According to a study by The Guardian, the world’s top 100 oil and gas companies collected more than $30-million every hour in “unearned” profit during the first month of the Iran war, and stand to make “$230-billion by the end of the year if the price of oil continues to average $100.” That’s a pretty big “if”—but it does put an eye-watering number on the potential windfall for companies in 2026 compared to anticipated profits before the war started. And it’s why people began talking about a “windfall tax” on the companies.

“As the owners of the resource, Albertans should get the lion’s share of those profits,” wrote Alberta Federation of Labour president Gil McGowan in the first week of the war. “And the way to do that is to introduce a windfall profits tax on top of the royalties that oil companies pay in exchange for the right to exploit publicly owned assets.”

This wasn’t a sudden revelation but rather part of McGowan’s long-standing argument that Alberta must increase oil and gas royalty rates. And he’s not alone. A long list of prominent economists have been saying the same thing for years—and they doubled down as the Iran war dragged on into April. “Taxing windfall profits won’t worsen inflation; it will recapture unearned gains from corporations and resource owners and can be used to protect vulnerable populations,” declared a group of economists led by Nobel-prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz.

It all sounds straightforward. Indeed, about 25 countries had already introduced a windfall tax well before Donald Trump’s misadventure in Iran. And Alberta does have a sliding scale for oil sands royalty rates, where they increase relative to the price of oil. But this isn’t enough for critics such as McGowan.

Oil companies are suddenly awash in windfall profits—while we’re paying near-record prices for gas.

Oil companies are pushing back, arguing windfall taxes discourage investment. They quote University of Calgary economist Trevor Tombe, who in 2022 said in an interview that “having a government just enact an ad hoc tax out of nowhere based on just whatever they think the rate should be—that’s problematic because it creates uncertainty.”

We also bump up against the “symmetry argument,” in which oil companies, facing a windfall tax from governments during boom times, could then demand some sort of “calamity compensation” from governments when oil prices collapse—as they did during the COVID-19 pandemic.

To save ourselves from jumping on the never-ending merry-go-round of arguments for and against a windfall profits tax, let’s just ask one short question: Would a windfall tax ever fly in Alberta The even shorter answer: No.

That’s not just because Alberta is governed by the fossil-fuel champion Danielle Smith. A windfall tax is part of a political suicide trifecta, along with raising royalty rates and introducing a provincial sales tax. The provincial NDP has also shied away from the trifecta. After campaigning in 2015 on implementing “competitive, realistic royalty rates as prices rise,” NDP leader Rachel Notley then performed a whiplash-inducing policy shift upon becoming premier. She went through the motions of a royalty review, then concluded the rates under previous Progressive Conservative governments were suddenly okay.

At the time, an irate McGowan complained that the NDP government was committing a “profound political mistake.” McGowan vowed to continue the battle for higher royalties, a fight that now extends to a windfall tax.

The public appetite for higher royalties comes and goes in direct relation to the world price of oil. When it’s over US$100 a barrel, Albertans practically march on the legislature, demanding a bigger share of energy revenues. When the price drops, so does the appetite. We felt the hunger pangs return last spring, watching our wallets drain as our tanks filled. In that context a tax on skyrocketing oil profits looked pretty good.

But even if there were a windfall profits tax, how would you, as an inflation-pummelled Albertan, benefit Alberta governments in the past have tended to spend windfall revenue to avoid making hard political decisions. The nadir of that unofficial policy came in 2006, with “Ralph Bucks.” Premier Klein, trying to boost his flagging popularity, gave a $400 “prosperity” cheque to pretty much everyone in the province. A lot of Albertans were happy. Like McGowan today, they saw it as a just counterbalance to high oil prices.

But there was no long-term plan, no saving for a rainy day; just a cheap political stunt. You could still argue a windfall tax is a good idea—but you can’t deny that Alberta has a poor track record of dealing with windfall revenues in the past.

Graham Thomson is an Edmonton-based political commentator who has covered Alberta politics since the early Don Getty era.

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Aly Hyder Ali says YES

Program Manager, Oil and Gas, at Environmental Defence

Canada is running out of time to meet its climate goals, and the biggest obstacle standing in the way is unchecked pollution from the oil and gas industry. Despite being responsible for nearly a third of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs), the oil and gas industry has made little effort to meaningfully reduce its carbon footprint. While other sectors have reduced theirs, oil and gas emissions have risen by roughly 80 per cent since 1990. The solution is clear: Canada needs a strong, enforceable emissions cap on the oil and gas industry—one that ensures real reductions, not more delay.

The global energy transition is accelerating. According to the International Energy Agency, demand for oil and gas will peak this decade, then decline. Other countries are ramping up investments in renewables, electric vehicles and clean technology. If Canada continues to lean on an emissions-intensive, high-cost, fossil-based economy, we’ll be left behind. An emissions cap would send a clear message that we’re serious about transitioning to a clean, future-ready economy. It would drive innovation, create opportunities in renewable energy and reduce the risk of stranded assets.

But this isn’t just about future markets; it’s about protecting Canadians right now. Pollution from fossil fuels is linked to thousands of deaths each year and contributes to respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. Communities near oil and gas facilities face higher risks of exposure to toxic pollutants. Wildfires, droughts and floods—driven by rising temperatures—have become a costly reality across Canada. Cutting oil and gas emissions is a direct investment in public health and safety.

Then there’s the climate responsibility. Canada can’t meet its GHG emissions reduction targets without addressing its largest source of pollution: the oil and gas industry. Voluntary measures from the sector have been largely non-existent. Companies have spent millions of dollars to talk a good game, but data tells us a different story. Investments in decarbonization remain a fraction of what’s needed, while capital spending continues to expand fossil fuel operations. Meanwhile, oil and gas companies in Canada are actively lobbying against climate regulations, all while recording massive profits.

A cap isn’t about punishing the oil and gas industry. It’s about fairness and responsibility and building the kind of nation we want to be. We need to invest in a healthier, sustainable future, not cling to outdated, polluting systems that benefit the few at the cost of the many. Every sector must do its part. Canadian households are already adapting to reduce their carbon footprint. It’s time Canada’s biggest polluters followed suit to help build a stronger, cleaner and more equitable country.

We can’t afford more delays. This is a pivotal moment for climate leadership and for real nation-building. For the health of our economy, our environment and future generations, it is time to make the emissions cap a reality.

heather exner-pirot says no

Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s Director of Natural Resources, Energy and Environment

Greenhouse gas emissions contribute to climate change, and it’s in our self-interest to reduce them. By doing so we would also improve air and water quality. I’m for reducing emissions. But the question is whether Canada should cap oil and gas emissions. I say no, and the main reason is that oil and gas isn’t under Canada’s jurisdiction; it’s under Alberta’s.

Section 92A(1) of the Constitution Act affirms that provinces have the “exclusive” ability to make laws for the “development, conservation and management” of non-renewable natural resources. This was tested with the Supreme Court’s October 2023 ruling in Reference re: Impact Assessment Act. The majority identified that the federal government’s broad scope of “effects within federal jurisdiction” under the IAA would allow them to deny projects solely based on their GHG emissions. They determined that this eroded the balance inherent in the Canadian federal state and was unconstitutional.

Indeed, Alberta has already exercised its jurisdiction on this issue and does have a cap on its oil sands emissions. It passed legislation in 2017, under the Notley government, and limits total oil sands emissions to 100 megatonnes (MT) annually. Currently the oil sands emit about 80.1 MT, and there is no foreseeable future where they would exceed that cap. Emissions intensity—the amount of CO₂e per barrel produced—has declined in the oil sands for six straight years.

So, Canada has no jurisdiction to cap oil and gas emissions, and Alberta has already capped its oil sands emissions. This should be the end of the debate. It’s not, however, because the federal government has expressed its intention to impose an emissions cap on Canadian oil and gas and has proposed draft regulations to that effect. These would be a disaster on every front: economically, politically, legally and technically.

It would be hard to imagine a more expensive or divisive policy. The regulations are a relic of Trudeau-era ideology rejected in the 2025 election. They wouldn’t just cut emissions but would cut production too: of oil sands oil, conventional oil, natural gas and liquids such as propane. They would result in less investment, fewer jobs, a diminishment of royalties and corporate taxes, no new LNG terminals, no new pipelines, no Atlantic offshore development and no new export markets. Just the threat of them has already harmed the economy.

The Parliamentary Budget Officer determined that the cost of the emissions cap to Canada’s GDP would be $20.5-billion by 2032 and that the cap would cut 7.1 megatonnes of GHGs. That’s an implied carbon price of $2,887 per tonne. Prime minister Mark Carney “axed” the consumer carbon tax of $80 per tonne. If our goal is to cut emissions, it could be done more cheaply by means other than an oil and gas emissions cap.

Canadians want to build infrastructure, grow the economy and diversify trade. No policy threatens this more than the proposed emissions cap does. It needs to be quashed, for good.

Aly Hyder Ali responds to Heather Exner-Pirot

Heather Exner-Pirot argues that Canada should not cap oil and gas emissions, citing constitutional overreach, economic harm and lack of necessity. But closer scrutiny shows these claims don’t hold. The oil and gas sector is Canada’s largest source of climate pollution, its voluntary emissions reduction methods have failed, and a federal cap is both legally justified and economically necessary.

Exner-Pirot references provincial powers under Section 92A of the Constitution and the 2023 Impact Assessment case. But this misrepresents the scope of federal powers. The Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that the federal government has authority over matters of “national concern.” GHG emissions are transboundary pollutants, which means that what Alberta emits affects Quebec, Ontario and the Atlantic provinces. The 2021 Supreme Court reference case on carbon pricing explicitly upheld Ottawa’s right to regulate GHG emissions, calling this a national concern. A federal cap on oil and gas emissions targets pollution, not resource extraction, making it constitutional.

Yes, the oil and gas industry has made some progress in reducing emissions intensity. But total oil and gas emissions continue to be Canada’s largest source of climate pollution. Since 2005 oil and gas emissions have increased significantly, even as other sectors have shrunk theirs.

Exner-Pirot also foresees job losses and GDP decline under an oil and gas emissions cap. But global markets are already shifting: the International Energy Agency projects global demand for fossil fuels will peak this decade. Supporting fossil fuel expansion is bad for the environment and economically irresponsible. Conversely, clean energy investments are surging worldwide.

She also highlights the cost per tonne of reductions but ignores the massive economic and health damages tied to climate inaction. Climate disasters are increasingly expensive: 2024 was the costliest year for severe-weather-related insurance losses in Canadian history, at over $8-billion. And this is only expected to get worse, as 2025 is already our second-worst wildfire season ever. Furthermore, the Canadian Climate Institute estimates that climate impacts will reduce Canada’s GDP by $25-billion starting this year. The damage will only spread if we ignore climate change.

