by Ted Binnema, François Lanoë and Heinz W. Pyszczyk
University of Alberta Press
2025/$39.00/232 pP.

When it comes to navigating in unfamiliar terrain, today’s travellers have many options based on GPS systems. I’m a bit of a luddite with my boat anchor of an iPhone, but it does have the county map on it showing every quarter section of land, and landowner’s name, for miles around. If all else fails, I have topo maps for old school route finding, thanks to generations of cartographers who have plotted the entire country in a series of grids based on calculations of latitude and longitude. But in Cartographic Poetry we learn that Indigenous people, the Siksika and Gros Ventre, had a totally different way of navigating, based not on mathematical measurement but on landmarks, particularly rivers, that were, and are, of cultural, historical and spiritual significance. The authors note that “Poetry is language condensed: Siksika cartography is landscape distilled,” that is to say, not only landmarks but the history of a nation was distilled in the minds of the First Nations travellers and guides. Every river, every mountain, every buffalo jump was a living story in the mind of the people.

This was the mental cartography the early fur traders relied on, while exploring the west with Cree and other Indigenous guides. One notable explorer was Peter Fidler, a Hudson’s Bay Company surveyor and map maker. In 1792, guided by Sakatow and his band of Piikani, he made a winter journey from Buckingham House on the North Saskatchewan River south to the Oldman River gap. Nearly a decade later he established the short-lived HBC trading post of Chesterfield House, where he asked the Siksika leader Ac ko mak ki (Old Swan) to draw a map of the land south of the post, an area that at the time was a blank spot on European maps. Fidler, writes author Ted Binnema in one of his chapters, took great care in getting his guides to draw on paper the maps they held in their minds. Among explorers in that era, he “was unique in his systematic efforts to preserve and document Indigenous cartographic conventions.” Indeed, Cartographic Poetry contains a wealth of ethnographic detail on place names thanks to the meticulous care Fidler took with his Siksika and Gros Ventre informants.

The maps drawn for Fidler are very different from the European tradition of mapping. They are minimalist by necessity, since they would have been typically drawn in the snow, in sand or mud, or upon a piece of hide using charcoal or other medium. They show the Rockies, the “Back-Bone of the Earth” to the Piikani people, as a pair of double lines in Alberta bending east to the Musselshell River in Montana and then south again to the Big Horn Mountains. From it, the major rivers are drawn simply as lines leading out to the plains with the Indigenous names attached by Fidler. We are then shown their transition in Fidler’s hands to maps a fur trader might understand. Next, this Indigenous knowledge passes from the HBC to the famous British cartographer, Aaron Arrowsmith, for his 1802 map of North America. The authors point out that Fidler, if allowed, would have made a much better map than Arrowsmith. The latter, to “…make his depiction plausible to a western reader, invented sinuous river courses and confluences even though he had no evidence for them.” His map was relied on by Lewis and Clark for their much-ballyhooed continental transit in 1804 (which had already been done with zero fanfare by Alexander Mackenzie in 1793), but Arrowsmith’s map “…contributed nothing to the success of the Corps of Discovery.”

Today these maps “are priceless treasures,” write the authors. In publishing them they hope others will “become as fascinated by the maps, their authors and the territories they depict as we are.” With this respectful, evocative study, they have succeeded.

Sid Marty’s most recent book is Oldman’s River, which won the Al and Eurithe Purdy Poetry Prize in 2024.

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by Amal Alhomsi
ROCKY MOUNTAIN BOOKS
2024/$20.00/184 pp.

by Lorne Fitch
ROCKY MOUNTAIN BOOKS
2024/$25.00/232 pp.

Both Senescence: A Year in the Canadian Rockies, by Amal Alhomsi, and Travels Up the Creek: A Biologist’s Search for a Paddle, by Lorne Fitch, published by Rocky Mountain Books in the fall of 2024, are thoughtful and passionate engagements with the mountains and prairies of Alberta. Although Alhomsi and Fitch are devoted to similar landscapes, their approach to the land and to the environmental concerns at the centre of their books, as well as the language they employ in connecting to place, couldn’t be more different.

