Canola Archives - Alberta Views

Creating a Buzz

Doug Firby — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 17:00:34 +0000

It was a frosty winter day, but Calgary supply chain specialist Dave Acquah was steaming. “I just renewed my auto registration for 2026,” he fumed on the Tesla Owners Club of Alberta Facebook page. “$300 total ($200 EV tax). I need someone to put me in a pile of snow for 5 hrs to cool my body temperature down. That electric vehicle tax.”

Acquah, who bought a 2024 Tesla Model Y, shares a frustration many owners of electric vehicles (EVs) in Alberta feel: they live in one of only two provinces in the country—the other is Saskatchewan—in which you’re taxed for simply owning a zero-emissions vehicle.

It’s not so much the existence of the tax that annoys Acquah and other EV owners. Instead, they say it’s a symptom of a larger anti-electric-car attitude in Alberta’s UCP government, which is actively stifling local EV adoption. The effort is marked by heated rhetoric by conservatives who see the vehicles as part of a Liberal anti-oil conspiracy. Federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, for example, once claimed an EV sales mandate would be akin to “banning the rural way of life.” Danielle Smith called federal EV adoption targets “environmental extremism.”

But if the UCP is hostile to EVs, they’re swimming against a global tide. One in four new cars sold around the world in 2025 were electric. Some 20 million EVs were sold globally that year. In China fully half of new cars are EVs. Alberta lags far behind not only that rate but even other Canadian provinces. BC has 195,000 registered EVs on the road, for example, nearly 10 times Alberta’s meagre total of 20,000.

EVs remain polarizing in Alberta, says Andrew Batiuk, president of the Electric Vehicle Association of Alberta (EVAA), where they pit environmentalists and tech fans against supporters of oil and gas who perceive a threat to the province’s economy. As the naysayers see it, the more EVs there are, the less fossil fuel that gets burned. And that’s a sore spot for Albertans who rely on oil and gas for their livelihoods. That’s partly why the province aggressively opposed the Electric Vehicle Availability Standard—the so-called EV sales mandate—that Justin Trudeau’s government introduced in December 2023 to reduce air pollution and fight climate change. Prime Minister Mark Carney has since cancelled the mandate.

Opponents aren’t wrong that the cars reduce the world’s demand for oil. It’s estimated that EVs already displace somewhere between 1.3 and 1.8 million barrels per day of oil consumption. That’s a fraction of the over 100 million barrels of oil currently being burned daily. Nonetheless, the trend has been noticed in the oil industry, which provides 144,000 jobs in Alberta. It also threatens a government that relies on that industry. Alberta is projecting $13.2-billion in non-renewable resource revenues in 2026/2027, 18 per cent of its total revenue.

All of this biases our government against EVs. Premier Smith has even gone so far as to aggressively promote the production of so-called blue hydrogen from natural gas for use in hydrogen-powered vehicles. Across the world, sales of these rivals to EVs are faltering. The cars are virtually absent from Alberta. The province’s only public hydrogen refuelling station, at Blackjacks Roadhouse in Nisku, which Smith’s government helped fund, closed down permanently in early 2025.

The economic impact of oil and gas gives the industry an outsized influence on provincial policy. Charges Daniel Breton, president of Electric Mobility Canada: “I see the premier of Alberta more or less as a puppet of the oil and gas industry, and her government as well.”

But for all of this hostility, EVs may yet prevail—even in Alberta.

Anti-EV campaigners often draw on outdated anecdotes and at times deliberate misinformation. One favourite claim is that EVs—with their multiple battery packs—are worse for the environment than gas-powered vehicles. Initially, an EV does indeed have a higher carbon footprint, Batiuk says. Making the batteries is energy intensive and requires rare-earth minerals. But the gap with gas-powered vehicles evens out within one to two years of ownership, depending on distance driven. After that, the carbon footprint of an EV becomes substantially smaller, especially since Alberta has converted its electricity generation from primarily coal-fired plants to natural gas, solar and wind.

The EVs-are-worse argument has been debunked by no less than the Trump-era Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), whose website announces: “FACT: Electric vehicles typically have a smaller carbon footprint than gasoline cars, even when accounting for the electricity used for charging, plus they are far more efficient when it comes to energy use.”

Other biases are almost comical. Angie Dean, president of the Tesla Owners Club of Alberta, says someone once asked her if it was OK to wash her electric car.

Ironically, the people who make and sell EVs don’t always help. “Misinformation is a huge problem, even when it comes to car manufacturers,” says Electric Mobility’s Breton. He argues some manufacturers are “spreading crap” about EVs—even their own models—because they don’t particularly want to build the vehicles, or are frustrated by “unrealistic” government EV sales mandates. The “green halo” effect of having an EV in, say, Ford’s lineup might be good for the company’s marketing image. But EVs are costlier to make, and many, such as the F-150 Lightning, are sold at a loss. (Ford recently announced it is ending production of the truck.)

Anti-EV campaigners often draw on outdated anecdotes and deliberate misinformation.

Dealers sometimes discourage buyers from choosing EVs. Doug Green, dealer principal of High Country Chevrolet Buick GMC in High River, says he invested $250,000 in equipment upgrades at the dealership to service EVs at the urging of GM, but he has sold only three of the vehicles, at a net loss of $10,000. “I was so happy to be rid of those,” he says. He also paid $6,000 to ship three additional unsold EVs to dealers in Quebec. Green says one customer in town bought a Blazer EV, only to discover she’d have to shell out $3,000 to install curbside charging from her duplex, which doesn’t have a garage. “She was unprepared,” Green said. Meanwhile, he says, the only public EV-charging station in town was out of commission. Chargers have since been added at the Ford and Chrysler dealerships.

Angie Dean wasn’t surprised to hear of the GMC dealer’s attitude. “I’ve heard so many stories from people who have gone into car dealerships and been excited about an electric car and [are told], ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. Let me show you this gas car here.’”

And then there’s the myth that EVs don’t work in cold weather. Green claims an electric SUV with a rated 500-km range is really only capable of travelling 300 km, because you shouldn’t fully charge the battery. And, he contends, it will suffer dramatic power losses in the cold. “If you drive in the wintertime, and you put winter tires on, then it’s going to go in half,” he says. “If it’s cold out, then it’s going to go in half again, and if there’s snow then it’s going to go in half again.”

Dean scoffs at Green’s doomerism. She said her Tesla Model Y might lose 40 per cent of its range when the temperature hits minus 40, but that’s “extremely uncommon.” In Calgary’s more typical winter temperatures, she says she sees an estimated 15–20 per cent loss of range. Yet some people just don’t believe her. She recalls an incident in February 2025 when she parked at a local Home Depot. “This guy walks up to me and says, ‘You know those things don’t work here in the winter.’ And I was, like, I’m right here! Do you think I just pushed the car here?”

Dean’s experience reflects research by Recurrent, a US-based organization that tracks EV performance. The study, conducted during the winter of 2025–26, analyzed data from more than 30,000 vehicles across 34 models from 13 automakers. Although performance varied by make, the study found that EVs maintain on average around 80 per cent of their rated range in freezing conditions.

Meanwhile an underreported fact is that gas-powered cars are likewise less efficient in colder weather. The EPA estimates that a drop in temperature from 24°C to 7°C can increase gas consumption by 12–28 per cent. And EVs actually start more reliably than gas cars do in the winter, because they aren’t affected by cold-sensitive oil and have no sparkplugs, which are especially susceptible to low temperatures.

Even when people appeal to facts to disparage EVs, their assertions are often only half true. The UCP government claims, for example, that electric vehicles do more damage to roads than gas-powered cars do, because they’re heavier. An EV does tend to weigh more than its internal combustion engine equivalent—perhaps 10–15 per cent more. But as Breton notes, EVs are lighter than the giant pickup trucks so common in Alberta, and the province isn’t levying a special tax on pickups. “Alberta and Saskatchewan are both taxing EVs under some dubious excuse,” Breton says. “It has a lot more to do with politics than facts.”

Horner, the Alberta finance minister, also justified the $200 tax when he introduced it in February 2025 as a way to offset revenue lost by drivers who don’t buy gasoline or diesel, which is taxed by the province. But Breton questions why the flat rate is disproportionately high. Albertans, on average, drive 15,200 km per year, consuming 1,216 litres of fuel in a typical mid-sized vehicle. Under the province’s current fuel tax of 13 cents per litre, that would translate into $158 in road taxes—21 per cent less than what EV owners must fork over. Says the EVAA’s Andrew Batiuk: “It seems punitive.”

In an emailed statement, Horner claims the tax is “fair” and states: “Alberta’s tax on electric vehicles is in line with what drivers of a typical internal combustion engine vehicle pay in fuel tax annually.” EV proponents find such stonewalling typical. Batiuk says his organization just can’t get the ear of government: “We don’t have much of a relationship with them.”

And if Alberta’s government were truly interested in a full accounting of the costs and benefits of EVs vs. traditional vehicles, it would consider other facts. Pollution from gas- and diesel-fuelled cars and trucks is killing people. A March 2022 federal report analyzed data from 2015 and found that 1,200 Canadians, including 82 Albertans, died prematurely that year from the effects of pollution from cars and trucks. Another 2.7 million people suffered from acute respiratory symptoms. Breton argues considerations such as marginally higher EV weight need to be weighed against the $9.5-billion annual health cost to Canadians from gas-powered vehicle pollution.

Horner’s statement dismissed pollution and health concerns. “Alberta has some of the cleanest air in Canada and the world, and that isn’t changing,” it read. “Our transportation emissions have declined 12 per cent since 2015 and will keep falling.”