Oil and gas is Canada’s largest source of climate pollution, and voluntary emissions reduction methods have failed.

The health costs too are staggering. Air pollution from fossil fuels causes an estimated 34,000 premature deaths annually in Canada, with direct economic and societal consequences. Additionally, a recent study published in the journal Science shows that air pollution from the Athabasca oil sands may be up to 6,300 per cent higher than industry-reported figures. This pollution would rival all other human-made sources in Canada combined, and it raises dire health concerns for nearby communities.

The harms of oil and gas emissions aren’t evenly distributed. Air pollution disproportionally affects communities—particularly Indigenous, racialized and low-income—that are closest to industrial sites or lack resources to protect themselves. Indigenous communities near the oil sands face higher rates of cancer and respiratory illnesses linked to industrial emissions.

A cap is not an extra burden. It’s risk mitigation and protection for public health and the economy.

Exner-Pirot says an oil and gas emissions cap would be divisive. But depending solely on households and small businesses to shoulder Canada’s emissions-mitigation burden while oil and gas companies continue to pump out vast amounts of pollution with no accountability is inequitable. Rather than divisive, an oil and gas emissions cap would share responsibility fairly. It would ensure that industry’s operations align with national and international climate goals. If industry were to support a cap, they would show they’re serious about reducing emissions. This would send clear signals to investors, workers and communities that a smooth, fair transition is possible—rather than a chaotic collapse.

Exner-Pirot calls a cap unconstitutional, economically damaging and unnecessary. But constitutionality is established by a Supreme Court ruling. An early transition is far more economically prudent than clinging to fossil-fuel dependence, as renewables offer stronger long-term returns and avoid risk of stranding assets. Emissions data contradict the promise of voluntary emissions reduction from the oil and gas industry. And the health and environmental costs of delay are crippling, with climate disasters and pollution already exacting a heavy toll.

Canada promised in 2021 to cap oil and gas emissions. Fulfilling that commitment is not about ideology but about survival. Implementing an enforceable federal cap is about safeguarding our climate, economy and communities. It is time to deliver on that promise.

Heather Exner-Pirot responds to Aly Hyder Ali

What’s the case for capping oil and gas emissions According to Aly Hyder Ali, it boils down to some tried and true environmentalist warnings: we can’t meet our Paris Agreement commitments without a cap; companies won’t reduce emissions without a cap; and we’ll be left behind in the energy transition if we don’t do it.

I’ll grant him that our efforts to meet the Paris goal are all but certain to fail. That doesn’t preoccupy me much. For those people who still prioritize that goal, however, I reiterate it could be achieved at less cost to the Canadian economy than through imposing an emissions cap.

Hyder Ali argues that “the oil and gas industry has made little effort to meaningfully reduce its carbon footprint” and that “emissions have risen by roughly 80 per cent since 1990.” The first point is demonstrably false, and the second is a red herring.

Emissions from Canada’s oil and gas sector peaked in 2015, even though we’ve added over a million and a half barrels of production since then. How was this accomplished Through industry’s sincere efforts to reduce its carbon footprint, including through methane capture, electrification and efficiency measures.

Emissions intensity per barrel in Canada has decreased by over one-third since 2000. This kind of achievement takes significant human, physical and financial capital, and yet it is totally dismissed.

It’s unfair for Hyder Ali to point to 1990 as a benchmark year. Emissions rose sharply between then and the early 2010s because a couple hundred billion dollars of investment in the oil sands came to fruition and production grew dramatically. But ever since 2015—the year of the Paris Agreement—we have seen a decoupling between production growth and emissions. We know that the oil sands can meaningfully reduce GHGs.

Not only does the federal government not have the jurisdiction to enforce a cap, it doesn’t have the mandate.

The argument that Canada will be “left behind” unless we turn to greener alternatives is rarely substantiated. The main markets for our oil, led by the US, do not pay a premium for lower-carbon products. And our LNG is already some of the least GHG-intense in the world.

We can plainly see Europe’s economic trajectory as it has tried to decarbonize its energy and offshore its industrial activity. This isn’t a path to emulate. Today most of the world isn’t ramping up its energy transition but rather plateauing—or, in the case of the USA, retreating. Bans on offshore drilling and fracking in New Zealand and Mexico have been reversed. Canada would be an outlier if it didn’t recalibrate some of its own expensive climate measures.

At any rate, there’s no reason to believe that a supportive environment for oil and gas production detracts from investments in renewables, electric vehicles and clean tech. Quite the opposite: the revenues generated from a healthy oil and gas sector allow governments and corporations to invest in such technology. Starving the industry of capital and growth with a cap would inevitably result in it spending less on decarbonization, not more.

But my main criticism of Hyder Ali’s argument and those like it is they remain in the abstract, indifferent to the trade-offs involved. These are emotional and ideological appeals. They fail on the details. They’re impracticable. When the federal government proposed draft regulations and modelled the costs of an emissions cap, it was a hot mess. The assumptions made no sense, unintended consequences weren’t accounted for, the costing wasn’t logical and there were inherent contradictions.

How would a cap work with Alberta’s existing industrial carbon pricing and emissions trading system and comparable frameworks in BC, Saskatchewan and Newfoundland How can the energy sector meet ambitious targets without limiting production How can operators plan without knowing their exact compliance obligations We don’t know.

The proposed cap is emblematic of a policy approach that has put Canada’s unrealistic Paris commitment at the top of a hierarchy, with every other policy issue subordinate. This isn’t what Canadians want. We’re preoccupied with housing, the high cost of living, Trump’s threat to our economy. Prime minister Mark Carney ran on a promise to make Canada an energy superpower with the strongest economy in the G7. Paris and the 2030 commitment weren’t even mentioned in his platform. Nor was an emissions cap. Not only does his government not have the jurisdiction to enforce an emissions cap, it doesn’t have the mandate.

We all want a healthy environment alongside a strong economy. We all want world-class environmental, social and governance standards. But it’s manifestly not in our interest to regulate our oil and gas to the point where production is so uncompetitive that other jurisdictions, likely higher-emitting ones, take up our market share. That’s the choice: produce oil and gas in Canada or let someone else—likely not a democracy or an ally—produce it instead. Hyder Ali is arguing for the latter.

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Plastics are everywhere. Microplastics—tiny particles of plastic less than five millimetres long—have been found near the top of Mount Everest. A deep-sea submersible descended to the deepest point in the oceans, in the Mariana Trench, and found a plastic bag. Scientists found phthalates—chemicals used to increase the flexibility of some plastics—embedded in the skin of ants in remote parts of the Amazon rainforest. In Antarctica, an icy, unpopulated continent, 97 per cent of birds were found to have ingested microplastics—primarily common plastics such as polyethylene, polypropylene and polystyrene. Microplastics were similarly found in the blood of 77 per cent of people tested by scientists in the Netherlands. So, it would be no surprise to find such particles in the North Saskatchewan River.

But getting a clean sample wasn’t easy. To avoid polluting 1,500-litre samples of river water, the researchers designed and built a pump out of stainless steel, with no plastic at all. Then they worried about other things that contain and shed tiny bits of plastic, such as their clothes and lifejackets. “When we started sampling,” said Bryksa, “we would have to stand downriver [from the pump] because that lifejacket is contaminating the sample.” Studying plastic pollution would be easier, they joked, if their lifejackets were made of concrete.

Left: In August 1955 a LIFE magazine article ran with the then-celebratory but now vaguely sinister title “Throwaway Living.”
Right: Kwabena Akese, Accra, Ghana, 2020. In Canada only 9–12 per cent of plastics are recycled. Most of the rest goes to landfills.

Unless you were born before 1907, when the first synthetic plastic was invented, everyone alive today has been born and raised in the age of plastic. Forget the generational divides—Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z, Gen Alpha—we’re all part of the same era, an age marked by the increasing abundance of often useful and convenient plastic stuff and the growing amount of plastic waste found everywhere on earth.

The scale of plastic production today is mind-boggling. In 1950 all countries around the globe together produced 1.5 million tonnes of the stuff. In 2025, globally, over 500 million tonnes of new “virgin” plastics are now created every year. Much of it is disposable—50 per cent of virgin plastic is turned into single-use items meant to be thrown away—and little of it is recycled. In Canada, depending on who’s making the calculations, only 9 to 12 per cent of plastics are recycled. Of the rest, the vast majority of the over three million tonnes a year that’s tossed out goes to landfills. Some 4 per cent is burned in incinerators and 1 per cent of plastic in Canada is lost into the environment as litter.

Figuring out how to keep the good things about plastic while limiting the downsides is one of the great conundrums of our time. In Alberta a variety of organizations think they have a solution to that problem. These groups range from the government of Alberta to recycling and chemical industry associations to NAIT polytechnic—where the sampling for microplastics study is part of a 10-year, $10-million program called Plastics Research in Action (PRIA). The NAIT program—funded by energy company Inter Pipeline—began in 2020, according to informational material, “with a single focus: finding ways for society to reuse and recycle plastic waste as valuable commodities. In short, PRIA is on a mission to build a sustainable circular economy.” The Alberta government has a similar goal in its “Natural Gas Vision and Strategy,” released in 2020, promoting a “plastics circular economy,” which they define as “when the full value of a plastic product is used across multiple lifecycles, not just used once and then discarded.”

Alberta’s plan is to reduce plastic waste while growing the plastics industry. “The future is bright, and it is circular,” said Leduc-Beaumont MLA Brandon Lunty (UCP) at the start of the third annual Alberta Circular Plastics Day at NAIT in March 2025. It sounds laudable. But you might ask: to what extent is a plastics circular economy for real?

Undeniably plastic has benefits. “This looks promising,” wrote Leo Baekeland, with prophetic understatement in his laboratory notebook after inventing the first synthetic plastic in 1907. His product—Bakelite—could be heated and moulded into various shapes such as radios, telephones, toys and other mass-produced goods. Its inventor made a fortune. But Bakelite had flaws. Made from chemical compounds teased from wood alcohol and coal tar, it was brittle and couldn’t absorb bright colours. New varieties of plastics were soon invented, and today 99 per cent of plastics are derived from oil and gas, including hydrocarbons such as ethane and propane.

The plan for our “circular economy” is to reduce plastic waste while growing the plastics industry.

In simple terms, “plastic”—from the Greek plastikos, meaning mouldable—is a synthetic polymer. A polymer is a chain of molecules—hence the “poly” (“many”) in long tongue-tripping names such as polyethylene and polypropylene. Plastics can be hard or flexible, depending on chemical structure and additives. But in its various forms, plastic is lightweight, durable and insoluble. It’s also relatively cheap to make in large volumes.