Senescence explores the process of aging and setting down new roots in a place when one has come from another landscape entirely. Alhomsi is a Syrian writer and artist who has lived in Banff since 2018. His debut book is written in layered, lyric dialogue with the land and water; at the same time, it is in constant conversation with other writers and thinkers whose work explores the natural and the spiritual. Considering the state of a heat dome summer, the Bow Valley landscape around him turning sere and brittle, he reflects, “Nearly 40 degrees C. Nearly Riyadh’s weather. I would look at a tree and wonder: How is it not on fire Is it not just dry sap and timber I have never seen things rattle without being touched by wind. Natalie Rice writes, ‘Grass is a fire / before it knows it is a fire.’ So are the mayflies, so is this body; lumps of damp mud left until they turn into tar, until they’re burnt out of their clinging.” The language in Senescence is exquisite, delving into the intimate connections between the human and the more-than-human, forging elegant links between the aging body and the land suffering through the climate crisis.

Alhomsi’s language may be rich with image and sound play, but it loses none of its power to convince. This is a book exploring the gorgeousness of the earth, but it’s also one that looks clear-eyed at the devastation wrought upon the land—in particular, by those nations whose primary drive is to consume, and at the more-than-human world that pays the price of that hunger. Alhomsi warns, “Since the 1500s, over 140 species of birds have gone extinct, 80 mammals, 10 per cent of all insects, and around 600 plants. There seems to be not enough world for what we want from the world. These horrifying statistics are not, as many believe, an accidental consequence of industrialization or pollution. They are as purposeful and methodical as tides.” As readers, we find ourselves drawn in by the sensuousness of the author’s language, and we quickly come to understand that it is underlain by a keen intellect constantly aware of the larger world.

Similar in focus but vastly different in register, Lorne Fitch’s Travels Up the Creek uplifts both land and community from the perspective of a professional biologist and co-founder of the riparian stewardship organization Cows & Fish. Over his long career in Alberta, Fitch has forged deep connections with communities of ranchers, farmers and researchers. Travels Up the Creek is both a celebration of the land—from places such as Hidden Creek in the eastern slopes through to the prairies and forests into which the mountain streams and rivers flow—and an unveiled look at the impacts of the climate crisis and the devaluation of scientific inquiry. Fitch is equally adept at recounting stories of the lands he’s known and worked with much of his life as he is at calling for awareness of political grandstanding and social media misinformation; the book blends research and narrative with aplomb. A story well told and intelligently and accurately sourced, he argues, can prove compelling to those who have not yet decided to take action in their own lives in support of the land: “Stories tell truths about place and the ways place can affect us. Our minds are shaped by place, as they are by our genes. Stories are the threads that connect our intellect, locate common ground and find the linkages between our history and our future. Richard Kearney wrote, ‘Telling stories is as basic to human beings as eating. More so, in fact, for while food makes us live, stories are what make our lives worth living.’ Maybe they can help us treasure the place where we live and treat it kindlier.”

Toward this, Fitch recounts many of his own experiences with community (both human and more-than-human), from the rivers and fish to those whose work is intimately linked to the health of the nearby waterways. He’s generous with his stories of learning from the land and from the farming and ranching communities around him, and realistic in terms of the impacts of the changing climate on these same lands and communities. But he doesn’t leave the reader in the gloom without rescue. The book itself is the proverbial paddle in its title, an informed and thoughtful steering mechanism to help us right ourselves and move toward a more sustainable future. “If the contents of this book help educate you on environmental issues, inspire you, anger you and ultimately motivate you to act,” he writes, “my job is temporarily done.”

Alhomsi’s and Fitch’s books take different approaches and stem from different communities, but both are deeply grounded in engagement with the more-than-human world. Ultimately, both authors alight on the same point: that close attention to the world is imperative, and that even at this late date, there’s still time to lean in, attend and change.

Jenna Butler is an author and scholar near Barrhead. Her most recent book is Revery: A Year of Bees (Wolsak & Wynn).

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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 post Damming the Rivers appeared first on Alberta Views.

Canmore’s transformation story started over 50 years ago, which makes it a very long and convoluted tale. Let’s start in the early 1970s, when Canmore (pop. ~1,500) was still a coal-mining town, its residents waiting with trepidation for the inevitable closing of the mine, which would happen in 1979. Seeing the end of coal, the responsible men in Edmonton began to execute a plan to maintain the Bow Valley’s role as the little economic engine that must.

In 1973 the provincial government held public hearings about the future of what was then known as the Canmore Corridor. It is unclear how much of the local public knew about the hearings or what the locals thought they wanted, but according to the Calgary Herald, “individuals and groups eager to cash in on what might become Alberta’s Golden Valley” had submitted more than 30 different development proposals. “If even half of the schemes become a reality,” the Herald opined, “the narrow corridor of semi-wilderness would be transformed into a commercial jungle.”