But the main barrier to EV adoption in this province isn’t special punitive taxes, uninterested EV dealers or disinformation. Alberta drivers won’t fully embrace EVs until there are enough public chargers available across the province to ease so-called “range anxiety”—the fear that one’s car battery will deplete far from home. Similarly, the extent of the local charging network affects whether or not we will attract EV-driving tourists from places like BC, says Danielle Wiess, director of transportation initiatives at the Fernie-based Community Energy Association. “EV drivers go where they can charge.”

But the UCP government is offering no help to expand Alberta’s charging network. The province had 429 EV charging stations in December 2025. That’s just 6 per cent of the 7,000 chargers found in BC, which has 5.7 million residents versus Alberta’s five million.

In 2020 the Community Energy Association managed the Peaks to Prairies charging network, which connected communities from Canmore to Medicine Hat and south to the US border. Working with local municipalities, ATCO installed 20 direct-current fast-charging sites across southern Alberta. The $1.2-million contribution from the then-NDP government was the last time Alberta has funded any EV charging infrastructure, says Wiess.

Charging one’s EV at home also remains a vexing problem for Alberta’s renters and condo dwellers. Provincial building codes don’t require EV charging capacity to be added to new multi-unit residential buildings—condos and high-rise apartments. “We’re still building condos and apartments without charging infrastructure considered,” says the EVAA’s Batiuk. “At [a single-family] home, you can plug in an EV. But when you live in a condo or apartment, you don’t have the option to charge at home. Selling that person an EV is a more difficult task.”

The situation is even more challenging in rural areas that lack the fast EV chargers found in the Peaks to Prairies network. “If I have a boat to pull to a lake, and I pull it to Little Bow Provincial Park, there’s no chargers down there,” says Green, the GMC dealer.

Under a joint federal/municipal program, incentives cover up to nearly half the cost of installing chargers at businesses, condos, Indigenous communities, public facilities and not-for-profit organizations. But remote communities that install such infrastructure can encounter sticker shock just to keep their chargers operating. In December 2025 a City of Cold Lake committee reported that it would need to quadruple the rate the city offers at its city-owned EV charger. Wiess says Level 3 (also known as DC fast) chargers incur high demand costs if they’re used infrequently.

Alberta is also at odds with provinces that have created incentives to purchase EVs. BC offered rebates of $4,000 to buyers of electric vehicles but scrapped the program in May 2025 under budget pressure. Before the program ended, zero-emission vehicles accounted for almost one in four new vehicles sold in BC. In 2025 BC registered almost as many EVs in just its fourth quarter as Alberta’s overall number of EVs. (Alberta and Newfoundland are the only provinces that don’t provide Statistics Canada with data on new EV registrations. They only report total registered EVs.) Quebec, with a population of nine million, has even bigger incentives than BC did, and registered 82,700 EVs in 2025.

The feds announced in January they will allow 49,000 Chinese EVs into Canada. Previously tariffs made these prohibitive.

The ingrained resistance to EVs in Alberta manifests in some of the most unlikely places. Batiuk discovered that the owners of Ol’ MacDonald’s Resort and Campground, on Buffalo Lake about an hour northeast of Red Deer, imposed a $60/night EV surcharge in 2024. A notice on the resort’s website stated its “electricity etiquette” rule is “a small price to pay to ensure the fair and sustainable use of these shared resources.” (The Alberta Motor Association reports that the typical cost to charge an EV in Alberta ranges from free—at roughly half of Calgary’s public charging stations—to $15 at fast-charging sites such as those in the Peaks to Prairies network.)

Messages left at the resort for listed owner Jean MacDonald were not returned. “We [also] tried to talk to them,” says Batiuk, “and they weren’t interested in talking to us.”

But EV advocates such as Batiuk, Dean and Breton believe EVs will eventually prevail—including in Alberta. The federal government recently committed $1.5-billion to expand Canada’s public EV charging network, so essential to driving the vehicles any distance, especially rurally. Mark Carney’s government also announced in January 2026 that it will allow 49,000 Chinese EVs into the country at a nominal 6.1 per cent tariff rate. Previously a 100 per cent tariff had made the cost of these cars prohibitive. Even premier Smith had called for Carney to drop the tariff and let Chinese EVs in—if only because she hoped it would enable Albertans to sell more canola and pork in China.

Major Chinese manufacturers such as Chery and Geely are preparing to enter the Canadian market. BYD, which in 2025 surpassed Tesla to become the world’s largest EV maker, plans to open 20 dealerships in Canada, first in Toronto, then in Montreal, Vancouver and Calgary.

Those Chinese EVs may comprise just a fraction of the 1.8 million vehicles sold in Canada each year. But more significantly, federal EV incentives are being restored. Sales of EVs across Canada dropped by nearly one-third last year as provincial and federal incentives ended. In February of this year Carney introduced a new, $2.3-billion, five-year program that offers individuals or businesses up to $5,000 to purchase various types of EVs. At the time, the prime minister predicted EVs will reach 75 per cent market share in Canada by 2035 and 90 per cent by 2040.

By the time the federal incentives end in five years, Breton says, they may be unnecessary. This is a point on which EV advocate Breton and EV skeptic Green agree. “I’m not asking for special treatment,” says Breton. “Just don’t stand in the way of progress.” “I’m always interested in change,” says Green. “Just let the free market decide.”

Dean, a planner with the City of Calgary, says she sees beyond the personal benefits of driving an EV. She believes she’s helping future generations, and every effort counts. Someone once told her, “Your one electric car isn’t going to do anything,” she says. “And I replied, ‘But it’s what I can do. If I can do something, I’m going to do it.’ ”

Doug Firby has over four decades of experience in newspapers, including at the Calgary Herald. He’s now president of Troy Media.

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March 24-28, 2025

Alberta Views — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 20:47:39 +0000

Monday, March 24: Premier Danielle Smith vehemently denied accusations that she asked the US to interfere in Canadian federal politics. In an earlier Breitbart interview, Smith had said she told US officials she hoped “we could put [tariffs] on pause,” so Canada could get through an election, because Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre is more aligned with the Trump administration’s agenda.

Tuesday, March 25: Long-time (2015– 2023) NDP MLA Rod Loyola resigned his seat in Edmonton-Ellerslie.

Wednesday, March 26: Former NDP MLA Rod Loyola announced he is running for the federal Liberals in Edmonton Gateway.

March 26: Former Medicine Hat MP LaVar Payne, former Calgary West MP Rob Anders and others launched the “Delegation to Washington” project to determine the level of support in Washington, D.C. for an economic union or statehood for an independent Alberta. According to a Leger poll from March, president Trump’s suggestion that Canada become the “51st state” is supported by only 9 per cent of Canadians and 15 per cent of Albertans.

March 26: The Parkland Institute released a report titled Operation Profit: Private Surgical Contracts Deliver Higher Costs and Longer Waits, which shows that since the province started contracting with for-profit surgical facilities, the average cost per outsourced procedure has risen by 79 per cent compared to those performed in public hospitals. Funding of for-profit facilities has increased by 66 per cent, while funding for public operating rooms increased 12 per cent.

Thursday, March 27: Premier Danielle Smith spoke at a fundraiser in Florida for PragerU (not a university but a far-right propaganda machine) with commentator Ben Shapiro. They discussed how to help Canada elect “solid allies” to the Trump administration. Alberta is paying for her trip and the four staff accompanying her. Shapiro had told outgoing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, “When we take Canada, you will be expelled to Panama to work the canal.”

Friday, March 28: Matt Jones, Minister of Jobs, Economy and Trade, travelled to Germany to meet with companies, potential investors and government officials to promote trade opportunities with Alberta. A delegation of 50 Alberta companies, organizations and post-secondary institutions will join him at Hannover Messe, an industrial trade show. In 2024 Alberta imported $770-million worth of goods from Germany and exported $95-million worth, mostly canola, carbon and pet food.

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Youseepee No-Vax vs. the Green Genie

Sid Marty — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 10:00:07 +0000

Alberta’s renewable power industry was purring pleasantly along on the evening of August 1, 2023, and no wonder: our province was home to 90 per cent of Canada’s new wind and solar projects. But it proved to be a reluctant host. For on August 2 the industry awoke with a start to find itself flailing in the political wind of the UCP government’s if-it-ain’t-broke-break-it parallel reality. Premier Danielle Smith et al. had suddenly announced a seven-month “pause” on all new renewable energy projects. In the interim, the Alberta Utilities Commission was to propose some new guidelines on development. The pause drew sharp rebukes from industry players and clean-energy advocates. According to the Pembina Institute, 53 projects were “abandoned” after the UCP moratorium was announced, putting at risk $33-billion in investments and 24,000 job-years. It turns out that trying to rebottle the green genie can be very expensive.

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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Damming the Rivers

Alex McCuaig — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 19:59:46 +0000

When Captain John Palliser’s mid-19th-century expedition mapped out western Canada for European settlement, southeastern Alberta was a stark landscape. Drought had gripped the area. The parched shortgrass prairie, dotted with cactus and sagebrush and the occasional cottonwood grove along the rivers, appeared ill-suited for agriculture.

Today the region, encompassing much of the South Saskatchewan River basin, is known as Palliser’s Triangle. It runs roughly from its westernmost point near Cardston, north to the confluence of the Red Deer and South Saskatchewan rivers near Oyen, before dipping south to Swift Current, Saskatchewan. And it has a lot of agriculture. This is because the drought that Palliser experienced abated and the region bloomed, as did settlers’ hopes of cultivating crops in the area. Palliser’s report, the first major survey of southeastern Alberta, was dismissed as pessimistic.