That’s handy for all kinds of products. Bottles, bags and clingwrap, for instance, are made from polyethylene. So too is the most common type of polyester. Coffee pods, straws and microwavable dishes are made from polypropylene. Cutlery and take-out cup lids can be made of polystyrene. Most vinyl siding on houses is polyvinyl chloride. The list of products that contain plastic today is almost endless. Bike helmets. Cell phones. Seatbelts, airbags and dashboards in automobiles. Medical equipment is now mostly made of plastic, not least because it’s hypoallergenic and it’s easier—think syringes—to ensure the sterility of a single-use product in a hospital.

Proponents of plastic can be extravagant in their praise. “In many instances, plastics are the solution to the climate change problem,” said Bob Masterson, president and CEO of Chemistry Industry Association Canada, to a committee of MPs in 2019. “That includes lightweight, high-strength plastic composites in the automotive sector, improved insulation in the building sector, enormous quantities of plastic resins that are vital to the production of renewable energy from wind turbines and solar panels, as well as the very important role of plastic packaging in reducing food waste.” The shelf life of zucchini, the MPs were told—with a helpful info sheet from the Flexible Packaging Association—is extended from one day to five days when stored in plastic packaging. Ground beef is extended from three days to 20. Grapes allegedly remain edible for 70 days instead of seven.

Plastics also benefit the economy. In 2020 Alberta’s petrochemical sector was valued at $12-billion. That’s but a portion of the $35-billion the sector generates in Canada as a whole and a tiny sliver of the US$712-billion global plastics market. Alberta has vast supplies of oil and gas—including ethane and propane—and global demand for plastics is growing. According to the International Energy Agency, “petrochemicals are set to account for more than a third of the growth in world oil demand to 2030, and nearly half the growth to 2050.” Given this economic projection, the provincial government wants to produce more plastic in Alberta. Goal number one in the “Natural Gas Vision and Strategy,” for instance, is “for Alberta to become a global top 10 producer of petrochemicals” and “to grow this sector by more than $30-billion by 2030.”

Government subsidies, under both the NDP and the UCP, have boosted the sector toward that goal. In 2019 the federal Liberal government gave $49-million to Inter Pipeline to both “invest in efforts to reduce plastic waste” and to build a polypropylene plant—the first in Canada—just northeast of Edmonton. In 2021 the province, through the Alberta Petrochemical Incentive Program (APIP), granted $408-million to Inter Pipeline to help build the Heartland Petrochemical Complex. Completed in 2023, that $4.3-billion plant now turns Alberta propane into 525,000 tonnes of pea-sized plastic pellets a year—mostly for export to the US.

Similarly, the APIP is granting about $1.8-billion to Dow Chemical’s Path2Zero project near Fort Saskatchewan. Construction began in 2024 on the plant, which will turn ethane into plastic polyethylene pellets for export, primarily to Asia. It’s the first such facility to be considered “net zero,” in part because it will burn hydrogen and bury CO₂ nearby—reducing emissions lower than if it were built without those elements. The federal government is giving the “green plastic” project $400-million in investment tax credits. In late November 2023 premier Danielle Smith and then-federal finance minister Chrystia Freeland stood together in Alberta’s Industrial Heartland to announce that the $11.6-billion project had official approval to be built. “This project is the embodiment of the future of Canada,” said Freeland, “which is we have a growing economy, we have more great-paying jobs, and at the same time we’re reducing pollution.”

To date, the history of dealing with plastic waste has largely been a tale of failure. The latest flop was in December 2024 when about 175 UN countries held talks in South Korea to establish a legally binding global treaty to cut plastic pollution. It ended without an agreement.

It’s not as if the stakes were unknown. Plastic doesn’t dissolve. That’s great for storing water in bottles, for instance, but not ideal if you factor in that plastic bottles take somewhere between 400 and 1,000 years to fully break down. Some one million plastic bottles are bought every minute on earth. Add in other kinds of plastic, and it’s estimated that a truckload of insoluble plastic escapes into the environment every minute—much of it into the ocean, most famously in the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” which includes 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic floating in an ocean area twice the size of Texas. But plastic also breaks down locally into minuscule pieces. “It is widely agreed upon that smaller particles can enter the bloodstream and organs more easily than bigger particles,” says a 2022 article in the Journal of Hazardous Materials Letters.

The potential health risks are reason for caution. “Plastics are made out of the combination of thousands of chemicals,” said Patricia Villarrubia-Gómez, the lead author of a research article on plastic pollution released prior to the treaty talks in Korea. “Many of them, such as endocrine disruptors and forever chemicals, pose toxicity and harm to ecosystems and human health.” That alarm was echoed in an Environment and Climate Change Canada news release, also just before the talks: “The scale of this problem has reached a boiling point that requires urgent action,” said the feds, “with plastic pollution projected to grow by 2.5 times by 2040.”

In Canada the urgency around plastic waste had grown since January 1, 2018, when China stopped importing almost all used plastics for recycling. Previously Canada had exported most recyclable plastic—including what’s thrown in blue bins—to China and other Asian countries. The cost of dealing with all that waste hit fast. In 2019 the City of Calgary, for instance, spent $330,000 to store 2,000 tonnes of plastic clamshells, hoping to find a way to recycle them, then eventually dumped them—about 92 semi-trailer loads—into the landfill.

Alberta and the federal government soon fought over how to deal with plastic waste. Both sides, curiously, drew inspiration from the same document. That 2019 report by Deloitte, which the feds had commissioned, pointed out that in Canada we overwhelmingly produce, buy and use virgin plastics that are thrown away with little recycling. But plastic waste, said Deloitte, is “a lost opportunity.” If Canada recycled 90 per cent of plastics—moving from a “linear” to a “zero plastic waste” economy—the benefits could include thousands of new jobs and lower greenhouse gas emissions. It wouldn’t be easy—under the status quo only 25 per cent of discarded plastic is collected for recycling. Most plastic packaging, textiles, auto parts and electrical and electronic equipment end up as waste. But with better waste collection, bigger recycling plants, new incentives and innovation, the ambitious promise could be realized. Alberta and the feds agreed on the gist of all that. But on one point they sharply diverged.

In 2019 an all-party committee of MPs, convened after the Deloitte report, recommended “that the federal government commit to banning single-use plastic products—such as straws, bags, cutlery, cups, cigarette filters and polystyrene packaging.” The feds subsequently banned some of those single-use items such as plastic straws and plastic grocery bags. In response, a consortium of plastics companies, including Dow Chemical and Calgary’s Nova Chemicals, sued the feds. Alberta was an intervener in the case in support of the petrochemical companies. In 2023 the Federal Court of Canada ruled that the federal government’s labelling of some plastics as a “toxic substance” was jurisdictional overreach. The feds appealed, and the Single-Use Plastics Prohibition Regulations remain in force while the appeal is in court.

Constitutional matters aside, the fight comes down to one question: Should there be limits on plastic production The UCP government says no. A ban on plastics would be a “serious threat” to the petrochemical industry, said then-premier Jason Kenney in 2022. Environment minister Rebecca Schulz added to that dissent in April 2024. “The federal government would be better served by taking a page out of Alberta’s plan, which diverts plastics from landfills and turns used plastics into new products,” she said. “This is the promise of Alberta’s plan to create a plastics circular economy, a modern miracle in which, through chemistry, we can have all of life’s conveniences and necessities while protecting our environment and reducing plastic waste.”

The third annual Alberta Circular Plastics Day—organized by the Alberta Plastics Recycling Association (APRA)—was held in March 2025 in the sprawling and light-filled Productivity and Innovation Centre at NAIT. Among the attendees—described by Tammy Schwass, the executive director of APRA, as “about 200 people from across the plastics value chain in the province”—were representatives from Dow, Nova and Inter Pipeline, reps from recycling companies, reps from companies selling new products made with recycled plastic, instructors from NAIT, and groups such as the Recycling Council of Alberta, which in 2024 officially switched their mandate from “supporting the recycling value chain” to “advancing the circular economy.”

“Our government sees plastics as an opportunity, not a problem,” said MLA Brandon Lunty, at the start of the conference. “We see this as a waste management issue, not a plastics issue.” He admitted he was “a circular plastics newbie” and sent greetings from minister Schulz, who was not able to attend. The UCP government, he read from prepared notes, “is working with the recycling industry, plastics manufacturers and Albertans to eliminate the plastics we don’t need, innovate to ensure the plastics we do need are either reusable, recyclable or compostable, and circulate the plastic items we use to keep them in the economy and out of the environment.”

Notably, he touted Alberta’s new Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) regulations, which came into force on November 30, 2022, and were “fully implemented” on April 1, 2025. These are intended to shift the “burden of collecting, sorting, processing and recycling waste” away from municipalities and onto the producers of plastic packaging. A central body, Alberta Recycling Management Authority, will oversee the system, similarly to new EPR systems in Ontario and Quebec. The idea is that companies which produce plastic pollution will pay for or find ways to reduce that pollution.

Polyvinyl chloride releases harmful chemicals when melted. Polystyrene turns into a “weird powdery mix.”

“We know this transformation to a circular economy will take time,” said Lunty. How much time is unclear. But challenges were on display at the conference—not least that some plastics are very hard to recycle. Take, for example, a potato chip bag. “That chip bag might have 12 layers of foil and different kinds of plastic in it,” said Mark Sabourin at an exhibition booth for EFS-plastics, a company opening a new recycling plant in Lethbridge in July 2025. Each kind of plastic in those layers has a different melt temperature. That means if you heat the bag at just one temperature, the layers glom together into a piece of junk. “Recycling has to be like for like,” said Sabourin. Plastic products are stamped with numbers 1–7. EFS will specialize in recycling numbers 1, 2 and 5—basically polyethylene and polypropylene—turning those kinds of used plastics back into pellets to ship to producers that want such recycled material.

Even “like for like” recycling isn’t straightforward, however. Recycled plastic is not the same as virgin plastic. At the Nova Chemicals booth, bright-white virgin polyethylene pellets were displayed beside darker-coloured recycled pellets. Each time a plastic is “warmed up again to melt into a pellet,” said Robert Clare, the Nova rep, “you get more degradation.” He showed clear plastic bags made of virgin polyethylene beside bags made with “30 per cent recycled” plastic. The bags with recycled plastic had visible speckles. “It’s still fit for purpose,” he said. “You can fill it with liquid or solids and it would be hermetically sealed.” But for commercial purposes it’s not up to snuff. A used plastic can be turned back into a pellet up to 10 times, he claims, but each time it’s made into a new product it must be blended with virgin plastic to “boost the performance,” and chemical additives are needed to mask imperfections.

Other plastics pose more difficult challenges. Polyvinyl chloride releases harmful chemicals when it’s melted down. Polystyrene, said Sabourin, “turns into this weird powdery mixture that floats everywhere.” Most recyclers don’t want it.

