Frozen in the glare!
Dear Editor:
There he is, Ed “the big buck” Stelmach, frozen in the middle of the road, eyes glazed over by the semi trailer bearing down on him. Not a new situation for Alberta premiers, but this time, the lights of the worlds people and the worlds best climate and natural scientists are brighter than they have ever been. And he still cant move his feet!
Conservative governments in Alberta have been leading the oil and gas industry through the darkness known as Alberta’s democracy for well over thirty years. In that time, I suspect some of them were smart enough to see the catastrophic local and growing global environmental impact of their excesses. But under the guidance of people like Ralph Klein, they spent their energy and time, along with our resources, trying desperately to dim the lights of public and scientific scrutiny. This they did with the help of an army of columnists, energy, chemical and coal industry big wigs, and a vocal compliment of hangers on, geologists, trade associations, all attached to the energy industry by cash flowing through an umbilical cord as big as a sewer pipe.
Now, the Stelmach government claims it cant move because it has to take care of those that would loose their share of the pie. These are the people the government, the media, industry and horn blowers like the Fraser Institute call the winners; For thirty years they’ve gotten more than their share, and paid less than their share, and sent an awful lot more of our share out of the economy to other countries and foreign shareholders. These are what the conservatives and economists call the winners; beneficiaries by virtue of prejudicial gain from public resources and processes. That, and of course, having to carry a Conservative party membership card. And Stelmach says their well being has to come first, before he can make a move on carbon emissions, water and land use issues. Why is there such a stench associated with this sudden and misguided caution?
I’m asking myself what of the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of Albertans, that have already paid dearly for the excesses of this government and the oil and gas industry? Why aren’t they the first priority? They’ve already been screwed, they’re the ones already in the proverbial waiting room, already socially, economically and politically injured, already taken advantage of. What about the tens if not hundreds of thousands of Albertans who have been slowly poisoned or debilitated by toxic fumes and effluent from the oil and gas industry? What about the hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million and a half Albertans who have had the door slammed in their face – democracy denied - because they don’t wake up in the morning and raise the Tory flag? What about the hundreds of thousands, actually millions of Albertans, who have seen the Conservatives subsidize multinational giants in the oil and gas industry with billions of uncollected, overlooked, and deliberately excused tax and resources revenues? What about the tens of thousands of people that depend on streams and subsurface water flows degraded and diverted by thousands of kilometres of roads, pipelines, well sites, well bores, and seismic lines? What about the families that have been bombarded with noise, dust, construction and service traffic, and intimidated by the oil and gas industry and their soothsayers, the Energy Utility Board, for thirty plus years? What about the thousands of landowners invaded by coal bed methane exploitation that pock marks the countryside and disengenuously hides under the skirts of experimental?
Yes, it’s true. These people don’t count in conservative Alberta. In the Stelmach Conservative Book on how to exercise absolute power, you’ve already been had. Stelmach and the Conservative crew make it very clear they feel no moral obligation to treat all Albertans as equals; Under Klein and preceding premiers, and now Stelmach, any sense that there was a legal commitment to treat all Albertans equally has been deliberately and systematically destroyed. These are people that don’t trust Albertans. They behave as though Albertans are too numb, too uninformed, too busy, too dangerous to participate in democracy; After all, we might not do what they’ve done, which is roll over for the oil and gas industry. And they’re right, I don’t think there is any doubt we would do things differently but they have labored feverishly to make sure you and I aren’t going to have a say in how this government operates and how it doles out our resources.
That’s never been good enough for me, and I know other Albertans for whom this is not good enough. But a democracy lost is near impossible to recovery without rage and rebellion. The forces of political and economic resistance to the peoples right to be informed and their right to participate in the operation of government prior to final decisions being made, rights entrenched, for example, in Montana’s constitution, are immense and intense.
I get no sense of rage and rebellion in Alberta, at least not one imminent enough to boil over into democracy; it may fall to other Canadians, clear minded and honest, and tired of the petulance of “made in Alberta” charades like “emission intensity”, to free us. The rest of the world, perhaps even Americans in two years, may help. As the prestigious journal Nature says in editorial, those who have ruled Alberta and those industry funded skeptics who waged twenty years of trench warfare against our democracy and our environment, are now “looking marooned and ridiculous”. Great damage has been done to Alberta and our freedom, and even more severe losses are yet to come, but I must remain optimistic that the people can and will overwhelm the influence of big money and political corruption.
Brian L. Horejsi
HYPERLINK mailto:b2horejsi@shaw.ca b2horejsi@shaw.ca