That change of perspective was just the first in a cycle in Alberta over the past 125 years, pushed along by dry years and wet years. People in Palliser’s Triangle have regularly had to manage drought or flooding, trying to smooth out the peaks and valleys of water supply. And for over a century now, the solution to flood and drought alike in the region has always been the same—build more irrigation infrastructure.

The Canadian Pacific Railway, having acquired much of the land in Palliser’s Triangle as part of a deal to build a transnational rail line, saw the potential to bring water to lands thought too barren to cultivate for food. It developed the province’s first large irrigation system, hoping to maximize its capacity to ship agricultural products east and transport European settlers and goods west. The CPR system began in 1903 with the construction of a weir at Calgary to divert water from the Bow River to the Chestermere Reservoir. The Bassano Dam, built in 1910, and an extensive network of canals allowed thousands more acres to be irrigated. Southern Alberta soon had one of the most extensive irrigation networks on the continent.

The CPR wasn’t wrong. The combination of a hot, dry climate and available water transformed the region. But today many Albertans are questioning whether further expansion of irrigation infrastructure is a good idea.

The first significant pushback to building more irrigation infrastructure in Alberta came from opponents of the Oldman Dam. Spurred by the 1984 drought in southern Alberta, Premier Peter Lougheed had commissioned a dam at the confluence of the Oldman and the Crowsnest rivers, just north of Pincher Creek. It would create the largest irrigation reservoir in the province. The Piikani Nation, where headgates were to feed a canal network west and north of Lethbridge, fought the project in the courts and on the land. The advocacy group Friends of the Oldman River was launched as well, alarmed that an environmental assessment hadn’t been done for the reservoir and dam.

After a court decision in December 1987 allowed construction of the dam to continue, an emergency debate was held in the legislature. “One of the most justifiable complaints about this project has been that the public—and when we’re talking about $350-million of taxpayers’ money, that means every taxpayer in the province—has not been given ample opportunity to voice their concerns,” said Edmonton-Glengarry MLA John Younie (NDP) in the legislature. “Those objections [are] both economic and environmental.”

Fred Bradley, MLA for Pincher Creek (PC), argued that the future of southern Alberta was at stake. “If we don’t have sufficient storage in the whole South Saskatchewan system, including the Oldman, there’ll be limits to development in the Bow River basin and the Red Deer River basin,” he told the legislature. By this Bradley meant that economic opportunities in those regions could be reduced if Saskatchewan didn’t receive its allotted water under a 1969 interprovincial agreement that dictates how much water must flow across the provincial boundary near Medicine Hat.

In May 1992, after the Oldman Dam was completed, a court-ordered environmental examination recommended that the dam be decommissioned, concluding “the environmental, social and economic costs of the project” exceeded its economic benefits. The Alberta government ignored the report.

Nearly four decades later, the arguments for and against more dams in the South Saskatchewan basin are much the same. People discuss the role of infrastructure in preventing flooding, mitigating drought and creating water security (for both Alberta and our neighbours), and question whether the benefits outweigh the financial and environmental costs.

The reservoir created by the Oldman Dam, for example, hasn’t always ensured water security. In December 2023 the province had 51 active water shortage advisories as drought gripped southern Alberta. In mid-August 2023 the MD of Pincher Creek saw its intake pipe exposed as water levels in the Oldman Reservoir dropped precipitously. The town had to truck drinking water in. That was also the situation for the rural municipality in 2016. Nor has the Oldman Dam always provided security to irrigators whose canals are fed by its reservoir. The initial water allotment for local farmers to begin the 2024 growing season was half the annual average.

But there have been undeniable economic benefits. Since the Oldman Dam opened, the number of irrigated acres in Lethbridge Northern Irrigation District has risen by more than 60 per cent. Irrigation has prompted a boom all along the Highway 3 corridor from Lethbridge to Medicine Hat, now an agri-food hub that processes potatoes and sugar beets grown using irrigation. The corridor includes greenhouses that fill Alberta’s grocery stores with tomatoes and cucumbers, while lentils, beans and peas flow through to international markets. The beef industry is also dependent on irrigation to supply feed crops and power “feedlot alley,” just outside Fort Macleod. Feedlots generate $1.6-billion in farm receipts in Lethbridge County alone.

According to a 2021 report by the Alberta Irrigation Districts Association (AIDA), irrigated acreage collectively represents less than 4.5 per cent of all cultivated land in Alberta’s 13 irrigation districts but produces more than a quarter of the province’s agri-food GDP.

Everyone can agree that the winter of 2023–2024 wasn’t the first time southeastern Alberta has experienced drought. Where people disagree is in what we should do about it.

Earlier this year AIDA released a report on the future of water management in southern Alberta. “The Adaptation Roadmap for the South Saskatchewan River Basin” recommends a multi-option build-out over 20 years involving more infrastructure, including a new dam on the Bow River just south of Brooks, another upstream near Cochrane, a third on the Red Deer River east of that city and a fourth on the upper Belly River, along the western edge of the Kainai Nation, southwest of Lethbridge.

The report also proposes a new off-stream reservoir—one supplied by a canal or pipe—along the Red Deer River south of Oyen to provide irrigation to the Special Areas, three sparsely populated municipalities atop Palliser’s Triangle. The Special Areas were constituted by the province in response to the mass abandonment of the area during the 1930s Dustbowl, and they have remained under provincial governance ever since. Irrigation could transform the region.

The AIDA report is currently being evaluated by the province. Budget 2023 allocated $5-million to study the feasibility of the Eyremore Dam near Brooks, with a report due in spring 2025.

Richard Phillips, general manager of the Bow River Irrigation District, is likewise bullish on building more infrastructure. He says AIDA’s report balances the needs of southern Alberta’s irrigators against those of municipalities while creating more resilience against not only water-supply variations consistent with historical trends but also those predicted by climate change modelling.

Phillips is also the chair of Irrigating Alberta, a consortium of 10 irrigation districts set up to manage the nearly $1-billion that has been allocated to the Alberta Irrigation Modernization (AIM) program. AIM, announced in 2021, is the province’s largest-ever one-time investment in irrigation. The districts themselves are contributing $163-million. More than $407-million will come from the Canada Infrastructure Bank, with the province contributing the remaining $245-million. The 56 projects covered under AIM—including four new off-stream reservoirs—have the potential to increase Alberta’s irrigated area by 84,000 hectares.

Phillips says demand is high for expanding irrigation, but he argues new infrastructure won’t lead to more water being used. In the past, “expansion of irrigation districts has been based on [creating] efficiencies …both on-farm improvements and district improvements,” says Phillips. “We’ve more than doubled the irrigated area since the 1970s but we truly don’t use any more water than we did then.”

In 1976 southern Alberta’s 320,000 hectares of irrigated land was using 2.1 billion m² of water annually. As of 2022 some 600,000 hectares in Alberta were being irrigated using 2 billion m² of water. A 2015 report prepared for irrigators, “Economic Value of Irrigation in Alberta,” says water efficiency in Alberta almost doubled from 1965 to 2010, largely through the use of more-precise irrigation systems.

Now, much of the AIM funding will be allocated to converting open canals to pipelines. This is projected to reduce the estimated 10 per cent of a southern Alberta canal’s water that is currently lost to evaporation.

But water needs vary year to year. A flash drought in 2017 and a prolonged one across western Canada in 2021 saw irrigation districts divert more water than was typical. In wet years such as 2010 through 2015, districts diverted far less. So new infrastructure in Alberta would be about “taking a long-term view… to improve water management for both wet extremes and dry extremes and everything in between,” says Phillips.

Just as with Alberta’s last major drought, which lasted from 2001 into the spring of 2002, the end of 2023 going into 2024 saw an El Niño weather pattern dry up southern Alberta before transitioning into a more neutral pattern. After shrinking alarmingly over the winter, reservoirs in Phillips’s district and the neighbouring Eastern Irrigation District, which draw water from the Bow, were near or above normal levels heading into the growing season.

The “solution” to flood and drought alike has always been the same—build more irrigation infrastructure.

Asked why more infrastructure is needed if Alberta has managed to weather two major droughts in the past quarter century, as well as several extremely dry years, Phillips pointed to the situation faced earlier this year by irrigators who rely on the Oldman system. Going into 2024 the Oldman Dam reservoir was at its second-lowest level ever—drier only in the spring of 2002. The St. Mary Reservoir, whose namesake river feeds into the Oldman downstream of the dam, began this year nearly empty. That situation led to an initial halving of the normal water allotment for St. Mary River Irrigation District farmers, down to eight inches.

“It was a very different picture there,” says Phillips. “This Roadmap (report) isn’t just about the Bow but the whole South Saskatchewan. Many recommendations will improve the Oldman and its tributaries as well.”

And the Roadmap isn’t just about irrigation, says Phillips; it will also develop resilience for flood and drought management. Indeed the report (and nearly every similar one commissioned by the province in the past two decades) says a changing climate is the main reason to build more water infrastructure. “If climate-change models are accurate—and time will tell—we’d expect to see more extreme cycles of flood and drought,” said Phillips. “We’ve seen some pretty crazy things in recent years… Last year we had a good snowpack in the mountains, but it all came down a full month before you would expect to see it. If that continues, it just becomes so much more important to be able to capture the water when it’s available.”

Southeastern Alberta saw record flooding events in 2010 caused by overflowing creeks running off the Cypress Hills. That was only a prelude to the swamping of communities along the Bow and the Elbow rivers in 2013, including downtown Calgary. Says Phillips: “This Roadmap is about adapting to highly variable water supply so we can still have the water we need, regardless of what the weather is looking like.”

Do the benefits outweigh the costs The Oldman reservoir hasn’t always ensured water security.