Those problems are among the reasons why most plastics end up in the landfill. Finding ways to keep plastics out of the dump has been a primary focus of research initiatives at NAIT, along with funding for pilot projects and start-up companies from both government and the private sector. Dow Chemical, for instance, paved a parking lot at the new Path2Zero project with asphalt that included some 2.2 million plastic bags worth of used polyethylene. NAIT and Heartland Polymers (Inter Pipeline) collaborated to turn plastic polypropylene waste into a wax that they mixed into asphalt used to pave roads at four test sites, including on the Alexander First Nation. Alberta Innovates—which funds research projects “aligned with Government of Alberta priorities”—gave out numerous grants, including $250,000 to both PolyCo (a start-up that also partnered with NAIT), which makes luxury floor tiles from recyclable polypropylene, and to Resolve Plastics Recycling, which turns mixed plastics into cinder blocks that can be used to build everything from garden sheds to roadway crash barriers. Merlin Plastics, the biggest Alberta-based recycling company, got $2-million from Emissions Reduction Alberta (which doles out money from the government’s TIER fund) to research a “commercially viable” method for recycling used food-grade clamshells back into new food-grade clamshells. “The circular economy is in its infancy in the province,” said Schwass, praising all that’s been accomplished so far. “It’s only been about five years since we started talking about it here.”

Jeremiah Bryksa looking for plastic in the North Saskatchewan River. He’d like to study microplastics in food packaging next.

By designing out waste and pollution, keeping products and materials in use, and regenerating natural systems,” says a quote from the UK-based Ellen MacArthur Foundation (which since 2010 has been acknowledged as the leading proponent of the circular economy concept), “we can reinvent everything.” It’s an ambitious idea. One that in Alberta still appears far off in the future.

Jennifer Koole, a conference attendee and the executive director of the Recycling Council of Alberta, told me in an interview that “there is a way to measure the circularity of an entity, whether that’s a country or a province. We haven’t measured it for Alberta,” she said, “but Canada’s circularity level is 6.1 per cent. That means a small percentage of materials [plastic or otherwise] are being recycled or recovered and there’s a lot of opportunity to do more.”

A few presenters who spoke at Alberta Circular Plastics Day—via Zoom—expressed hope that strict regulations could still be brought in to address plastic waste in the environment. Ryan Parmenter, from Environment and Climate Change Canada, told attendees that negotiators for a global treaty on plastic pollution will meet again in Switzerland in August 2025. This time, he said, “I think we’ll be able to move forward.” The stakes were highlighted by Roxana Sühring of Toronto Metropolitan University. “Plastics are complex chemical mixtures that are released into the environment throughout a product’s life cycle,” she said, explaining a study in which she traced microplastics back to their source products by analyzing chemical additives in various plastics. Microplastic regulation is needed, she said, but she wonders how it would be enforced.

Near the end of the day I talked with Jeremiah Bryksa. His microplastics sampling project was wrapping up in April 2025 and he was working on having the results of the study peer-reviewed and published in a journal. “We found plastics everywhere” in the North Saskatchewan River, he said. “They’re really low concentrations.” This surprised him. “I thought I would see way more plastic,” he said. “The river’s pretty clean.”

I asked how plastics are getting into our bodies, given that most people apparently have microplastics in their bloodstream. “The biggest exposure route is just through being indoors,” he said. “Most microplastics come from inhalation.”

At NAIT, he said, “our work is industry-driven, so I don’t get to choose what I work on.” But if he could choose, he said, “I would love to do more microplastic work. They come from plastic bottles. All food is packaged in plastic.” Studying microplastics in food packaging “would be a really interesting space to go to next.”

Tadzio Richards is a National Magazine Award winner and the associate editor at Alberta Views.

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Starting with Ralph Klein 25 years ago, and continuing with his successor, Ed Stelmach, Alberta has had a series of premiers who, politically speaking, made a career of casting bedroom eyes at our southern neighbours. In 2005 Klein gave a speech at Harvard University on “Alberta’s Role in the North American Energy Sector.”

In 2010 Stelmach spent $56,000 on a half-page ad in the Washington Post to tout Alberta’s oil exports to the US while countering environmentalists’ opposition to the oil sands. “Improved access via projects like the Keystone XL pipeline will benefit the US economically and allow your country to continue to receive oil from a country whose environmental  and social goals are similar to yours,” said the missive (which the newspaper had rejected as an op-ed piece).

There was comparatively little talk then about more east–west pipelines. It was “ship, baby, ship”—southward.

Alberta’s unofficial mantra of the day was “Americans will always need Alberta oil.” Back then the Alberta government didn’t just do all it could to ship oil to the US; it shipped our heavy oil products to be upgraded by American companies.

Think of it as selling Canadian lumber to American manufacturers to be made into furniture.

Alberta is overly dependent on the US market for our oil and gas—and we have no one to blame but ourselves.

When Klein talked about Alberta’s “role,” he meant one where we supply low grade oil sands product to the US for refining. To spark an “oil rush” in Alberta’s oil sands, Klein introduced all kinds of incentives, including a tax break that was such a holiday for multinational oil companies he should have thrown in piña coladas and a cabana.

In his retirement years, former premier Peter Lougheed asked, in a 2006 interview with the magazine Policy Options, “What is the hurry Why not build one [oil sands] plant at a time?” But Klein and Stelmach were in a hurry to exploit the oil sands and send the product south—and thus shackle us even more closely to the US.

We approved pipelines that were the energy equivalent of FedEx. Fast delivery guaranteed. The hewers of wood and drawers of water became the pumpers of heavy oil.

As early as 1993, premier Klein butted heads with prime minister Jean Chrétien, who was worried that the new North American Free Trade Agreement he’d reluctantly signed would force Canada to continue shipping oil and gas to the US at the expense of Canadians during an energy crisis. Klein had warned Chrétien to leave the deal alone, not only because Alberta wanted to ship as much oil south as possible, but because he didn’t want to scare off potential investors in the oil sands.

This, of course, was before fracking turned the US into the world’s largest producer of oil—and a less needy customer for Canadian energy.

Stelmach eventually realized that Alberta was in effect shipping jobs south along with our heavy oil, and that we needed to do more upgrading and refining in Alberta. That led to his government getting involved in a project that would see the first refinery built in Canada in more than 30 years. But the Sturgeon Refinery, just northeast of Edmonton, has become a disaster with a $10-billion price tag (it might start making money in 40 years). The project was a victim of cost overruns, low prices for heavy oil and a “North American energy sector” geared to American companies upgrading and refining Alberta’s raw products.

We simply could not compete in the very marketplace we had helped develop.

In recent years Alberta began focusing on east–west pipelines—and blamed the federal Liberal government for not getting new pipelines built. But even then Alberta’s gaze was fixed southward, with premier Jason Kenney in 2020 throwing away $1.3-billion in a failed attempt to kick-start the troubled Keystone XL pipeline project to the US.

Ironically, it was the federal Liberals who actually managed to get a new pipeline built: the Trans Mountain expansion through BC, which tripled the original line’s capacity to pump Alberta energy products to the west coast. But it ultimately cost taxpayers $34-billion, because private companies wouldn’t take the risk.

Alberta premier Danielle Smith has said she’d love to see more pipelines stretching across Canada so that Alberta can sell more oil and we won’t be so reliant on the US. These pro-Canadian sentiments are nice—but pipelines are expensive and controversial and take years to build. And when it comes to changing the status quo, Alberta is caught in a trap of its own making

Graham Thomson is a political analyst, member of the Legislature Press Gallery and former Edmonton Journal political columnist.

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Read more from the archive: “Petrostate”  October 2010.

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Fast forward to February 28, 2024: the pause was ended—sort of—as premier Danielle Smith and minister of affordability and utilities Nathan Neudorf outlined some of the regulator’s key findings in a report with the windy title “AUC inquiry into the ongoing economic, orderly and efficient development of electricity generation in Alberta, Module A”, dated January 31, 2024.  (Insomniacs can find that on Google; it beats sleeping pills.) A number of conditions would have to be met: for example, protection against losses to the agricultural land base and threats to farming operations would be the number one priority. Rural municipalities were also insisting on being properly consulted on new projects and having a seat at the table when decisions were made by the regulator. And they also wanted assurance that developers would post bonds and agreements to assure reclamation of wind and solar sites when project life was ended. The latter condition is essential in Alberta, where the preferred form of reclamation (think orphan oil and gas wells) is to declare bankruptcy.

As a former talk-show host, premier Smith knows how to give good phone to soothe any rumbling in the belly of the beast, by which I mean her base, which is mainly rural. “Protecting Alberta’s land,” she said sternly, “is also why we will establish buffer zones of 35 kilometres around protected areas and pristine viewscapes as designated by the province.” In a statement that seemed to single out TransAlta’s Riplinger proposal in Cardston County, which would have sited 47 turbines, each 195 metres tall, close to Waterton National Park, she said: “You cannot build wind turbines the size of the Calgary Tower in front of a UNESCO World Heritage site or on Nose Hill or in your neighbour’s backyard. We have a duty to protect the natural beauty and communities of our province.” Now that is some skookum wawa that should thrill the UCP base.

Was Smith not impressed by TransAlta’s claim that Riplinger could produce enough energy in an average wind year to power 138,000 homes or boil 3,960 Olympic-sized swimming pools worth of water TransAlta’s CEO John Kousinioris responded to the new buffer zone in May of 2024 by cancelling the Riplinger project and (cheekily) putting several other green projects on “pause,” citing the buffer zone and a general lack of clarity coming from the Alberta government in his decision.

I can imagine some readers saying “This is all just batshit crazy,” while others, more sanguine, might opine “It’s about bloody time!” The renewable energy industry, however, has been left in confusion, trying to figure out what qualifies as a pristine viewscape. The map released by our government implies that they mainly consider the viewscapes along the mountain front as pristine. Minister Neudorf mentioned a desire to protect “tourist landscapes” as part of the rationale for his government’s decision, but when pressed by media he admitted “there is no universal definition of a pristine viewscape; however, many use that term to refer to areas that are unobstructed natural landscapes.” The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.

The AUC’s opinion echoes the minister, though it prefers the term “valued” viewscape instead of “pristine.” And yet the commission left the door open for excluding other industries in the buffer zone, maintaining that protection of viewscapes should be “industry agnostic and apply equally to all forms of development.” They didn’t swallow Danielle Smith’s Kool-Aid targeting renewables. The AUC also naughtily pointed out that from 2019 to 2021 the largest driver of land loss in Alberta was the “expansion of pipelines and industrial sites,” not solar or wind development.

Perhaps wind turbines would spoil the view of the coal mine.