In the 50 years since those words were printed, Canmore (pop. ~14,500) has been transformed from a drive-by town Calgarians only stopped at on their way to and from Banff if they’d forgotten to fill up with gas, into an international tourist destination bending inexorably to the will of wealthy jet-setters and the people who serve their interests. (This probably explains why it’s the most expensive place to live in all of Alberta and much of Canada.) When Tucker Carlson came to Alberta in late January 2024, it was Canmore where he dined with our illustrious premier, Danielle Smith. Whose house they visited is unknown, but I’m guessing it was no one opposing what has certainly become a jungle of the most commercial kind.

The cumulative social, economic and environmental effects of this jarring transformation are largely why, in the spring of 2021, Canmore Town Council turned down two development plans, known formally as the Three Sisters Village Area Structure Plan (ASP) and the Smith Creek Area Structure Plan. These were brought forward by the latest of several iterations of the company that owns the Three Sisters lands, which sit below the photogenic eponymous mountains in the southwest corner of Canmore’s jurisdiction. The main rationale for council’s rejection was that the enormous scale and scope of the developers’ new plans looked nothing like the project that was initially proposed and then approved with conditions by the Natural Resources Conservation Board in 1992, and so all six councillors deemed the plans “not in the community’s best interests.”

The original vision for the property, boldly declaimed in the original company’s name, Three Sisters Golf Resorts Inc., was a grandiose proposal for luxurious hotels and several 18-hole courses, a commercial development that would have provided the owners with fat profits and the town’s residents with jobs and a meaningful commercial tax base, as well as housing for a few thousand new, mostly part-time residents. Three Sisters and the Town worked out an agreement to guide development and, in 2004, council approved the Smith Creek and Resort Centre ASPs, which reflected the commercial golf resort nature of the NRCB approval, along with 2,729 housing units, roughly the same number as in all of the Banff townsite.

Alas, it was not to be. After a decade of financial mismanagement and bankruptcies—when just a few dozen houses, including Three Sisters Golf Resorts owner Blair Richardson’s 11,000-ft², $11-million “European-styled castle,” and two golf courses had been built—the original owners repurchased the company out of receivership for pennies on the dollar and began a years-long campaign to amend the originally approved ASPs. Fast forward to 2021, when Three Sisters Mountain Village, the new company, proposed something wholly different: a largely residential development of up to 7,000 units of mostly trophy homes, basically a second townsite roughly equivalent to the size of three Banffs. The extra 4,000+ homes would be built on an area previously set aside as a “wildlife buffer.”

The Town can’t stop a private landowner from building 7,000 mostly trophy homes.

Shocked at such temerity, a small army of Canmorites, many of whom had lived there for 20 years or more, decided this change was too much. The proposed development would consume the Bow Valley’s last remaining viable wildlife corridor and double the population of Canmore, making it unrecognizable from the already busy and insanely expensive though still somewhat authentic community it is today.

People were also concerned about the economic consequences of the proposed expansion, which presented significant long-term financial risk for the Town of Canmore. Roderick de Leeuw, a current Canmore resident who worked for Three Sisters in the late 1990s and served as the chief financial officer for the Town from 1999 to 2010, said the proposed new ASPs could create “significant net negative fiscal impact for the Town’s finances (that) continue to put pressure on the municipal tax rates.” A big part of the reason why the town had approved the initial Resort Centre ASP was the commercial tax base it would create. Construction and maintenance of residential infrastructure—roads, sewers, water—is expensive, and without the additional revenues from business taxes, the municipal taxes paid by residents, already high, would only increase.

De Leeuw’s comments came as part of a seven-day public hearing where more than 200 very engaged residents provided 110 hours of testimony, 95 per cent of which was critical of, even hostile to, the Three Sisters Mountain Village proposals. So, it’s perhaps not surprising that when the time came, Canmore’s town council overwhelmingly rejected first the Smith Creek ASP, in April 2021, and then, a month later, the Three Sisters Village ASP.

“I have to agree with my fellow councillors; I will not be able to support this,” said Esmé Comfort, a 40-year resident of Canmore and the oldest member of council. “We have to keep our heads clear and set aside our bias and look at the facts…. I tried to do that. I tried to approve this plan in my own mind, because it would get rid of the uncertainty. But it felt like putting on a pair of shoes that were too small. There were too many things that were not addressed.”