But just as they were in the 1980s during construction of the Oldman Dam, the benefits and drawbacks of more dams and reservoirs are open to debate. Biologist Lorne Fitch has been vocal in his opposition to more such infrastructure in Alberta. Fitch worked with Alberta Fish and Wildlife for 35 years before teaching at the University of Calgary and co-founding the riparian stewardship organization Cows and Fish.

“We have seriously overallocated water diversion flows in all of the southern regions,” he says. “As a consequence, many river sections aren’t functioning ecologically anymore. Fish populations have declined, riparian cottonwood communities have suffered, and so the overall impact of irrigation on our rivers has been profoundly negative.”

The Alberta government, despite its enthusiasm for irrigation, doesn’t dispute Fitch’s assessment of the state of wildlife. It announced at the start of a recent and ongoing fisheries engagement process that “native trout populations across the east slopes of Alberta have experienced severe declines in population size and distribution.” A 2018 U of C research paper shows that the population of rainbow trout in the Bow River, for example, shrank by as much as 50 per cent from 2003 to 2013 (Fitch wasn’t one of the study’s authors). This finding was corroborated by Alberta Environment field samples in 2018, 2019 and 2020.

The moratorium the government enacted in 2006 on issuing new water licences in the South Saskatchewan River basin eased some pressure on the environment, says Fitch. But he argues the move didn’t come in time. The amount of water that has already been allocated, he says, can, in a bad year, exceed the supply. “The reality is, the volume that has been licensed may, in some years, exceed the flow in our rivers. The past hasn’t been a good template for the future.”

In 1988 Alberta’s irrigation districts used their full water allocation on the South Saskatchewan River basin. Between that year and the 2006 moratorium, a half-billion more cubic metres of water was allocated from the basin. Collectively Alberta’s irrigation districts today comprise by far the largest water-licence holder in the province.

Moreover, new dams and reservoirs could put pressure on the shortgrass prairie, as the financial allure of cultivating native grasslands might prove too tempting to ignore. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature has called the Great Plains “the world’s most endangered ecosystem,” with more than 50 per cent of it converted to crops and much of the rest intensively grazed.

While Fitch isn’t against all developments that impact water—whether irrigation, industrial expansion or resource extraction—he says there doesn’t appear to be much will in Alberta for exploring how much is too much. “We’ve failed to recognize limits and thresholds. The more we cross those lines in the sand, the less resilient we are to changes—and climate change is going to be a big factor, a wrench in the works.” If our environment is already overextended because of our inability to respect ecological limits, he says, “we’re in serious trouble.”

Fitch is critical of the AIDA’s Roadmap report, calling it a product of the “irrigation lobby.” He describes the 19th-century economic theory known as the “Jevons paradox,” whereby technology increases the efficiency of a resource and lowers costs, which in turn further drives demand and ultimately increases overall use of the resource. And, indeed, greater efficiencies haven’t appreciably reduced the overall amount of water used by Alberta irrigators.

In the driest parts of winter 2023–2024, Fitch said the common refrain from farmers, politicians and “the man on the street” was that they hoped more snow and rain would save southern Alberta from drought. “The problem is, hope isn’t a strategy,” he says. “It’s an acquiescence to doing nothing or doing the wrong things. And that’s why we need a better, overarching, objective review of how we manage water.”

A key part of such a review, he explained, would be to help more Albertans understand how logging on the Eastern Slopes of the Rockies is limiting forests’ ability to act as a sponge. Healthy forests slow the release of runoff in times of both drought and flooding. “But the larger the footprint of logging, the greater the runoff…. We’ve subjected the sponge to too much pressure, and the headwaters can’t hold as much anymore. It runs off so much faster, as we’re giving it many more conduits, with roads and cutlines and off-highway vehicle trails.”

Fitch said what he’d like to see is more objective oversight of water management in the province, considering all resource development and its impacts on the environment along with land-use planning. “We have to be a lot smarter about this stuff.”

Fitch isn’t alone in his criticism. Retired agronomist Ross Mackenzie, who worked for Alberta Agriculture for nearly four decades, primarily as a research scientist, believes better on-farm water management and soil-moisture monitoring could make a bigger difference than digging more dams and reservoirs.

“Typically, a cereal crop such as wheat, barley or canola… most years you only need to put on 10 to 13 inches—roughly, depending on precipitation—of irrigation water,” he says. Despite this, he says, irrigation districts commonly provide up to 18 inches per field. Mackenzie remembers working with a farmer in 2023 in the Eastern Irrigation District who was facing the possibility of seeing his 12-inch allocation reduced during a particularly dry spring and early summer. But strict on-farm management proved more could be done with less, he says, with that farm garnering average or above average yields just through improved water use. “He was very careful how much water he put on each field and then reallocated to other fields, particularly silage corn, which was important for the (cattle) feeding operation.”

Mackenzie is critical of Alberta Agriculture for cutting its funding for staff to help irrigation farmers improve such water management techniques. “We have one irrigation extension person that works out of Brooks, but obviously he can’t speak to all farmers across 1.7 million acres of irrigated land. One person can’t do it all.”

Mackenzie also says irrigation districts haven’t picked up the slack left by the province. “Irrigation districts aren’t promoting using good management; they’re just screaming ‘We need more dams, more reservoirs for more water.’ In most years, we’ve had ample water.” A typical year, he notes, sees most districts use 60 per cent of the water available to them, with only some of them nearing 80 per cent of their water licence. “Most irrigation districts in the past 50 years have never used their full allocation. [Then] they have a couple of dry years, low snowpack in the mountains, and they’re saying they need more reservoirs. Most of the time, we don’t,” he says. “We just need to manage our water very carefully and we can do quite nicely.”

In fact, between 1987 and 2020, the average annual water use by irrigation districts comprised 53 per cent of their licences.

The Oldman Reservoir: Spurred by the 1984 drought, Peter Lougheed commissioned a dam at the confluence of the Oldman and the Crowsnest rivers. It remains Alberta’s largest irrigation reservoir.

Looking westward, in December 2023, over a part of the Oldman Reservoir that normally would be under water. Going into 2024 the reservoir was at its second-lowest level ever—drier only in the spring of 2002.

Mackenzie questions the need for the Eyremore Dam, which would be downstream of diversions for the Eastern, Bow River and Western irrigation districts. “All it would do is hold water to make sure (Alberta) is meeting its allocation to Saskatchewan to give them their fair share of water… We have to ask ourselves: for the one time in 20 years or once in 10 years that we’re a little bit short of water, do we really need to be building new dams?”

Mackenzie adds that money is another precious resource in short supply—and that the Eyremore Dam is expected to cost more than $1-billion.

Similarly, Dwayne Rogness, director of the South East Alberta Watershed Alliance (SEAWA), one of province’s 11 watershed planning and advisory councils, says he’d like to see more drought-resistant crop rotations. “Why aren’t we promoting a more drought-tolerant rotation?” he says. “Irrigators want to have row crops in their rotation, but when there’s only so much water, you need to think about adapting and being resilient (at the farm level).”

Rogness was an agricultural fieldman for Lethbridge and Warner counties for over 17 years prior to joining SEAWA, and grew up farming near Lake Diefenbaker in Saskatchewan (which lake was itself created in 1967 by damming the South Saskatchewan and the Qu’Appelle rivers). He says farmers and ranchers across Palliser’s Triangle are already capable of adapting to drought. “We take what the Bow and Oldman rivers give us. We make the best of all those (upstream) situations,” he says. “In all honesty, in the SEAWA watershed, someplace every year is under drought conditions.”

We need more drought-resistant crops. “When there’s only so much water you need to adapt.”

He likewise praises irrigation districts for developing efficiencies in their systems. But he, like Fitch and Mackenzie, doesn’t necessarily share their vision for the future. “Does that mean we add more irrigation?” he says. “I’m not sure.” SEAWA, he adds, is focused not on technological solutions to water shortages, but on natural initiatives, including replanting native species such as cottonwoods, sagebrush and wheatgrass in riparian ecosystems, promoting water conservation, and raising awareness of the role of biodiversity in overall watershed health.

For Richard Phillips, back at the Bow River Irrigation District, the answer is clear. Building more river infrastructure—more dams and reservoirs—will help prevent flooding while making southern Alberta better able to deal with drought. It will help irrigators too, of course, almost as a bonus. And most importantly, he says, building more infrastructure will constitute a recognition that providing a safe water supply to Albertans is a priority. “Districts have demonstrated time and time again that when water is short, people come first,” he says. He cites multiple declarations by districts to that effect. “Irrigation expansion isn’t a threat to water supply for towns, cities, people anywhere.”

Originally from Calgary, Alex McCuaig has been a journalist in southeastern Alberta for more than 15 years, working at the Brooks Bulletin, Medicine Hat News and Western Producer.

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Read more from the archive “More Irrigation, Fewer Farms” June 2021.

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The Wings of Change

Kevin Van Tighem — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 08:00:40 +0000

When I was growing up in a much smaller Calgary during the 1960s, nature was never far away. I’m not sure how I became fascinated with birds, but yellowing notebooks and old scrapbooks offer evidence that my early interest soon became an obsession. Those days are now far behind.

So are many of the birds. A walk through my old neighbourhood shows that the yards and gardens are as lush and well vegetated as they were 60 years ago, but birds seem fewer. Once-common species are missing; the cheery “chi-bik!” call of the least flycatcher, for example, is rarely heard now. But new birds that are there weren’t even in Alberta bird books back then.

Alberta has changed dramatically over the decades. Inevitably wild rose country’s birdlife has also changed. Our decisions, after all, shape their destinies too. The changes among the birds we live with amount to a sort of ecological report card on our ability to create what novelist Wallace Stegner once described as “a society to match the scenery.”