Full disclosure: I’m a ratepayer in the MD of Pincher Creek No. 9, a founding member of the Livingstone Landowners Group and no fan of the current political regime. I’m worried about climate change, so I support renewable energy. But I’m also one of many people here who think that nine wind farms in this MD are more than enough for one jurisdiction to deal with. You might expect, given this, that I would welcome a more cautious approach on wind power hereabouts. Not so fast. I’ve found that a steady state of paranoia is the prudent way to deal with the ready-shoot-aim policy shifts of Alberta’s right-wing politicians.

The term “pristine viewscape” trips uneasily from a Tory’s lips. There’s nothing too pristine about their beloved oil sands mines, toxic tailings ponds or clear-cut logging operations. Such things elicit a kind of earth-ravished angst that many Albertans don’t care to contemplate—or even look at. So what has happened to Danielle Smith’s sense of the aesthetic Perhaps some pixie dust from the chemtrails sprayed on her base by the US Department of Defense has expanded her awareness of nature’s grandeur Does she really care about any scenic splendour that has not already felt the caress of a bulldozer blade or the embrace of a feller-buncher?

So many questions, so few answers.

After all, she heads a government that seems hell-bent on resurrecting a zombie coal mine, the Grassy Mountain project just north of Blairmore, that had multiple stakes driven through its heart by the Alberta Energy Regulator, the federal environment minister and the Alberta Court of Appeal. Yet it staggered back to unholy life on November 16, 2023, when energy minister Brian Jean suggested the same AER should take a new gander at Aussie billionaire Gina Rinehart’s favourite dead coal project. By the way, the Grassy Mountain open pit proposal, which includes a “350-tonne load-out bin” and a new railway loading spur next to the Blairmore hospital, is well within Smith’s 35-kilometre buffer zone. Perhaps wind turbines would spoil the view of the mine or fan up too much coal dust in the Crowsnest Pass. Those whirling blades might distract hospital patients from enjoying the lullaby of train whistles and shuttling coal cars being loaded, clang-bang, 24-7.

Further, minister Jean could be feeling nervous about the multi-billion-dollar lawsuit his government is facing from four mining companies after former minister Sonya Savage reinstated the Lougheed coal policy and closed the mountains to new open pit mines in 2022. And worse, Jean’s old political enemy, former premier Jason Kenney, is a senior adviser at Bennett Jones, the firm handling the lawsuit. And lo—that’s the same Jason Kenney who presided over the attempt to overturn the Lougheed coal policy in the first place. “No worries, mate. Just throw Brian Jean on the barbie.”

Good old UCP, still steering Alberta by a broken moral compass. This government suffers from a terminal case of irony deficiency—and from constantly being “hoist by its own petard.”

The new “no-go” zones for renewables include “viewscapes” and “visual impact assessment zones” plus agricultural land. But not all new energy development is banned; the UCP seems to believe coal mines and pipelines are somehow prettier to look at than windmills or solar panels.

Long ago, in a different time and a different world, I wrote: “Each mountain/ its own country/ in the way a country must be/ a state of mind.” I could easily have said there are as many mountain moods as there are mountains. They are that changeable, both welcoming and threatening when you live among nature’s uncompromising cathedrals, these water-towers of the West. When not admiring the constant play of light and cloud-shadow rippling across their ridges, I love to view them from a distance. The Piikani people called them “the backbone of the Earth”; they were known as the “Shining Mountains” to 18th-century fur traders. I can see why their classic profile appears on Alberta’s flag and provincial shield. Something worth protecting, one would assume, and some of us definitely try.

But the shining mountains are no longer the only towering images above southern Alberta’s plains and foothills. White wind turbine towers, some as high as 90 metres from ground to hub, with a rotor diameter of 100+ metres are steadily upstaging the view.

The Municipal District of Pincher Creek was home to Canada’s first commercial wind farm, at Cowley Ridge, in 1993. Its 52 windmills, outlined against the mountain backdrop, predicted how the industry would relate to the “pristine viewscape.” These first latticed towers, some 25 metres high, were replaced in 2017 by a row of 15 turbines measuring 46 metres. According to the US Department of Energy, hub heights of land-based windmills have increased by 83 per cent since 1999. “In 2023,” the department notes, “the average rotor diameter of newly installed wind turbines was over 133.8 meters… longer than a football field, or about as tall as the Great Pyramid of Giza.” The reasons are simple enough: wind shear increases with a gain in height while surface friction (by trees, buildings, grass etc.) is diminished. And the longer the rotor blades, the more energy they capture for the turbine.

In two decades, the mountainous scene west of Fort Macleod and Pincher Creek, from Chief Mountain north to Crowsnest Mountain, and from the Porcupine Hills west to the Livingstone Range, that thrilled many a first-time visitor to this place, has been rapidly transformed by wind turbines as this part of Alberta became the centre of wind farm development. Most locals supported the industry. In Alberta’s free-wheeling energy market, there’s a lot of money to be made by vandalizing the view, both for the developer and for the landowner. I could not obtain information on current leases, but in 2017 Evan Wilson of the former Canadian Wind Energy Association told the Calgary Herald that “every 150 MW of new wind power represents $17-million in lease payments… over a 20-year period and $31-million in property taxes to municipalities.”

Historically, the Alberta Utilities Commission paid little more than lip service to those citizens or local politicians who objected to the pace of development or to turbine placement. The most glaring example of unregulated growth begins a few kilometres west of Brocket, where huge steel transmission towers and a maze of high-tension power lines frame a tangled view of multiple windmills, their huge blades slicing at the sky. Windmills and transmission lines, due to sheer numbers, have become a man-made geographic feature, a creeping industrialization of the signature Alberta landscape that appears on Alberta’s provincial flag. The effect for a long-time resident is a solastalgic assault on the nervous system, a cognitive dissonance where cherished memory meets current realities.

Of course, most of these space-age marvels are well within Danielle Smith’s buffer zone and are grandfathered-in from her newfound pristine obsession.

When it comes to new wind-power development hereabouts, however, the honeymoon phase is probably over. According to the The Western Producer, a survey conducted in 2006 found 90 per cent of MD residents favoured wind-power development. But as development increased, a new survey in 2017 showed only 54 per cent were still in favour of more turbines. The industry is looking farther afield for new sites these days. The local development officer, Laura McKinnon, told me there has not been a new wind-power application here for three years. Right now the biggest windfarm in Alberta so far is the Buffalo Plains facility, and it’s well out on the prairies of Vulcan County. Personally, I think the industry would be more popular here if it had just showed more sensitivity in siting its turbines, sacrificing some height in return for more social acceptance and goodwill.

A “pristine” pumpjack near Longview, in the foothills of the Rockies, on the Cowboy Trail (Highway 22) south of Calgary.

Criticizing wind power during this disastrous era of climate change is like criticizing mom’s pumpkin pie. Calgary politicians have touted the fact that the CTrains run on wind power. But the electrons from wind-powered or gas-powered turbines flow through the same wire. Since urban residences and industry use most of the electricity, why not put the windmills closer to main consumers, thus cleverly reducing material expense and line loss of power over long transmission distances. Why not insist on solar panels on city rooftops, which is becoming the norm in Europe Could it be that city folks might find such installations (especially wind turbines) not to their liking if they were forced to look at them day and night, while watching their electrical bills increase despite all the new infrastructure that comes with new power generation?

While two feuding entities, the Green Genie and Youseepee No-vax, are cudgelling their wits for a social media assault on yours truly, let us slip into a handy thicket of etymology. The word “pristine” derives from the Latin pristinus, meaning “former,” according to the Canadian Oxford Dictionary. Over time the meaning evolved from “ancient, primitive” to “1: in its original condition; 2: fresh and clean, as if new; and 3: unspoiled (pristine wilderness).”

We’re all familiar with current usages, as in “used F-150 in pristine condition,” “pristine bottled water,” “pristine starter-castle for the millionaire handyman”—whatever. None of these meanings apply to either the viewscape of the Rocky Mountains or the condition of its myriad peaks and river valleys. You may hike up to see the untouched marvels of Window Mountain Lake north of Coleman, for example, but don’t drink the water unless you are hankering for a dram of polycyclic aromatic compounds found in the coal dust blown into it from Teck Resources coal mines just across the Great Divide.

You could also argue, based on several factors, that there is no pristine wilderness to be had in these latitudes, let alone a pristine viewscape.

The view west of the windmills, as I write this, may not be pristine, but as the dwarf birch turns crimson and the aspen leaves go to yellow, the foothills and mountainsides are a watercolour artist’s dream, and that includes the battalions of round hay bales, the yellow fields of canola, the still-green grasslands topping high foothills and the distant ranch-houses and barns backed by the blue-grey walls of the mountain backdrop with endless cerulean skies above. There is a word for a view like this that stirs our heartsprings with love for our native place: sublime. Sublimity is what meets the eye when you leave the wind turbines behind.

As a young park warden in Jasper, I once endured a lecture by a Canadian Forest Service officer who liked clear-cut logging and summed it up: “I love to see the hand of man upon the land.” You can see the hand of man at work in the Alberta Forest Reserve just about anywhere you care to look. It’s there in the roads, in thousands of kilometres of seismic lines, in deeply eroded ATV trails, in clogged-up trout streams, logging clear-cuts and abandoned coal mines and slack piles. There are also pipeline rights-of-way, gas flare stacks and transmission lines criss-crossing and scarring the mountains. Even the tree cover today has greatly increased from what it was before European contact, the result of billions of dollars spent on wildfire control to preserve wood fibre for loggers, or in the case of national parks, to protect the scenery. That accounts for the massive fuel loads that feed today’s forest fires.

But in truth, the hand of man cannot be avoided. Even before European contact, the hand of man was at work doing cultural burning to improve the range for deer, elk and bison, to encourage food and medicinal plant growth and to keep some of the trees in check. Historical photos taken by the early surveyors in places like Waterton National Park show a less forested landscape far different from today—at least before the Kenow wildfire of 2017, that is.

Writing in the anthropology magazine Sapiens, Claudia Geib cites the work of geographer William Denevan, who speaks of the “pristine myth”—the belief that all of nature was once a sparsely populated wilderness where humans had little or no influence. She quotes Kawika Winter, an Indigenous biocultural ecologist at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa who says: “I loathe that word pristine. There have been no pristine systems on this planet for thousands of years.” Such scholars are part of a growing consensus against the old tenets of “fortress conservation”—the Eurocentric notion that “pristine wilderness” can only be protected by excluding human beings, particularly Indigenous people, from within its boundaries.

What we describe as a pristine viewscape is a kind of political mirage.

In Canada, First Nations people were pushed outside the boundaries of our national parks when the parks were founded. Recently Parks Canada has been striving to undo some of the harm by reaching out to Indigenous people and involving them in programs such as the reintroduction of bison into Banff National Park. That effort was marked in October 2024 by sponsoring a ceremonial bison hunt by members of the park’s Indigenous Advisory Council in which eight bison were to be “harvested” and used by First Nations members.