The lone supporter was a shocked Mayor John Borrowman, a potter and small businessman who had moved to Canmore in 1974 and who wanted desperately to bring an end to three decades of tumult. “I’m disappointed, of course. I saw this as an opportunity to bring some balance to our community…. The growing imbalance, particularly the social imbalance that we experience today in our community is, in my opinion, going to get worse. But I certainly will support the decision of council. Council’s decision is always right, whether or not I voted the same way as the rest of council.”

Many Canmorites celebrated as if they’d just won the World Cup. Karsten Heuer, a long-time Canmore resident and wildlife biologist for Parks Canada, said he was elated at the development’s rejection. “We were reminded that democracy still works in Canmore,” he told the Calgary Herald. “It was a huge outpouring of concern in the last five months.”

By the time I moved to Canmore in the late 1990s (pop. ~10,500), hoping to settle down and raise my soon-to-be daughter there, the benches above the valley bottom where the old town sits were a sea of brand-new, mostly fancy houses (of which I rented one of the most modest). The infamous Peter Pocklington had built Rundleview Estates on the west side of the valley shortly before the world arrived on Canmore’s doorstep for the 1988 Winter Olympics. Over the next decade, construction continued non-stop on the benches along the northeast side of the valley, with obligatory names reflecting the natural values that were literally being torn up and paved over: Silvertip, Benchlands, Eagle Terrace, Cougar Point (and Creek) and so on.

Meanwhile, the growing population of Canmore—including and especially the concerned environmentalist types, which included me—was spreading out in every direction. Not content with enjoying the views and counting the birds, we experienced the forests and mountains by foot and wheel and ski, running and rolling and gliding on a network of trails that seemed to grow exponentially each time the earth made its way around the sun.

At around the same time as provincial government officials started eradicating trails and closing some areas to recreation to ensure the wildlife corridors remained functional, unknown monkey-wrenchers, armed with more than passing knowledge of the workings of heavy machinery, poured sand into transmissions and hydraulic lines, and corrosive chemicals into fuel tanks. They ruined eight backhoes, loaders and bulldozers on Three Sisters land, and caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage, slowing (but not stopping) the construction of the next subdivision to be added to Canmore’s ever-expanding waistline.

A big part of the conflict was that the provincial government had never bothered to develop a long-term land-use plan for the Canmore Corridor or conduct a meaningful environmental assessment on any of the developments, except for Three Sisters. The Bow Valley became the same kind of free-for-all that also plagued other areas during Ralph Klein’s tenure as premier, most notably the reckless expansion of the oil sands in the 1990s and 2000s.

For locals such as Ron Casey—who moved to Canmore as a young electrician in 1973 and would eventually become a town councillor, the longest-tenured mayor in the town’s recent history and an MLA of the Progressive Conservative persuasion—the rapidity with which the provincial government sold land to developers made it almost impossible for the local government to keep up with the onslaught of development proposals.

“Certainly, in the late ’80s, early ’90s, there was almost the sense of being under siege. You had people coming in that had way more capacity than anyone locally had ever dreamed would show up on our doorstep,” he said, in a frank interview with Jeremy Klaszus on the Sprawlcast. “And there was a bit of concern in the community that we were being outweighed, that these people were all politically connected… and they had way more capacity to deal with the province, to manipulate some of the outcomes that the community wouldn’t have the same say in.”

Although nothing was ever proven, the fire sale of Bow Valley public land after the 1988 Olympics reeked with the stench of corruption.

It has become the same kind of free-for-all that plagued other areas in Klein’s tenure.

In 1989, the year Ralph Klein was elected as an MLA and became environment minister, the Canmore Alpine Development Company bought “a remarkable piece of [public] land” just north of downtown Canmore, on the lower slopes of Mount Lady Macdonald. The majority owner of CADCO happened to be Hal Walker, a major PC fundraiser and Klein’s political adviser and dear friend, who would later go on to become a key figure in the rise of the Wildrose Party. Klein apparently exempted Walker’s SilverTip golf resort, located right on the boundary of Banff National Park, from an environmental review, even though the Three Sisters golf resort would need to undergo a review by the Natural Resources Conservation Board that Klein had recently created.