Where scenery is concerned, my old hometown has eaten a lot of it. Once confined to the sheltered confluence of the Bow and Elbow rivers, Calgary now sprawls across most of the wild prairies, sloughs and shrublands where I once built my lists of prairie birds. Urbanization has eliminated long-billed curlews, Baird’s sparrows, meadowlarks and ferruginous hawks. Other birds, however, now thrive in the urban forest that has grown up along city streets. We still have birds, just different ones.

Calgary’s estimated seven million trees provide habitat for a host of bird species virtually unheard of back when a much smaller Calgary lacked that sheltering canopy. Baltimore orioles forage in the tops of the elms that arch over residential streets. Blue jays chatter in back alleys, vireos sing through the long summer afternoons. House finches and Eurasian collared doves—recent immigrants to the province—nest in backyard spruce trees and feast at bird feeders. Calgary’s forest has turned an otherwise hostile urban environment into a place where at least some woodland birds have found new homes.

Cleve Wershler, a Calgary-based ecologist, lists off some of the birds that thrive in his urban landscapes: house wren, yellow warbler, American robin, northern flicker, black-capped chickadee, cedar waxwing, chipping sparrow, red-breasted nuthatch, common grackle, black-billed magpie. It’s a similar story in most of Alberta’s older cities and towns. As trees, parks and yards matured, birds moved in. Some are as fascinating as they are relatively unknown. Northern saw-whet owls, for example: round little birds whose distinctive repetitive call sounds like a saw being whetted with a file. If you live in Edmonton, chances are these little owls are your neighbours.

“Saw-whet owls appear to be quite common in the Edmonton river valley,” says Geoff Holroyd, a former Canadian Wildlife Service endangered species biologist who now chairs the Beaverhill Bird Observatory, east of Edmonton. “But in the historical records, they weren’t there at all. If you look at pictures of Fort Edmonton from 150 years ago, there’s not a tree in sight. They were all chopped down for firewood and building materials. So that means our forest is only 150 years old.… Those regenerated forests now allow flickers and pileated woodpeckers to build their cavities, which are then used by secondary cavity nesters like saw-whet owls. In the 1990s, when we made a concerted effort to find owls on the Christmas bird count, we got the highest count in North America.”

Growing Populations (Clockwise from top left): Robin, peregrine falcon, Northern saw-whet owl, raven, white-faced ibis. Alberta’s cities have urban forests where some woodland birds can now thrive. Irrigation reservoirs have produced new lake and shoreline habitats in Alberta, helping some water bird populations grow dramatically.

Holroyd hastens to add that, where forest birds are concerned, cities aren’t all good news: “A lot of the forests in the Mill Woods area have been cleared and are now subdivisions. The forest tracts I used to know south of Edmonton are gone. So we’re still chopping forests down, but where we haven’t it’s recovering and more diverse than it used to be.”

Holroyd points out that birds need more than just nesting trees in order to thrive in an urban environment. “When I moved to Edmonton there were nighthawks and purple martins in the city, but within a few years they were gone, and they’ve been gone for decades now. They were able to tolerate the initial invasion of humans, but the growth of the city wiped out their feeding habitats, and of course the spraying for mosquitoes interrupts the food chain for both of them.”

Myrna Pearman, the public face and voice of the Ellis Bird Farm near Red Deer until her retirement in 2020, says it’s not just urban birds that are doing well in Alberta. She notes that water impoundments such as irrigation reservoirs have produced new lake and shoreline habitats in parts of the province where they were once scarce. “Some water bird populations have increased dramatically—white-faced ibis, American avocet, black-necked stilt, American white pelican, osprey and black-crowned night heron. Ducks that benefit from nest boxes, especially common goldeneye, have also increased.”

But for all that some species have benefited from the new habitats we’ve created, the overall bird conservation picture is grim. A comprehensive analysis released in 2022 by the North American Bird Conservation Initiative shows that three billion fewer birds survive on this continent than when I was a young birdwatcher. Among those facing the strongest headwinds are grassland birds and aerial insect-feeders such as swallows and nighthawks.

Our native Alberta prairie birds are now less than half as abundant as they used to be. Swallows and other aerial insectivores are down by almost 60 per cent. It would have been inconceivable in the 1960s to imagine barn and bank swallows ever becoming scarce. Today both are listed as species at risk.

“Burrowing owl, long-billed curlew, ferruginous hawk, loggerhead shrike, chestnut-collared longspur and upland sandpiper all used to nest commonly in the Calgary region as late as the 1960s and early 1970s,” says Wershler. “With the loss of native grassland habitats, these are all now rare or non-existent.”

Pearman says the most discouraging land use trend she has seen in her time as an Alberta naturalist is the spread of canola farming and other monocrop agriculture. “Old farmyards are gone, fencelines are gone; there’s no more habitat.”

Declining Populations (Clockwise from top to left): Barn swallow, long-billed curlew, burrowing owl, common nighthawk. These prairie birds used to nest commonly in the Calgary region as late as the 1960s and early 1970s. But with the loss of native grassland habitats, they are now rare or non-existent.

Where prairie birds and insect-eating species are concerned, it’s not just the loss of nesting habitat and shelter that’s causing trouble. Poisoning is an even more insidious threat. Bald eagles, peregrine falcons and other raptors, as well as some songbird species, became endangered in the 20th century because of a highly toxic pesticide, DDT, that accumulated in the ecosystem to the point where birds could no longer produce young. Public concern led to that pesticide being banned. The renewed abundance of those birds is one of the great conservation successes of the past few decades.

But the agrochemical industry found replacement pesticides that are devastating in other ways. Neonicotinoids are a class of biotoxin even more effective than DDT at killing insects. Neonics are widely used now, not only as sprays but as seed treatments. Nearly every canola and corn seed planted in Alberta is painted with the new poisons which, being water-soluble, quickly wash into wetlands and streams.

Geoff Holroyd points out that neonics have been banned in Europe, and were the subject of a proposed ban here. Under pressure from the agrochemical industry, Health Canada backed down. “Research on the prairies has shown that the highest level of neonicotinoids in ponds is in the spring. They are in the soil; the snow melts, that flushes them into the ponds, and you get the highest levels and it’s still lethal. It’s killing the midges and aquatic insects that are the food of aerial insectivores such as tree swallows.”

“It’s one thing to have neonicotinoids available for treatment if you have an insect problem,” says Holroyd. “But just to prophylactically have them on every seed is irresponsible.”

He, Pearman and Wershler all agree that intensive prairie agriculture accounts for a lot of the harm to native Alberta grassland and wetland bird species. Some of the effects are obvious—vast monocultures that no longer provide habitat for prairie birds—while others are more subtle and unexpected.

“Tree swallows eat aquatic insects that are getting hit by neonicotinoids,” Holroyd says. “But barn swallows eat larger insects such as flies that would normally live in cow manure. Producers treat livestock with ivermectin to get rid of parasites. It remains active in their bodies and droppings for about six months. Cow pies, within six months of cattle being treated with ivermectin, aren’t used by insects. So cow pies no longer produce dung beetles and other large insects that feed barn swallows, burrowing owls and other species.”

The poisoning problem is a fairly straightforward fix. Banning DDT brought back endangered birds of prey. Banning the prophylactic use of neonics and ivermectin would help bring back insect-eating birds that have only recently become rare. But solutions to other challenges facing Alberta birds are more elusive. Climate change is the big one.

On the upside, Holroyd points out, a changing climate brings new birds into the province. “With climate change, birds are going to keep moving farther north. We’re seeing an increase in egrets, for example. The first white-faced ibis was at Beaverhill Lake in 1999, and now you can see flocks of hundreds.”

But for most birds, climate change offers a new set of problems. Pearman’s decades-long monitoring of mountain bluebirds shows that, because of earlier snowmelt, they now return to Alberta weeks earlier than before. That can create what Holroyd calls a “climate trap”—the sudden spring blizzards that birds used to avoid simply by staying south now cause many of those birds to freeze or starve. “Around Ellis Bird Farm,” says Pearman, “mountain bluebird populations have never recovered from the catastrophic spring storm of 2008.”

Meadow voles often breed under the snow. As snow-free periods become more frequent in winter, vole populations decline. Returning birds of prey no longer have a key food source. On the other hand, rivers that used to freeze over in the winter now support large wintering flocks of ducks and geese which in turn help sustain bald eagles, prairie falcons and other birds of prey that no longer need to migrate from the province at all.

Climate change yields winners and losers, just as landscape changes and the use of agricultural chemicals do. Sadly, many of the losers are songbirds, shorebirds and other native species that give our province its unique nature. The winners include ravens, magpies, gulls and other scavenging species that are able to profit from others’ losses.

The dawn chorus of birdsong is an experience that seems to be fading into Alberta’s past.

Awakening to a dawn chorus of native songbirds can feel like the whole world is shouting for joy. Sadly, among the many changes to Alberta’s birds, that morning chaos of birdsong is an experience that seems to be fading into the past.

Myrna Pearman says she no longer hears hermit and Swainson’s thrushes or ovenbirds on morning rambles near her home at Sylvan Lake. “While walking the woods, the spring birdsong of years past seems to be much quieter.”

Geoff Holroyd concurs: “The dawn chorus isn’t there. I was just out at Gregg Lake [northwest of Hinton] and you’d have to stop and listen, hear one bird, and then go on and hear another species and another—there isn’t the cacophony of song that there used to be.”

We could get it back—if enough Albertans cared enough about birds to demand better pesticide regulations, reformed land use policies and action on climate change. And in fact both Holroyd and Pearman see encouraging signs that this could happen.