The Parks effort is a tentative move towards a conservation approach that includes humans as part of the landscape and biodiversity that ecologists are striving to protect. Danielle Smith, whose former claims to Cherokee ancestry qualify as “pretendian,” should stop pretending that coal mines and pipelines are somehow prettier to look at than windmills and solar panels. I doubt the public will be convinced by this petrostate gaslighting of pristine viewscapes, distorting the term “pristine” as a means of simply slowing the inevitable rise of renewables in favour of the fossil fuel lobby. It’s a fallacy that Alberta can have both unspoiled natural beauty and unchained industrial development at the same time in the same landscape—everybody going everywhere doing everything all the time.

The oil well access roads, gas wells and clear-cuts that scar Alberta’s east slope are not visible at a distance of 35 kilometres. In fact, what we describe as a pristine viewscape is a kind of political mirage. The concept that mountains are pristine landscapes is a myth. Yet the ranges of mountains on Alberta’s western horizon are sublimely beautiful. They still inspire awe, and I hope that someday, for all Albertans, they will inspire respect for the forests, the peaks and the rivers that lie behind that famous skyline.

Sid Marty is the inaugural winner of the Al and Eurithe Purdy Poetry Prize for Oldman’s River: New and Collected Poems (NeWest Press, 2023).

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Read more from the archive “Where to Put a Solar Farm” November 2023.

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“For those of you who don’t remember my history,” she said to the AEG audience by way of an intro to her talk that day with oil and gas lobbyist Kris Kinnear, “I was recruited by the Western Stock Growers’ Association. They called themselves the ‘free market environmentalists of Alberta’ and they wanted to set up a property rights advocacy group. What I particularly appreciated about their approach was that when they recruited the board they recruited people from the energy sector; in fact, our chair was an oilman.”

In 2021 both Smith and Kinnear, then-director of Sustaining Alberta’s Energy Network (SAEN), were actively lobbying the provincial government about RStar, a proposed program in which oil and gas companies would get royalty breaks on production from new wells if they spent money cleaning up their old ones. The two lobbyists hoped the RStar program would see $20-billion in “incentives” given out by the Alberta government to clean up old wells, stimulate new drilling and repair the “broken down” relationship between rural landowners and junior oil and gas companies. “It’s a program near and dear to my heart,” said Smith.

Some 20 months later, at an Alberta government budget committee meeting in Edmonton on March 15, 2023, premier Danielle Smith was questioned about Kinnear by opposition leader Rachel Notley. Kinnear was now “special project manager” in the premier’s office, appointed shortly after Smith won the UCP leadership (with Kinnear’s help as a “campaign coordinator”). Notley wanted to know exactly what he was doing, given that he expensed claims for meeting with the energy minister and was still listed as the director of SAEN. Smith said Kinnear was no longer a director of SAEN and the listing was an oversight. There was no conflict of interest, she said. “The person in question is a yak farmer. He’s a landowner. And he was doing survey work as an independent individual who was very concerned about the level of liability that was occurring on land.”

Which is not quite how Kinnear described himself to Smith on June 24, 2021. “We’ve spent a lot of time together,” said Smith to Kinnear on the AEG video. “I think people should understand a little about who you are.” Kinnear did say he “grew up on a farm east of Olds” and today owns “a little farm” and that “old well sites” are on both properties, but apart from that he talked about his career in the oilpatch and how he got into politics and lobbying. Having started as a young labourer on a pipeline, he moved into land reclamation and then oilfield services. He got the idea for RStar, he said, when he saw that “my friends that own small oil and gas companies couldn’t get funding.” This was before the 2019 provincial election, he said, and the downturn inspired him to get politically active. “I work in Calgary, so I went around to all the ‘battle zones’ and I got to know [the UCP] campaign managers,” said Kinnear. “I started helping all these campaigning MLAs,” he said. “It kind of took off. We rallied hundreds [of volunteers] and helped 15 [UCP MLAs get elected in Calgary].”

Smith made notes as he talked, then steered the conversation to RStar. “We’re talking about how this benefits the junior and mid-sized companies,” she said, “but it seems to me that this should also benefit the large companies. Do you see it that way?”

“It helps Alberta,” said Kinnear. “A royalty credit helps everybody that can use it.” Such a credit would mean environmental liabilities in Alberta could be bought and sold. “I think the benefit for the larger companies is if they want to get out of Alberta, they don’t have to hand over liability deposits to the regulator and pay their way out,” he said. Or bigger companies “may be looking for [smaller] companies that have lots of liabilities that they know they can clean up and harvest to improve drilling programs in the future. Maybe they’ll get into that. I don’t know.”

“That’s the amazing thing,” said Smith. “This is why I always prefer a free enterprise, market-based entrepreneurial solution, to a central-planning, regulatory-driven, rules-based, government-bureaucrat-led solution, because we just don’t know what we don’t know about what this might unlock if the program gets implemented.”

Lobbying and politics have long been intertwined in Canada. As detailed by journalist Natasha Bulowski, lobbyists “are a fixture in the realm of government and policymaking.” In that realm their “main objective is to influence government decisions in the interest of their client—either by lessening the harm those decisions could cause or taking advantage of the opportunity presented by a government decision to maximize its benefit.”

Lobbyists seek to influence government decisions to benefit clients instead of the public. Alberta’s Lobbyist Act, however, aims to temper the risk of government acting to benefit a special interest. In Alberta lobbyists must register their lobbying activities—who they lobby and for what purpose—and Alberta’s lobbyist registry can be searched online free of charge.

Still, lobbying politicians, political staff and civil servants is a job often done by former political staffers and politicians. In Alberta, for instance, Wellington Advocacy (one of the most influential lobbying firms) was co-founded by Nick Koolsbergen, who previously was UCP leader Jason Kenney’s chief of staff and before that the director of issues management for Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Wellington’s “Alberta Government relations team” is currently led by former political staffers including Brad Tennant (former executive director of the UCP) and Leah Ward (a former director of communications for the Alberta NDP caucus).

Another big lobbying firm, New West Public Affairs, is led by Monte Solberg, the former MP for Medicine Hat who was a cabinet minister in Harper’s Conservative government. His son Matt Solberg, a partner in the firm, was director of communications for the UCP. Premier Kenney’s former press secretary, Christine Myatt, also works for New West.

At yet another lobbying firm, Alberta Counsel, former Wildrose MLA Shane Saskiw is the principal lobbyist, and former UCP MLA Richard Gotfried, former Alberta Party leader Barry Morishita and former NDP candidate Taneen Rudyk are all on the “lobby team.”

The list of political partisans who took the off-ramp from politics into lobbying could go on and on. Danielle Smith is among them—she took a lobbying job after politics—but her trajectory is notably different. Unlike the others, she sprang from lobbying straight into politics and not just once but twice. It’s a unique career in which the line between lobbying and politics appears porously understood. After Smith became premier in October 2022 she ran in a by-election in Brooks-Medicine Hat. As revealed by Nate Pike at The Breakdown, Smith’s campaign manager in that by-election was Alexandra Carlile, a lobbyist at Alberta Counsel who at the same time as she was campaign manager for the premier was listed on 40 then-active files directly lobbying Premier Smith’s office. That’s not illegal in Alberta. But as Laurie Adkin, a political scientist at the University of Alberta, said to Bob Weber of the Canadian Press in November 2022, Premier Smith’s lobbying ties raise questions—among them: “Whose premier is she?”

When Smith registered as a lobbyist for the Alberta Enterprise Group in June 2019, it wasn’t her first gig as a lobbyist paid to try to influence government policymaking. Back in October 2006 she left a job as a talk radio host to be director of provincial affairs for the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB), a group that lobbied for “tax fairness, reasonable labour laws and reduction of regulatory paper burden” for small businesses.

In April 2009 she left that lobbying role to run for the leadership of the Wildrose Party. That same month, a Wildrose Party fundraising letter written by David Yager and other “oilfield service and junior oil and gas executives” was sent to members of Alberta’s oil and gas industry. The letter decried then-Progressive Conservative premier Ed Stelmach’s attempt to reform Alberta’s oil and gas royalty framework and said “the ultimate success of our industry is now political. Only when the government of Alberta supports and trusts its most important industry—oil and gas—will Alberta’s future be truly secure.”

Yager, in his words, was the “top fundraiser for Smith’s leadership bid” in 2009, and he today takes credit for teaching Smith about the oilpatch. “I met Danielle Smith 14 years [ago] when we asked her to consider becoming leader of the Wildrose Party,” he wrote on LinkedIn in 2022. “For the next five years we worked together where I taught her as much as she could absorb about the nuts and bolts of how the oil industry works. We went to dozens of meetings together with industry associations and executives, and if she didn’t fully understand afterwards, she and I weren’t done until she did.”

A key message that Yager wants to impart, as he wrote in his 2019 book From Miracle to Menace: Alberta, A Carbon Story, is that, for him, on practically all energy issues, including climate change, “the private sector and free markets are the solution, not the problem.”

For Smith, that lesson fit “with what I truly believe.” After her political failure in 2015 (floor-crossing to the PCs, losing her seat), her second career arc—again from media to lobbyist to party leader—revealed a heightened enthusiasm for the oil and gas industry. As Smith wrote in a 2021 paper praising “our entrepreneurs and wealth creators” and the “titans of business” for the School of Public Policy at the University of Calgary: “Energy provides the foundation for our success, and it is the perfect example of how Alberta entrepreneurs take a challenge and find a solution…. There is no problem that is too big for our business leaders to solve.”

From 2019 to early 2022 Smith lobbied the Alberta government on behalf of “business leaders” at AEG—advocating for nearly 100 companies, including oil giant Canadian Natural Resources, the Canadian Association of Energy Contractors, and firms in construction, finance, health services and law. According to records at the Alberta Lobbyist Registry, Smith met with multiple ministries to encourage “opposition to labelling plastics as toxic” and “opposition to [the] federal Impact Assessment Act.” She lobbied the Premier’s Office to “create a ‘concierge’ service for large projects.” Along with persistent lobbying about “reducing COVID restrictions to help business,” Smith met with health minister Tyler Shandro to discuss “a new accountability model for delivering healthcare that would split the roles of purchaser, provider and performance oversight.” This last point, seemingly arcane, was articulated by Smith in a later interview with Jordan Peterson in November 2022, when she said that the “split the roles” model is the way “to apply our free enterprise values […] to how you deliver healthcare, how you deliver seniors care, how you deliver advanced education, how you deliver K–12 education.”