Walker, who was the president of Klein’s Calgary-Elbow constituency at the time, denied that his political connections had anything to do with his get-out-of-environmental-review card. In the 1992 Legislature, NDP MLA John McInnis asked the now-premier about this apparent conflict of interest and said “this sort of half-baked, piecemeal approach will result in numerous lawsuits and possibly another federal environmental review at the end of the day.” Klein just shrugged it off. “The hon. Member for Edmonton-Jasper Place is talking about a fine gentleman, one of the finest gentlemen to walk the face of the earth, which is a lot more than I can say for this individual,” Klein said. “With respect to Canmore Alpine Development, that project was initiated in 1986, long before the NRCB was a notion. The proponent played by all the rules of the day. This member would have that proponent go back and be subjected to rules that were put in place long after he received all the permits and the necessary regulatory approvals that were required at that time.”

Klein’s contempt for the injustice of retroactivity, however, was apparently one-sided. Meanwhile, Three Sisters investors, 66 of what the Calgary Herald called “powerful and politically well-connected business people”—including Richard Melchin, whose brother Greg would become a three-time PC MLA and energy minister; one-time mining minister Bill Dickie; and Calgary Olympic Committee president Frank King—had become worried the Town might interfere with their ability to develop the lands. So in 1995 Klein’s government decided to provide some much-needed security for the Three Sisters cabal, amending the Municipal Government Act (MGA) by adding section 619, which gives the province, not the town, jurisdiction over projects that have been approved by the NRCB. Although the NRCB’s Three Sisters decision had been made three years earlier, s. 619, now known as the Canmore Clause, was made to apply retroactively to all NRCB decisions.

Just like that, the Town’s ability to determine its own fate had been neutered.

In rejecting Three Sisters’ 2021 development plans, Canmore’s councillors understood what many of the more strident opponents of the development didn’t: this wasn’t the end of the battle, not by a long shot. The issue was not development or no development. Three Sisters still had approvals from 2004 for the Resort Centre and Smith Creek, and they were well within their rights to bring amended versions back to council again and again until a mutually beneficial compromise was reached. One of the sentiments expressed time and again by the councillors was that they weren’t opposed to development, but the size and scope of the proposal was overwhelming. The development needed to meet the needs not just of the developer but of the community, to make the community, as it saw itself today, better.

Blair Richardson and Don and Dave Taylor, the owners of Three Sisters, didn’t see it that way. Surely aware of their privileged position in Alberta’s oligarchical tradition, they must have decided they’d already made their final offer and were done negotiating. They immediately appealed council’s decision to the Alberta Land and Property Rights Tribunal, a quasi-judicial body much like the NRCB. They also filed a $161-million lawsuit against the Town of Canmore. Named in the suit were all the councillors who voted against the plans—Esmé Comfort, Jeffery Hilstad, Joanna McCallum, Karen Marra, Vi Sandford and Robert Seeley. Even mayor Borrowman made the list, though he was the only one to vote to approve the Three Sisters Village ASP.

The rest was a foregone conclusion. Six months later, in May 2022, the Tribunal reversed Canmore council’s decisions and mandated that the two Three Sisters ASPs be allowed to go ahead. The Town appealed, but the Alberta Court of Appeal eventually concurred with the Tribunal. Canmore could not prevent a private landowner from building a large residential development that would double the size of the town, because, the logic went, the NRCB had assessed and approved a golf resort 30 years ago.

In Canmore, October 24, 2023, will go down in infamy. On this day the newly elected councillors gathered to approve, against their will, the court-ordered Three Sisters ASPs. It was like a scene out of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. First, the members of the previous council who had been re-elected—Joanna McCallum, Karen Marra and Jeff Hilstad—recused themselves and left the room because they are still being sued by Three Sisters Mountain Village, and their lawyers had told them the less said the better.

Sean Krausert, a long-time resident and the new mayor, who, when the ASPs were rejected in 2021, had opined that “the right decision is being made!,” gave a longish speech to, in his words, “reflect on how we got here.” Specifically, Krausert, a lawyer, wanted to express his concern about the locals who were complaining the process had been “undemocratic” and those who suggested the mayor and council should resign rather than approve the ASPs.

That’s “easy for someone to say who has not been elected and [doesn’t have] a fiduciary duty to the municipality to uphold,” said Krausert. “It’s also easy for someone who is not subject to a code of conduct or obligations under the MGA; it’s easy for someone who does not face legal ramifications, whether that be contempt of court or potential civil liability or bolstering lawsuits already against the municipality. And what would be accomplished by such Nothing. The ASPs would still get implemented, but only after Municipal Affairs comes in to handle things, which will serve no one.”