Interest in birding exploded during and after the pandemic. Pearman’s Backyard Bird Feeding: An Alberta Guide sold out its first printing in less than six months. The second is almost sold out too. The Beaverhill Bird Observatory can barely keep up with public demand for its talks and nature walks. Holroyd says that nighttime owl adventures attract 70 people at a time, and the observatory hosted over 1,700 visitors in 2023. The off-site 2024 Beaverhill Snow Goose Festival drew 1,500 participants.

People who experience birds in their lives care about their well-being, Holroyd says, but they also need knowledgeable coaches who can take the experience and tease the meanings out of it. That’s what the Beaverhill Bird Observatory tries to do with its public programming, and it’s why Holroyd and Pearman deliver dozens of talks to thousands of curious Albertans every year.

“We need people to care about and understand every bird species, not just the most colourful or charismatic ones,” says Pearman. She’s right. As Alberta continues to change, so will its birds. How diverse and abundant they will be is entirely up to us. The first step is simple. Go outside, meet some birds, fall in love.

Kevin Van Tighem is an author, naturalist and former superintendent of Banff National Park (2008–2011).

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Disinformation Ain’t Free

Fred Stenson — Fri, 01 Sep 2023 16:32:08 +0000

It’s about time the political machinery of Canada dragged itself out of the past and showed some respect for human-assisted and/or autonomous manufacture of information and opinion. I speak here on behalf of Canada’s bot and troll farmers (and our associates, the rage farmers). Frankly, all of us have had it up to here with the preferential treatment given to producers of basic goods in the so-called “real economy.” Since we are known colloquially as “farmers,” let’s start there. Let’s use agriculture as our standard of comparison.

Federally and provincially, Canada’s governments cannot lavish enough funds on agriculture. If you think I’m wrong, go online and have a gander at the government websites devoted to agriculture. If farmers and ranchers want to improve their land, buildings or equipment, if they want to buy more livestock, if they want to expand or export, or make environmental improvements, or diversify, or insure themselves against weather phenomena—you name it, there’s a government program to do it! Let’s face it: farmers in this country are coddled. We in the bot- and troll-farming business might not even care—if we were getting the same. But we are not.

Perhaps you think I’m making a big deal out of a figure of speech: that bots and trolls come from farms. Bear with me.

Trolls aren’t born. They don’t pop out of the womb simply knowing how to spew misinformation and hate into the homes and offices of millions of social media users. A great deal of basic training is involved, to which only experience can add the finesse that is the hallmark of the finished troll. But are troll farms paid to produce and train their trolls To support them until they’re paying their own way No way. As for our non-human operatives, the autonomous bots, they obviously have fewer needs and no dependants, but they don’t just happen. At this point in history, actual humans are needed to create, program and release bots into the internet universe.

Trolls aren’t born. They don’t pop out of the womb simply knowing how to spew misinformation and hate.

Let’s make this comparison more direct. What do farmers do They seed the ground. We in the troll-farming industry seed the internet. According to one study, 9 to 15 per cent of the accounts on Twitter are bots. Think about that for a minute. Can Canadian farmers and ranchers claim to have that kind of penetration of the planet’s cow, pig, chicken or wheat markets Wheat, maybe.

Like farm workers in agriculture, our trolls need care (especially the high-needs ragers). Most internet trolls may seem to arrive at their jobs full of hate and loathsome creepiness, but that’s not often the case. Some are naturals, I grant you, but many of these more instinctually vicious trolls go to work for conservative parties, where the pay is off the charts. The majority of trolls are not so lucky or so fortunate. When they come to us, most are just ordinary people (sort of) looking for ways to make money without leaving their chairs. That doesn’t make them good at it. Bear in mind that disinformation, by its very definition, must be invented. If it’s to be believed, it must be, for instance, correctly spelled—though in fact we prefer misspelling when it comes from our rage-farmers.

For every gifted troll, thousands are nearly useless until groomed. The fine art of torquing and twisting. The ability to fan petty grievances until they burst into towering flames of unhinged hatred. If we depended on natural ragers, the people who beak off in taverns and rant online for free, we could not produce the quality of troll armies that are currently in demand. As just one example, imagine how many trolls it takes to keep 30 per cent of Canada’s population frothing mad at their prime minister.

As for job satisfaction, we’re not unlike the dirt farmers who look with pride at their fields of golden canola and waving wheat. We get a similar deep sense of satisfaction when we turn on the nightly news and see F*#$ TRUDEAU signs bobbing in an angry mob.

Our greatest accomplishment to date was when the convoys rolled. Sure, we wish we could incite armed attacks on government buildings and politicians as our colleagues to the south do, but we have to accept that cultural differences are real. We can only make Canadians do what Canadians do.

So perhaps you see now why it’s high time for the pols who tax and subsidize us to realize the effect troll-and-rage farmers have on Canada’s economy and political stability. It would be perilous to think we can be ignored. Rather than receive cash from shadowy party funds, we want to be paid where Canadians can see our work—a line in the budget! If our current federal government won’t play ball, the next one surely will.

If you get my drift, let’s see some grift.

Fred Stenson‘s novels include Who By Fire, The Trade, Lightning and The Great Karoo.

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Blight or Blessing

Alanna Mitchell — Sat, 01 Jul 2023 09:00:01 +0000

The earliest written record of human revenge against the grasshopper was etched into a tiny tablet of greenish black stone more than 5,000 years ago. The tablet, measuring slightly larger than a matchbook and inscribed in pre-cuneiform-era pictograms, recounts how a Babylonian holy man drove away a plague of locusts, then laid a curse on them.

Not that it helped. Grasshoppers have bedevilled human plans and their crops ever since. The biggest outbreak of desert locusts in seven decades is attacking eastern Africa even now. An estimate in 2020 reckoned that, every day, a single swarm in Kenya of 200 billion insects was eating as much as the human population of Germany. Food across the region has become precarious for millions of people. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization calls the current surge “a scourge of biblical proportions” and has launched a locust hub webpage to track swarms by satellite.

In the past several years, South America has been hit too, its first locust plague in six decades. And in North America grasshopper outbreaks have struck the three prairie provinces, parts of British Columbia and the US west in recent years. While these haven’t caused as much loss as the African outbreak, the eruptions carry reminders of the panic of the Dirty Thirties, when pitiless swarms of grasshoppers in the prairies ate not just the remnants of wizened crops but also clothes off farmers’ limbs.

And things are poised to get worse. Droughts and heatwaves, fuelled by climate change, are on the rise. These ramp up the ability of some grasshoppers to produce eggs. Warmer temperatures also push the insects’ metabolisms higher, meaning they need to consume even more food than normal.

But while the crop-gobbling has an ancient hold on the human imagination, it’s only one part of the complicated grasshopper story. Canada has more than 100 species of grasshoppers, and only a few of them are capable of episodically ripping through a quarter-section. As unlikely as it may seem, many other types are instead critical to preserving the highly endangered grasslands ecosystem. Grasshoppers, for example, are an essential food for wild birds. Some, such as the Turnbull’s grasshopper, which gorges on Russian thistle, eat only weeds.

“If you were able to easily see the flow of energy through a grassland,” says John Acorn, an entomologist and lecturer at the University of Alberta, “you would see it flowing through the very abundant grasshoppers—flowing from the sun to the plants, through the grasshoppers and into the birds and other insects.”

And alongside other threatened insects, including such pollinators as bees and butterflies, some of those ecologically indispensable grasshoppers seem to be in freefall. Climate disruption, habitat loss and dramatic shifts in bird populations are all in play.

“Some very weird things are happening, and some are good but some potentially are very bad,” says University of Lethbridge entomologist Dan Johnson, who is funded through the Canadian Agricultural Partnership and is one of the world’s foremost experts on grasshoppers. Some species, for example, are expanding their range. And in Alberta’s north, for some species the typical five-year pattern of growth followed by decline is now squished into two years. Reasons unknown.

While there are no comprehensive studies that show exactly how insect populations on the prairies are changing, the red flags are disquieting. Johnson has been monitoring grasshoppers for many years at the Alberta Conservation Association’s Silver Sage Project south of Manyberries, for example, and has tracked a grim decline among some of its 40 species of grasshoppers. Many types of mountain grasshoppers are becoming sparser, and so is a non-pest group called band-winged grasshoppers, a favourite repast of birds.

Ironically, Johnson says, pest-control measures that decades ago killed off many types of grasshoppers are now used far more parsimoniously. One would expect that trend to lead to increases in the populations of non-pest grasshoppers. But it’s not happening, for reasons he continues to examine. “If the only thing that was hurting grasshoppers was us spraying, then right now they’d be back in record numbers and everything would be cooking out there in the ecosystem,” Johnson says.

While we don’t know exactly how grasshoppers are faring, the fate of the grassland songbirds that rely on the insects for food is better known. The 2022 State of the World’s Birds report, published by BirdLife International last September, tracked a 42 per cent drop in grassland birds in North America from 1968 to 2018. In sheer numbers, that’s roughly 700 million fewer birds in just 50 years.

The disappearance in Alberta has been stark. In the 1990s Johnson would routinely spot vast numbers of a dozen species of birds as he conducted insect surveys. “Now, you go to the same sites, and it’s just like the dead zone,” he says. “So, where are they?” But the disappearance of birds—like the let-up in chemical spraying—hasn’t helped grasshoppers either.

All of this matters, Johnson says, because counterintuitive as it may seem, as goes the grasshopper, so goes the prairie. One study, for example, shows that grasshoppers make up more than 85 per cent of the diet of nestling chestnut-collared longspurs. Another found that for sharp-tailed grouse, a key indicator of the health of the prairies, grasshoppers are a diet staple. Endangered burrowing owls rely on grasshoppers, and so do prairie owls of all sorts. Grasshoppers “hold up the food web,” Johnson says. “Without them, massive loss would happen.”

