As is customary at the end, there was a joint media scrum. Most questions focused on the about-face that federal Minister of Finance Jim Flaherty had done on Canada Pension Plan reforms—now favouring Alberta’s position of allowing private sector alternatives rather than increasing CPP premiums (see chapter 7).³⁹ But, just as the scrum was breaking up, Cryderman asked me about Micrex. She then did me the favour of quoting me verbatim in her subsequent Calgary Herald article:

Morton said, “It would be premature to approve a project like this before the regional plan for the South Saskatchewan region is finalized. … If you look at the policy document for the land-use framework, it identifies the Eastern Slopes in terms of priority use, as watershed and recreation—not mining.” … Morton suggests the company’s application may be subject to review by the province’s Natural Resources Conservation Board.⁴⁰

Less than twenty-four hours later I received an angry phone call from Minister Knight. What the hell did I think I was doing? I replied that I was just repeating what I had told him before the Christmas break. He was not impressed. While this tactic unfortunately cost me my friendship with Mel, it did get the policy results I wanted. Cryderman’s article triggered a flood of phone calls and emails to both Knight’s office and to the premier’s office—all opposing the Micrex mine. It took several months to grind through the formal process, but in April, SRD announced cabinet approval of an order-in-council (OC) mandating a full NRCB review of the Micrex proposal. But it never happened. Knowing that it could never pass the NRCB review, Micrex placed the project on hold.

So how was I able to block the Micrex mine? I’d like to say because it was so clearly without merit. But we all know that governments routinely enact poor policy. Just look at the Stelmach government’s New Royalty Framework and North West Upgrader (see chapter 7). The primary factors in the Micrex defeat were that it did not have any champions in the cabinet, in the civil service, or in any influential business stakeholder groups. Contributing factors were the lobbying and public relations efforts of local residents—the Livingstone Landowners Group—which were effectively communicated by their MLA, Evan Berger. While these factors probably would not be enough to establish a new program, they were sufficient to allow a motivated minister—me—to block a project that clearly violated our government’s stewardship and conservation goals.

After the 2012 election, in which both Evan Berger and I were defeated, Micrex almost succeeded in resurrecting their mining project. They applied for a mining permit on a piece of property adjacent to their earlier proposal. Since it was a different block of land, the requirement for the NRCB review did not technically apply to it. The Livingstone Landowners Group communicated this to me in November 2012, and I immediately passed on their concerns to Ken Hughes, the new minister of energy in the Redford government. Ken was a long-time friend of mine. He had grown up on a ranch near Longview, where his family had settled in the 1890s. He knew and loved the Foothills. I pointed out that the “new” Micrex proposal was not new at all, but just a clever attempt to bypass the requirement of the NRCB review. All the environmental issues were the same. Once Ken became aware of this, the permit was denied.

Postscript

Looking back, I am disappointed that stewardship and conservation have slipped off Alberta conservatives’ priority list over the past decade. Disappointed, but not surprised. It’s been a tumultuous decade.

There have been four provincial elections, five different premiers, and four leadership races in the PC/UCP parties. There was a decade of recession, during which GOA revenues from oil and gas sharply declined. By 2020, successive PC/NDP/UCP governments had run up $100 billion of new provincial debt. Companies went bankrupt. Jobs and homes were lost. For the first time since the 1980s, more people were leaving Alberta than arriving.⁴¹ Stewardship and conservation concerns became secondary to creating jobs and growth. COVID then trumped all other issues for almost two years. There was a loss of institutional memory in the civil service. Sustainable Resources Development (SRD) was dissolved, and its responsibilities—including the Alberta Land Stewardship Act—were transferred to three different ministries—Environment, Agriculture, and Parks. Last but not least was the emergence of global climate change as the most important environmental issue. In both Edmonton and Ottawa, provincial stewardship issues took a back seat to the politics of reducing CO₂ emissions.

Much of this was beyond the control of any Alberta government. Boom and bust are inherent in the energy sector. Today, the price of oil and gas—and thus capital investment in new exploration—is a function of global economics and geopolitics. No one in the world saw COVID coming. The decline and fall of the Alberta PC Party? Well, read the rest of this book! But there are two takeaways that I would leave with the readers.

The first is coming to grips with Alberta’s boom and bust economy. We prioritize conservation and stewardship during periods of growth, but then slip into neutral when the next energy bust hits. The Lougheed government implemented important new conservation and environment policies during the growth years of 1970s. But these issues were then mostly ignored during the Getty-Klein years in the 1980s and 1990s. This pattern was repeated during the growth years of the Stelmach government (as recounted in this chapter), but stewardship then slid back into the policy basement after 2013.

Once we recognize this problem, we can do something to correct it. Not completely, of course. Governments rightly prioritize policy areas that directly impact the daily lives of Alberta families: job security, a stable and strong economy, health, education, and community safety. But this does not mean ignoring conservation and stewardship issues. As I stated at the outset of this chapter, the “Alberta Advantage” is not just about annual GDP growth. The quality of life Albertans enjoy also includes the recreational opportunities—hiking and camping; fishing and hunting; skiing and snowmobiling—all made possible by Alberta’s amazing mountains, foothills, prairies, rivers, and lakes. There are very few places on the face of the Earth that enjoy what we Albertans too often take for granted. Stewarding them for future generations must never drop off any future government’s agenda.

My second takeaway is a more realistic approach to the challenges of climate change. One is not a “climate change denier” to insist that the reduction of CO₂ emissions must be balanced with both affordability and energy security. The price of oil and gas is not just about driving our cars and turning on the lights. It affects the cost of everything we do—the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the homes we live in. The building blocks of all modern economies—cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia (fertilizer)—all require oil and gas.⁴² The cost of energy impacts the bottom line of every family’s monthly budget and the balance sheets of every Canadian company. Affordability must be part of our climate change calculations.

As for energy security, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 should have been a wake-up call. Europe’s reckless dependency on imports of Russian natural gas was exposed as a dangerous strategic mistake.⁴³ And Hamas’s brutal October 2023 attack on Israel and the ensuing chaos/slaughter in Gaza is a tragic reminder of the West’s energy insecurity. Global supply chains only work during times of peace. Almost all of Canada’s allies are dangerously dependent for global oil supply on the Arab nations of the Middle East.⁴⁴ The emerging China-Russia-Iran triad is threatening the relative peace and prosperity enjoyed by much of the world since the end of the Cold War in 1991. Going too far, too fast on government mandates to reduce oil and gas production will have dangerous consequences on energy security for both Canada and our allies.

Canada’s response to climate change must also be tempered by the recognition of the unpleasant fact that what we do makes little difference. Canada emits less than 1.5 percent of global CO₂ emissions. We could shut Canada down and all leave, and it would not make much difference. By contrast, we can control what we do here at home. How well we steward and conserve our forests, foothills and plains, rivers and lakes—and the wildlife they sustain—will make a positive difference in the lives of our children and grandchildren.