Notably, she also lobbied the Kenney government to implement RStar—to incentivize oil and gas companies to clean up old wells they are already legally obligated to clean up. Then-energy-minister Sonya Savage rejected the idea in June 2021, saying, “The proposal does not align with the province’s royalty regime or our approach to liability management and upholding the polluter-pays principle.” But Smith lobbied for RStar again, writing in a letter to Savage that “the revenue situation has become dark for the junior oil and gas sector.” The “solution” to companies going “broke” and leaving orphaned wells, she wrote, “is to create a pathway for junior oil and gas companies to clean up existing wellsite liabilities, improve corporate health, improve profitability and become compliant with all their financial obligations. We believe the RStar program can address all these issues.”

Lobbyists seek to influence government to benefit clients instead of the public.

“I’m sure you will all agree that our keynote speaker does not need much of an introduction,” says Mark Scholz, president and CEO of the Canadian Association of Energy Contractors (CAOEC), at the podium in the Grand Ballroom in the Westin Hotel in downtown Calgary a few minutes after noon on November 24, 2023. It’s the CAOEC’s annual State of the Industry event. Fifty tables are in the room. Nine seats are at each table, with every seat taken and people standing at the back by the doors. The CAOEC represents 95 drilling and service rig companies, “small- and medium-sized enterprises” and larger. Many are event sponsors, their names prominent on table card numbers. Akita Drilling at table 33. Halliburton at 40. Platinum sponsor Pathways Alliance at table 39. Alberta energy minister Brian Jean and minister of environment and protected areas Rebecca Schulz sit at table 21, next to the stage with the glass podium where premier Smith—a former lobbyist for the CAOEC—is about to speak. The crowd is hushed, all eyes on the stage.

Since she became premier, Smith has aggressively pursued an agenda in line with the policy direction for which she lobbied. Just 10 days after being sworn in, Smith again championed RStar, telling the Western Standard that it “will be a way we can clean up some of our legacy well sites.” In February 2023 her government announced it would begin an engagement process with the public on a $100-million pilot project for RStar, now renamed the Liability Management Incentive Program. But the public critique was harsh—including a Scotiabank report that said the proposed program “goes against the core capitalist principle that private companies should take full responsibility for the liabilities they willingly accept”—and the pilot wasn’t implemented. Neither did the UCP campaign on it in the 2023 election. But right after that election, won by the UCP, Smith’s mandate letter to energy minister Brian Jean directed him to develop “a strategy to effectively incentivize reclamation of inactive legacy oil and natural gas sites, and to enable future drilling.”

Also in February 2023, Smith gave a $60,000 contract to David Yager to chair an advisory panel of five long-time industry insiders to create a long-term vision for Alberta’s energy future. Public consultation wasn’t part of the panel’s envisioning process, and Yager delivered their report a mere four months later, on June 30. Clues as to what might be in the report could lie within Yager’s extensive writings as a columnist for Energy Now, where on June 3, 2023, he wrote about the impacts of climate change policy debates on the oil and gas industry. “If we’re going to be allowed to stay in this business, then it must be decarbonized. But taking the ‘carbon’ out of hydrocarbons is much easier to say than do,” he wrote. “Chanting ‘polluter must pay’ solves nothing.” Citing technical challenges, stockholder demands for profits, and taxes from multiple levels of government, he wrote, “the oil and gas industry needs more money, not less.”

“We won’t allow the federal government to take action to shut in our production.”

To say this was in the report, however, would be speculation, as the report was classified as advice to the premier, making it inaccessible to a freedom of information request. Global’s Saif Kaisar, who attended a press conference with Smith just after Yager’s report was delivered, did confirm that the report includes a section on the RStar proposal. As the report was being written, Yager was president and CEO of Winterhawk Well Abandonment, a company that rents oil and gas well reclamation tools. Reporters asked Smith if this was a conflict of interest. Smith said no. “Look,” she said, “he put together a panel of over 150 CEOs. Of course I’m going to take advice from CEOs. Who else am I going to take advice from?” After this press conference, Smith gave Yager a second sole-source contract, this time for $70,000, to review the Alberta Energy Regulator.

In early August 2023 the UCP government imposed a seven-month moratorium on approvals of renewable energy projects larger than 1 megawatt. Such projects have attracted close to $5-billion in investment into the province since 2019. In 2022 more than 75 per cent of all the new wind and solar energy capacity built in Canada that year was in Alberta. Renewable energy accounted for nearly 13 per cent of the electricity generated in the province in 2022, up from 7 per cent in 2018.

“She’s putting at risk billions of dollars of investment in her province,” said federal environment minister Steven Guilbeault on CBC’s As It Happens. It was one of the few times the federal minister publicly criticized Premier Smith. Mostly the attacks went the other way.

While both the provincial and federal governments have a stated goal of achieving net-zero emissions by 2050, they differ on how to get there. The federal Liberals prefer a planned, legislated approach, committing Canada, by law, to net-zero by 2050, with a short-term target of reducing emissions in Canada by 40–45 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030. In contrast, as she said when she was a lobbyist, Smith prefers a “free enterprise, market-based entrepreneurial solution” to the problem of how to decarbonize the economy. For Smith, that transition “doesn’t mean transitioning away from oil and gas. It’s about transitioning away from emissions” through fledgling technologies such as carbon capture and storage, small modular nuclear reactors and the emerging hydrogen economy. “It’s incremental changes of incremental technology that add up to a major reduction in emissions,” she told the Pembina Institute’s Alberta Climate Summit in October 2023. “But none of that can happen in six months, or by 2030. A lot of that might be 2035, might be 2040, might be 2045. That’s why we need to have the long time frame horizon.”

In the meantime, for Smith, impediments to market innovation must be resisted. The UCP government joined litigation before the Supreme Court contesting the federal plastics ban and the federal Impact Assessment Act, rulings that in both cases went against the feds (but arguably only insofar as to say that for both pieces of legislation the federal government needed to tighten up the wording). Among other “pushing back against Ottawa” moves, the UCP invoked the Sovereignty Act against the federal government’s draft clean electricity regulations that call for a net-zero electricity grid by 2035 and threatened to invoke it again in 2024 against the Liberals’ proposed cap on greenhouse gas emissions from the oil and gas sector. As Smith told the National Post, “We’re just simply not going to allow the federal government to take any action that will shut in our production.”

“Premier Smith has been travelling across the country and standing up for Alberta’s interests, especially when it comes to the province’s energy industry,” says Mark Scholz, at the podium for the CAOEC’s State of the Industry event. “They say every generation produces a leader who sets a new direction for its people, a leader who inspires through an ambitious vision anchored to steadfast values and unwavering principles,” says the CEO, to the assembled oil and gas well drilling and service rig executives. “And I’m happy to report that that generational leader is with us here today. Ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased to introduce the premier of Alberta, the honourable Danielle Smith.” The crowd welcomes their premier with loud applause.

Tadzio Richards is Associate Editor at Alberta Views. His story on Alberta’s 2023 election campaign ran in September 2023.

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It started with a couple of Tucker fanboys whose companies sponsored the event, one of whom was the president of the Bow Valley Credit Union, paying homage to the ostracized Fox News host by assuring him that “We’re here because, just like you [i.e., the Crowd], we share your values. And we care about what’s going on in our province.”

Then a giant screen lit up the dark conference room, and a larger than life virtual Tucker imparted some timeless wisdom: “The second you decide to tell the truth about something, you are filled with this supernatural, this power from somewhere else” that “makes you stronger.”

Down on the stage itself, the actual Tucker strode confidently out of the shadows, engulfed in the deafening rhymes of “American Badass” by “his friend” Kid Rock, whose songs contain a litany of dog whistles and catcalls for the titillation of the alt-right: “No Rogaine in the propane flow / The chosen one, I’m the living proof / With the gift of gab from the city of truth / I jabbed and stabbed and knocked critics back / And I did not stutter when I said that”…

The Crowd of roughly 4,000 stood in unison and showered the honoured guest with adulation. I had committed to myself that I would not stand for this man, but my neighbours’ glances at my seated position and the growing fervour of the Crowd, along with my trepidation at being outed as a MAGA-opposed journalist, weakened my resolve, though I did manage to refrain from clapping.

Tucker Carlson’s attestations are some combination of stupid, spurious and unfair. They’re also dangerous.

“Thank you, truly, for having me,” Tucker said with a cackle and a smile. “That was the wildest intro I’ve had, ever.”

As a professional propagandist, Tucker centred his message on “Truth,” but his first order of business was to butter up the crowd. He started by confessing something he had “never” shared publicly: that he was, in fact, part Canadian. This, he said, explained his long fascination with and concern for Canada, and the reason he had come to “liberate Canada” from the clutches of our dictatorial prime minister.

“I’ve been everywhere in your country, and I think it’s a remarkable place.” That includes Calgary, a city he apparently has visited many times, “because of your mountains, which I found just beyond belief, really the prettiest places I’ve ever been. This is the prettiest country I’ve ever been in.” The Crowd, sufficiently flattered and fawning, despite the backhanded compliments about Canada and Canadians, were now ready to hear the gospel according to Tucker.

The most impressive thing about Tucker’s “Liberating Canada” rant was just how many right-wing talking points, massaged for a Canadian audience, he was able to cram into such a short speech. He relentlessly attacked Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who he said was a “weird little cross-dresser” and the audience’s “enemy,” and whose government should be opposed to the “maximum extent of your ability.” (Rousing cheers!)

He complained about the federal government’s alleged erosion of our civil liberties, “not the ones granted to you by the Crown, but the ones granted to you by God.” (Nodding heads, a smattering of applause.) These included not only freedom of speech, but also freedom to own guns to protect ourselves from rising crime rates. (Big applause!) He claimed that all media in Canada was state media, and therefore biased toward the left. “I can tune in any hour of the day to learn that I’m racist for driving an SUV and not being trans.” (Knee-slapping and hoots of laughter.)

Such attestations, of course, are some combination of stupid, spurious and unfair; they’re also dangerous because of the context in which Tucker embeds them. Tucker made it very clear in his introduction that afternoon how divisive the meta-message was going to be. “The main thing that I want to say in the short time I’m allotted today is that you should recognize what is happening to you. This is not a political debate to which you’ve been invited to participate. This is a destruction of you and your culture and your beliefs and your children and your future as a country.”

The appropriate response to such utter BS might have been silence punctuated with the odd hoot of “You’re nuts!” Instead, the Crowd lurched to its feet, thousands of hands clapping in a collective appreciation of a man who, it would seem, expressed their “shared values.”

This is when the darkness became darker. Tucker turned the opportunity to critique BC’s safe injection sites policy into a tale of the government giving fentanyl to your kids. And “if they are giving your children fentanyl without telling you, they’re trying to kill your children, which are your inheritance, so the only meaningful thing you will ever produce on earth.”

He then moved on to the federal government’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) program, which, he maintained, is encouraging Canadians that are not actually terminally ill “to submit to being killed by the government, who won’t release the statistics. Like, what is that What is that!?”