Psoloessa delicatula, Brown-spotted range grasshoppers, overwinter in soil and grass as miniature hoppers, emerging in early spring just in time for baby birds to feast on them.

Grasshoppers are marvels of evolution. Every continent except Antarctica has them, and each one features the good-hopper/bad-hopper morality play. The 600 or so species that inhabit North America likely evolved in Mexico or in the mountains of Nevada and Arizona during the last Ice Age. Then, propelled by powerful back legs and leathery forewings, they walked, jumped and flew northward as ice sheets retreated.

They’ve developed a suite of quirky survival skills, Johnson says. Most of them lay eggs an inch or so under the ground toward the end of the summer, producing a single new generation a year. The embryo grows inside the egg for a while and then puts the brakes on, going into hibernation during the coldest parts of winter. They survive because they’ve mastered the trick of making what amounts to antifreeze in their blood. Once the weather warms up, the embryo finishes growing and pops out of the egg.
But others take a different tack. Some, like the brown-spotted and velvet-striped grasshoppers, hatch before the cold weather and spend the winter in bits of soil and grass as miniature hoppers, emerging in early spring, just in time for baby birds to feast on them.

“And even after being aware of this for decades, I have absolutely no idea why they’re not dead,” Johnson says. “I mean, I can see living a day or two at minus 10, with the wicked cold and wind and drying conditions. But all winter It’s like a miracle.”

These different life cycles have evolved so that if one species of grasshopper gets into trouble, another can take its place in the food chain. This diversity is evolution’s prime mechanism for building resilience, rather than stability, in an ecosystem. But the reasons why one population thrives while another fades away remain mysterious.

“I go out every weekend in the summer and just make sure I’m familiar with what’s happening with all the species,” Johnson says. “Which ones are up this year, which ones are out, which ones are late, which ones just completely disappear. And even after 30 years of chasing them around and trying to keep tabs on them, I don’t know why.”

For millennia, the triggers for grasshopper swarms were equally opaque. But ever since humans began farming, we’ve been all too aware of the havoc the swarms could bring. Tales of locusts infuse ancient Egyptian, Chinese, Hebrew, Roman and Greek texts. “Due to the extent of their devastation and the spectacular nature of their migratory swarms, locusts have left an indelible mark since ancient times in the minds, beliefs, literature and arts of many cultures all over the world,” write locust specialists Michel Lecoq and Arianne Cease in February 2022 in the journal Agronomy. Both the Bible and the Qur’an cite locusts as one of the ancient plagues of Egypt, a divine retribution for sin. China alone has been recording locust outbreaks for 3,000 years, logging more than 800 separate events. In North America, six voracious swarms of the notorious and now extinct Rocky Mountain grasshopper, each lasting at least two years, struck the Great Plains between 1818 and 1875 alone, shaping tales of the settlers forevermore.

More recently, the X-Men comic book franchise introduced the villain The Locust. This evildoer creates a swarm of giant locusts with an ionizing “magno-ray” to devour crops. “Feed well, my pretties,” he coos. “Feed well! Now only I, your leader, am present to hear your song of mounting menace! But soon the world shall know the meaning of that sound… and live in terror of it!”

Some farmers have told me, ‘Wow. Now I get it. We should conserve some grasshoppers and just not bother spraying.

But magno-rays aside, where does a swarm come from In 1921 the Russian entomologist Boris Petrovitch Uvarov finally decoded the mystery. It turns out that about 25 of the planet’s 6,700 grasshopper species can alter themselves from benign, shy insects into the terrifying swarms of locusts that devastate crops—but only under pressure from very dense grasshopper populations. The drier and more abandoned an area, the better for incubating swarmers.

These hoppers change colour, size, shape and even brain size, essentially shapeshifting into eating machines. The process is called gregarization, meaning that they transform into what’s known as their “gregarious” phase, the opposite of their “solitarious” phase, and then band together into dense, marauding mobs of insects.
The behaviour of some species can shift within mere hours. They move fast, too: hordes can migrate hundreds of kilometres in one night, eating everything they come across. That includes the leaves off trees and handles off shovels.

On the grasslands, the attacks have spawned generations of ingenious eradication campaigns, including bounty systems, grasshopper “armies,” burning, beating, drowning, plowing eggs into the soil, crushing them with horse-drawn “hopperdozers,” dynamite, flamethrowers and poisons of all kinds. A popular formulation in the 1930s was sawdust, bran and arsenic.

Today, chemical insecticides are still the go-to to control pest grasshoppers. But these poisons are shorter-lasting now, far more targeted and more regulated, to prevent persistent damage to the landscape.

As well, in an attempt to prevent outbreaks, nations now monitor desertified areas to find out whether they’re becoming cradles for locusts. Some countries have established early-warning systems that trigger immediate insecticide programs. Arizona State University has set up the Global Locust Initiative to make sure knowledge about outbreaks remains accessible across the world. That’s especially important now, because climate disruption is likely to reverse any recent progress in controlling outbreaks, making the events more frequent, more severe and more apt to strike in new locations, according to the Agronomy article.

Alberta maintains a pest-grasshopper population map and forecast, plus a late-August count of adult grasshoppers capable of laying eggs, conducted by agricultural fieldmen—professionals with applied agricultural or environmental science backgrounds. The Bruner’s spur-throat grasshopper, for example, could be shaping up to be a problem this summer in the Peace River region, and crop-pest grasshoppers have been on the rise in the warm, dry south and eastern borders over the past two years, carrying risks of an outbreak.

A mountain bluebird bringing food to its babies. One study shows that grasshoppers make up more than 85 per cent of the diet of nestling chestnut-collared longspurs.

Modern safeguards aside, the old evil-grasshopper battle stories remain tenacious. And, in Alberta at least, they’re taking hold once more. Despite many types of grasshopper appearing to be in decline, hotter weather is encouraging still other local species to multiply.

“I would say that in the last six months, more than at any time in 10 years, the news services and the people I bump into, they’re all just grasshopper, grasshopper, grasshopper,” Johnson says. “It’s back on their radar, and it wasn’t for a long time.”

It’s his cue to remind people that a grasshopper is not necessarily a blight. It could even be a blessing. To that end, he’s put together illustrated guides explaining the differences between good and bad.

Johnson’s basic message If the grasshopper sings, or if it flies before June, or if it has brightly coloured or black hind wings that you can see as it flies, it’s not a crop-eater—meaning farmers shouldn’t spray.

Pest species, on the other hand, hatch in late May and early June. They are brown or black and always have little wing buds rather than large wings that fold back. One of the big hungry ones with a fondness for grasses, cereals, pulses, canola and safflower is the two-striped grasshopper, with its characteristic twin lines of spots running along the back.
Johnson also posts grasshopper ID photos prolifically on social media. “I throw them on to try to get people that follow me interested,” he says. “And some farmers have said, ‘Wow. Now I get it. You know, this is really interesting. We should conserve some and just not bother spraying.’ It’s much better than it used to be.”

As for Acorn, he marvels at how grasshoppers manage to continue to play a key role in the grasslands ecosystem. They sing the soundtrack of the prairies, he says. What you hear on a warm summer evening in Alberta is mainly stridulating grasshoppers, rubbing a small, roughened surface on their hind legs against the front wings. Some make soft, lisping sounds in the grasses, while still others emit sharp calls across the wind, nestled up at the side of warm cliffs.

To him, it’s a lesson in being humble. In honouring the unexpected. And in being careful how we treat this tremendously complex world we find ourselves inhabiting.

Alanna Mitchell is a journalist, author and playwright fascinated by how science, art and society intersect.

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Frontenac House Poetry Quartet 2022

Steven Ross Smith — Sat, 01 Apr 2023 09:00:49 +0000

Openwork and Limestone, by Frances Boyle
Emptying the Ocean, by Kim Fahner
A Grief Cave, by Ben Gallagher
Pilgrim to No Country, by Anvesh Jain
FRONTENAC HOUSE
2022/$19.95 EACH

In late fall, as leaves and temperatures drop, new pages flutter from Frontenac House with their annual release, the Quartet poetry series. No obvious unifying content or style links the four new books in 2022, though each is a journey that leans in to territories actual, imagined, spiritual or emotional.

Ben Gallagher’s A Grief Cave: Thirty Poems and an Essay begins with tragedy, the death of a lover. Gallagher sets the context up front with a short, graphic paragraph ending with: “Around the corner I came to a line of police caution tape, and when I mentioned her name they drove me in a squad car to a nearby hospital.” The poems amplify. “I have a box / full of ash / invisible body / made real / I cannot give yet / to the wind,” read lines from “Looking for the Invisible.”

The writing, whether poetry or essay, is emotionally honest and stirs empathy—inventive in its approach to a difficult and language-defying experience. The poems are anchored in the concrete, while probing the otherworldliness of emotion and existence; they contain but move beyond the confessional I toward the mystical and occasionally the societal. The narrative is not merely linear. Memory haunts; in “The River”: “There was a time / we drank beer all the time / and the world felt // It felt light and burnt / a crème brûlée world / —your favourite—”.

Near the start of her collection Openwork and Limestone, Frances Boyle lays the threads that reach from family relations outward to the elements, the cosmos, with undertones of Gaelic and other mythologies, and to the poet’s existence in “fabled time.” Confession, biography and travelogue pull through the weave. Boyle, a time and space traveller, pauses with pen in many locales, occasionally with poetic sound play:

“Synchronous rush-slush, a wave of weeds,

a crash that isn’t heard but rumpatumps

through water”

Yet Boyle often falls back to straight-ahead, distancing, biographical reportage: “I am wounded, but why did my belly clench, fist-tight, when I read / that scene in a Toni Morrison novel”. Many poems are photographic, aiming to capture nature, as in “Strand”: “Between water and dune-edge / —hardscrabble salal, / spiny-tough grass tufts, / driftwood in tangles.” Such description is simultaneously specific and vague—vivid in the poet’s “I-eye,” but raising the question of how to make the seen rich for the reader and relevant beyond the poet’s moment. Representation salted with hope seems to be Boyle’s intention—the hope that scenes and their generated contemplations will ignite in a reader’s mind. Sometimes they do, as in the vivid, verb-based description: “Sheets billow and fill, / brush my face, wrap hips, shins. / Their touch is shivery.”

Kim Fahner, in Emptying the Ocean invites the reader to join her poetic voyage guided by tidal pull, cycle and myth. She begins on the sea, with its elements and creatures, in a suite of tiny songs, where the language surges, lush and evocative:

“the ice yearns

and longs, moans, shifts in sleep, rolls restless.”

Crafted sonority pulls us through the waters of Lake Erie, Newfoundland, Connemara. Fahner moves us onto land, its flora, its seeds and trees, minerals and tailings. Attention shifts to “Fire,” then to “Air,” where bees, dragonflies, moths and butterflies flitter, and all the lost birds spur an environmental lament. Fahner visits the creative spirit of womankind—Medusa, Persephone, Maude Lewis, and notably with the nine-part homage to painter Mary Pratt: “Solitude, sharp necessity for the image-summoning. / Pain like the red of pomegranate juice, spilled, / clotted. Jewelled fruit that sparkles, brilliant bright.” Through all, Fahner does not lean on the I. She shifts person and foregrounds ideas with vivid turns, making poetic moments direct and alive.

In “Coming,” the last poem of Pilgrim to No Country, Anvesh Jain writes: “Someday I was going / To write diaspora poetry, / Pen the great ironies of my displaced kind.”

I suggest he has reached well toward this intention with this exploration of emigration and immigration, its challenges and inspirations. He captures that experience, not linearly but as assemblage, with juxtapositions that corral how multiplicities of identity, history and lived reality co-exist in dis-placement and re-placement. He combines biography and imagination in poetically adventurous, jittery language, for example blending Indian terms and deity names with familiar English, as in “Ramayana Western: A Quarantine Epic”: “Only a Cowboy could find Sita / And BTW, O Laxmana, where art thou?”

His lines judder with the unexpected. While the work is serious, there is wit, even humour, for example, as the speaker practises a cricket swing in his Calgary backyard: “Tock! (proper / footwork) Tock! / Tock! (properly) / Between calypsos, the radio goads / Go west, young man, / To Canola Country, Boomtown, / Oilseed Prairiestan, tar sand / Petrostate. Cry me a Bow River, / … / There’s no better place for a Hindoo / Than Cowtown. / Tock! / Tock!”

The poet aches to align his birthright and birthplace with his new-place. He writes, metaphorically, in “Minar”: “You, concrete, pour / And pour and pour / Into me. Make full / These historic gaps, somehow.” This is a wide-ranging and engaging work—a notable contribution to current diasporic texts.

Steven Ross Smith was Banff Poet Laureate, 2018–21.

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Commissioner for Oats

Paula Simons — Fri, 01 Apr 2022 11:56:28 +0000

When my dad was a little boy growing up in Round Hill, Alberta, he was immensely proud that his Pa was the Commissioner for Oats. My Jewish grandfather wasn’t a farmer. He ran Round Hill’s general store. But in a farm community, my dad figured being the Commissioner for Oats must be a very important and prestigious job.

When my father was 8 or 9, the family moved to Edmonton’s bustling Boyle Street immigrant neighbourhood and left their oat-growing neighbours behind. So I don’t think it was until my dad himself started law school at the University of Alberta that he finally realized his own father had never in fact been a Commissioner for Oats. Instead, he’d been Round Hill’s Commissioner for Oaths. Since neither his Yiddish-speaking father nor his Eastern European immigrant customers could pronounce that final “th” sound, my young father naturally assumed they were saying “oats” instead of “oaths.”

The pandemic and its accompanying supply-chain crisis have thrown into stark relief the vulnerability of our food supply.

This was one of my dad’s favourite anecdotes, one he told pretty much every time he was called upon, during his long legal career, to serve as a commissioner for oaths himself. Now, a generation later, the story has come full circle. Or maybe that should be full crop-circle. Not that I’m actually Canada’s Commissioner for Oats. But I am the brand-new deputy chair of the Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry—known colloquially in Ottawa as AGFO.

It’s the first time in three years that an Alberta senator has served on AGFO, and the first time in almost a decade that an Albertan has been selected to a leadership position on the committee. As a city girl, I’d never expected to hold this position. But I can’t think of a more essential or exciting time to be working on these files.

This pandemic and its accompanying supply-chain crisis have thrown into stark relief the vulnerability of our food supply lines and the fragility of our ability to keep grocery shelves stocked. Canadians are facing major price hikes at those same stores, while few farmers are seeing any benefits from those higher prices. Prices of Alberta’s signature steaks and roast beef, in particular, are soaring out of reach for most families, but Alberta’s ranchers and cow-calf operators sure aren’t cashing in. Those profits are being taken elsewhere along a production line dominated by a handful of multinational giants.

At the same time, a series of climate crises, particularly the fires and floods and freezes in BC, have exposed susceptibilities in the transportation conduits we rely on to ship our food exports—and our forestry products—to international markets. Alberta canola, lentils, wheat and, yes, oats, got stranded in elevators for weeks when rail lines were washed out and trains couldn’t get our crops to the Port of Vancouver.

Climate change is having a direct impact on farmers, ranchers and foresters all across Canada. At the same time, farmers, ranchers and forestry companies are trying to figure out how to adapt their own practices to help them reduce or sequester carbon while they work.

And against that backdrop, fresh trade wars and trade skirmishes are playing out—with China playing games with imports of Canadian beef and pork, with Canada challenging the latest round of punitive US softwood lumber tariffs, with the Americans challenging our restrictive dairy rules, and with new attention to the whole marketing-board/production-quota model in Canada, which, with each passing year, seems more and more a throwback to another century.

Today we need to be thinking about everything from the health of our soil—which is integral to everything we grow—to the health of our economy as we consider the future of agriculture and forestry, two land-linked industries dominated by near-monopolies (or monopsonies), a condition that puts severe limitations on robust market competition.

Senate committees don’t always capture the Canadian imagination. A couple of years ago, when I was serving on the Standing Senate Committee on Energy, the Environment and Natural Resources, we made a few headlines when we held hearings from coast to coast on the controversial Bill C-69, which amended Canada’s environmental impact legislation. It was the first time the Senate had ever held hearings on a bill outside of Ottawa, and as we travelled from Vancouver to St. John’s (with stops in Calgary and Fort McMurray), hundreds and hundreds of people turned up live to watch our hearings in progress.

COVID-19 is going to limit that kind of road trip. But Senate hearings are always public and always available to live-stream—even if they aren’t always the sexiest of clickbait. Whether you’re watching or not, here’s my oath that I’ll be doing my best to fight for a prosperous, environmentally sustainable and globally competitive agriculture and forestry sector—and to make my father and grandfather of blessed memory proud.

Paula Simons is an independent senator and the host of the podcast “Alberta Unbound.” She lives in Edmonton.

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Revery: A Year of Bees

Laurie D. Graham — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 20:47:14 +0000

by Jenna Butler
Wolsak & Wynn
2020/$18.00/160 pp

Picture a beekeeper. What image forms in your head What gender What cultural background What uniform What tools What demeanour

With Revery: A Year of Bees, poet, professor, organic farmer and apiarist Jenna Butler sets out to broaden our idea of who beekeepers are, what they do and how they approach caring for hives. Following the shape of a year at her and her partner’s off-grid farm near Barrhead, Revery recounts Butler’s “five-year partnership” with bees both imported and wild, a partnership she describes as “beneficial to both sides”: the bees having access to organic crops, pollinator plants and boreal forest, and the farmers benefiting from the bees’ pollination as well as honey and wax and “a deep sense of hope and well-being.”

Alberta is honey country: not only the largest producer in Canada, but one of the largest in the world. The province’s honey industry sprang up alongside canola, yielding a sweet, light, highly coveted product. But as Butler explains, industrial honey production is hardly immune from the risks associated with monoculture, pesticide use or invasive species, and there are many commercial beekeepers wisely seeking to diversify and detoxify honey production in order to reduce harm in the bee yard and perhaps slow the decline of the species.

Revery cuts a wide swath, covering industry and its harms, climate change and solastalgia, predators and disease, the workings of the hive, honey’s “colonial past,” the changing community of beekeepers, beneficial organic practices and the ways the bees have contributed to the author’s recovery from past abuse. “Working with the bees has given me back my sense of agency,” she writes. Teachers and therapists of the tough-love variety, bees will protect themselves and each other vigorously against any perceived threat, including beekeepers who approach the hive with a troubled mind. “I still have days when the bees’ behaviour tells me I’m not as calm as I thought I was,” Butler says. “If something’s bothering me and it’s buried, a couple of stings will let me know I need to tend to my inner life.”

This manner of close listening and observance, to the needs and preferences of bee species, to their behaviours and gifts, shows us a whole mode of living. And though one person making a good home for vital pollinators is not enough to undo catastrophic damage to bee populations, Revery insists that there’s still importance, benefit and meaning in forging a good relationship, right now. As Butler writes, the keeping of bees is “at its roots, an act of hope.” And so reads the book’s dedication: “to hope.”

Laurie D. Graham is the author of Settler Education (M&S).

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