“Murder!” yells a voice from the crowd.

“Yeah, it’s genocide, that’s exactly what it is. It’s killing large groups of people.”

At this point, my friend Jim and I turned to look at each other with total disbelief. I had invited Jim to accompany me to Tucker’s Calgary stop on his “Sworn Enemies Tour” for a little companionship and moral support in what I knew would be a challenging environment. Jim lives in Canmore and is a retired American environmentalist who cut his teeth as a young activist in Utah by standing in front of ultraconservative John Birch Society meetings and explaining why the Vietnam War was wrong. Later, he would tell me he had felt more afraid in the Convention Centre that night than he ever had at a John Birch meeting.

“I felt like a Jewish tailor at a Hitler rally,” Jim said.

“And who are those people [being killed by the government], by the way?” Tucker asked. “Again, we don’t really know, because the government hasn’t released the stats. What percentage of those were born in Canada I bet right around 100 per cent.”

Where is he going with this?

“How many people who arrived in Canada in the last 10 years have opted into the MAID program I don’t know, but I bet it’s right around zero.”

The Crowd is very silent now, in that you-can-hear-a-pin-drop sense of the word. Can you hear the dog whistle?

“I bet there is zero conversation about that in this country, because I know this country, I know what it’s like. It’s too horrible. No one wants to talk about it. You should talk about it. But more than anything, you should internalize the message of that, which is: They hate me. They hate me to the point they are willing to kill me, which they are.”

Welcome to the great replacement theory, reimagined for the Canadian mind.

We had to stand in line for an hour and a half to get into the rally, which gave me ample time to observe those who would become the Crowd, and they appeared to be a totally normal gathering of Calgarians, the kind of people you might encounter on a late Friday afternoon stroll down Stephen Avenue Mall. A few attendees wore their hearts on their sleeves: three “Proud Member of a Small Fringe Minority” sweatshirts, some Christian private-school T-shirts, and the usual “I Heart Alberta Oil” swag, but mostly it was fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, and couples, mostly older men paired up with (much) younger women. The overwhelming majority of the audience were white men, of course, typically macho guys in upscale ersatz cowboy outfits, as well as numerous snappily dressed business casuals on long lunch breaks, decked out in their uniforms of white button-downs, crisp blue blazers and pointy brown shoes.

And now, here they are, cheering as Tucker attacks the CBC as part of the “woke crowd” that “hate[s] you, that’s what they’re saying. They hate you. They are saying, you are bad. That’s exactly what they’re saying, don’t lie to yourself.”

There were many more outrageous claims, ludicrous innuendoes and pernicious dog whistles: about how immigrants were diluting the voting power of (white) Canadians “who are vested in that country, people who were born there, who have lived there long-term, who understand the history of the culture of the country, who are bought in,” and how (white) Christians are similarly being persecuted. All of this persecution is being done, apparently, under the guise of public safety, “a euphemism for hard-edge fascism, actually,” said Tucker. “And frankly, I’m a little more comfortable with the old-fashioned variety, where guys in tight uniforms goose-step through your towns. At least you know who you’re fighting, and you know what it’s going to take to liberate your town.”

When I first heard that our premier had agreed to join Tucker on stage, I, like every Albertan I knew, was appalled.

I remember being dragged by my father to the Billy Graham Crusade at McMahon Stadium in the summer of 1981 as a 13-year-old boy. I don’t remember being affected one way or another, but over seven nights, more than 164,000 people came to listen to what the Calgary Sun called Graham’s much-needed gospel of “belief and hope” during an economic downturn that saw increasing rates of divorce, suicide and crime.

But Tucker is a proselytizer of a very different kind. And the mainstream media in Canada consistently underestimates him. Most coverage of the January 24 rally ignored Tucker’s hateful rhetoric in favour of what Premier Danielle Smith had to say in her interview with him. CBC’s The National framed the story around the political risk to Premier Smith for consorting with what Erin Collins referred to as a “peddler of misinformation,” a rather weak label for someone that Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy at Yale University and the author of How Fascism Works, has unreservedly branded as the latest in a long line of American fascists.

Like every good storyteller, Tucker constantly circled back to the beginning, where educated elites and leftist ideologues are trying to castrate our children or kill them with fentanyl. “They are not people who are trying to help; they are people who are trying to hurt you. Anyone who goes after your children, anyone who encourages you to have fewer children, is trying to make you extinct. It’s literally that simple.”

And the only appropriate response is violence. “How do you think [“attacks” on children] would fly in Serbia?” he wondered aloud. “You wouldn’t even get to the next sentence before you got shot.” (Laughter.) “Because you’re trying to kill someone’s kids! Your average Serb, whatever you think of them, doesn’t have generations of therapy talk that acts as a logical intermediary [to] seeing what’s actually going on. They’re trying to kill my kids, I’m the father, I won’t allow it, I will lay my life down to prevent it. It’s literally that simple.”

The Crowd stands, wild with applause, while Premier Smith waits in the shadows offstage to join Tucker for an interview.

When I first heard that our premier had agreed to join Tucker on stage, I, like every Albertan I knew, was appalled. But upon reflection, Tucker and Smith do have a lot in common. Indeed, before she entered provincial politics, Smith was the host of a Tucker-inspired radio talk show that, in the words of former Conservative MP Lee Richardson, “stoked division, hate and fear in listeners, with negative rhetoric, culture wars and conspiracy theories. The more provocative, outrageous or extreme the views expressed, the higher the ratings.”

Shortly after she became leader of the UCP, and thus premier, Smith gave an address to the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce and then sat down for a chat with the chamber’s president. She joked that her principal secretary had “a Ph.D. in propaganda” but only “the good kind of propaganda.” She must have been referring to the tens of millions of taxpayer dollars the Alberta government invests in pro-oil, anti-climate and anti-vaccine nonsense.

Since then, Smith has demonstrated a half-hearted commitment to the truth, a tendency to misrepresent history and a propensity to align herself with questionable characters such as David Parker and his Take Back Alberta movement. “Alberta is the heartland of conservatism in this country and the last stand against what we’re up against,” Parker told the CBC before the January 24 show, “which is this totalitarian creep of socialism.”

Today, however, Smith would be on her best behaviour, the genteel Thatcher to Tucker’s chilling Goebbels. She started off by defending her right to sit down with a hate-spewing and divisive propagandist because she doesn’t agree with every word of any of her interviewees, and then batted away any questions about the “human rights” violations represented by the arrest of the Coutts Four for allegedly conspiring to kill RCMP officers. She did use the moment to say what she apparently wanted the world to hear, that “I think we should just double down and double our oil and gas production”—this, less than a month after the end of the hottest year on record.

But what possible benefit did Premier Smith stand to gain by partaking in an interview with a hate-spewing fascist And why did she volunteer to introduce him again at the Edmonton show that night, a show she wasn’t even scheduled to attend?

The obvious answer is that she and Tucker (and fellow travellers W. Brett Wilson, Jordan Peterson and Conrad Black) are birds of a feather, and that the Alberta leg of Tucker’s “Sworn Enemies Tour” was the perfect trial balloon to test extreme ideas in the hope that they might one day become mainstream, a popular strategy among populists that allows leaders to slowly but surely instill a new vision of what is possible and acceptable.

Three days after the Tucker rallies in Calgary and Edmonton, Premier Smith promised Albertans a new “parental rights” policy that not only discriminates against trans and gender-diverse children and youth but is, in the estimation of two MRU professors published at The Conversation, “the most extensive, draconian and unbalanced proposal of any conservative province to date.”

Coincidence I think not.

A couple of days after surviving Tucker, I sent a short summary of what I had experienced to a bunch of friends and colleagues. Predictably most were outraged, but a few responses surprised me. A friend from high school in the 1980s who had attended the Calgary rally suggested “Everyone’s entitled to their own opinions.”

Another long-time friend from Calgary, while acknowledging that it’s “chilling that guys I think I share values with are falling under that spell,” also admitted, “I’m angry about some things too… and the radical left can be just as repulsive in a less obvious way.”

On the way out of the event I asked a few folks what they thought about the rally. The response was unanimous: “Great!”

Who might he align with When pressed, Friend B reminded me that “Canada has all the extremes. A normal dude like me feels somewhat separated from reality with some of the things being pushed down my throat. This is a minor example… but there is now a basket of menstrual products on the counter in the men’s room at work… I won’t be rioting, but it’s a minor aggravation that seems unnecessary to me and it’s the pushback against the ‘wokeness’ of it all that appeals to the Tucker crowd.”

Perhaps the most informative response was from Ruben Nelson, who grew up in Calgary and became an internationally recognized futurist who has spent the better part of his adult life trying to understand the forces that are now reshaping our lives, our world and our future. “I now conclude that what we are seeing is not simply an example of extremists having a night on the town. Rather, we are caught up in a long-term, stealthy effort by committed folks to ‘groom’ Albertans (and any others who will play) so that, voluntarily, more and more of us come to tolerate these folks as ‘somewhat offensive, but within what is now normal.’ Once Albertans accept these folks as part of the normal, and therefore legitimate, discourse, these folks own us.

“They’ve been at it for decades, and to date there is not enough in sight, let alone public outrage, to create an effective defence against them.”

On the way out of the Convention Centre I asked a few folks what they thought about the rally. The response was unanimous: “Great!” One young business casual, wearing the standard-issue pointy brown shoes and white button-down, this time under a tortoise-shell jacket instead of a blue blazer, gushed “I could have sat there for another two hours!”

Outside, in the disinfecting sunlight and fresh air, Jim and I ran into a lone protester in a well-worn red hoodie. He refused to provide his name, and as we chatted for a bit he confided to me that he was going to college and hoped to become a journalist. His sign explained why: “PREMIER SMITH’S MENTOR TUCKER CARLSON IS A LIAR.”

Two older men, well dressed and silver haired, overheard us and scoffed, “Enjoy the pedophilia.”

Journalists scoured the milling attendees for quotes. Two older women, who also withheld their names, told the Toronto Star that everyone needed to listen to Tucker because he wasn’t afraid to tell the truth. One of them paraphrased part of Tucker’s conclusion that “your timidity needs to be replaced by bravery…. [Cheers and applause.] The first thing that you need to do, before changing anything in your country, is to change everything about your heart. You have to be—right?!—ready for a contest where the stakes are existential.”

A light came on in her eyes and she said, “If I can make a difference with one person and that one person tells another person, it’ll just do this.” And then she spread her arms wide and twinkled her fingers, suggesting how Tucker’s fascistic ideas could travel by word of mouth until they consumed the entire world.

Jeff Gailus grew up in Calgary and now lives in Montana. He is the author of Little Black Lies (RMB, 2012).

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