Each of the three remaining councillors said their piece. Two of them, Jeff Mah and Wade Graham, were reluctant to vote yes but knew they had no choice. When it was time to vote, Mayor Krausert suggested they use “a little bit of a different system” this time. Instead of hands or speech, which would be captured forever in the video record, they would use their microphone lights, which would not be visible. “Light on if you’re in favour, leave it off if you’re not.” Lights on won.

Canmore’s inability to fend off unsustainable development is the norm in this province.

Canmore’s giant new development is “the biggest bait and switch ever,” wrote Jacob Herrero in an email to me. Herrero’s family moved to the town in the 1970s, when his father started studying grizzly bears in Banff National Park, and he still lives there today. He’s an environmental scientist and engineer, and has crunched the data in the various ASPs. “It starts out as Three Sisters Golf Resorts Inc. proposing multiple golf courses, conference facilities etc.… and morphs into plain-vanilla urban development, something the NRCB isn’t even supposed to review.”

Last October a group of about 20 Canmorites with Bow Valley Engage, frustrated at the undemocratic nature of the regulatory process that approved Three Sisters Mountain Village’s new plans, drove to Calgary and parked themselves in front of Don Taylor’s Mount Royal mansion with signs reading “Stop TSMV” and “Save Grizz Corridor.” Five police cars soon showed up.

Karsten Heuer was among the demonstrators, and he knew they were well within their rights to protest against the negative impacts of the project. “We’ve been pushed to the extent that we feel it’s time to actually air this thing out for what it is, and who the people behind it are,” he told The Narwhal. There are bronze statues of grizzly bears and elk on the Taylors’ lawn, he pointed out. “Those are the very things they’re putting at risk” by shrinking wildlife corridors, he said. Heuer is backed up by recent research in the Bow Valley, which shows connectivity has already been reduced to 21 per cent for grizzlies.

The Canmorites’ exercise of their Charter right “to participate in peaceful demonstrations and protests,” including on public streets, sent Blair Richardson into a paroxysm of outrage. “It’s essential to ask who these people are and whether they respect the principles of the law and unbiased court decisions,” he wrote in an open letter published in the Rocky Mountain Outlook. “Given the immense contributions of the Taylor family to Alberta and Canada, such treatment appears immoral, unjust and unethical.”

And then Richardson threatened his fellow Canmorites with a reminder of Three Sisters’s $161-million lawsuit that has “the potential to severely impact the financial stability of the town”—above and beyond the residential-heavy, commercial-light development he has foisted upon Canmore—“and residents’ tax obligations. With the benefit of the previous legal decisions in favour of Three Sisters, it is likely that financial damages will be awarded to Three Sisters.”

This sort of rhetoric sounds suspiciously old-fashioned and authoritarian, a frustrated Lord of the Manor chastising his peasant underlings for daring to challenge his wealth and authority. It also reveals a great deal about Richardson’s values and the rationale for the $161-million lawsuit against the Town and its councillors. University of Calgary law professor Shaun Fluker characterized the lawsuit as a SLAPP (or “strategic lawsuit against public participation”). According to the U of C Public Interest Law Clinic, filing a SLAPP is “a common tactic employed by claimants with superior resources or relatively easy access to the courts to force political opponents into a legal battle and intimidate them away from participation in political dialogue.”

“I think it’s noteworthy that the individuals named in the claim abstained from the council deliberations,” Fluker told The Narwhal. “So right there you’re seeing, seemingly, a connection between the litigation and [councillors’] ability to perform their public responsibilities. It’s highly problematic.”

It’s also an illustration of the privileged Conservative political culture that has evolved in Alberta over the last 50+ years, the same period of Canmore’s transformation from small town to billionaire wilderness.

I’ve lived in Canmore and written much about the political and economic machinations of Alberta’s conservative approach to economic development for the last three decades. It comes as absolutely no surprise that a grandiose real-estate mega-development that will largely benefit anonymous rich people, most of whom only spend a few weeks in town in any given year, prevailed over balanced economic development, a healthy landscape and a sustainable community.

Canmorites, especially those nature-lovers who moved to town long ago for the slow, quiet life of a former mining town on the edge of a national park, shouldn’t be ashamed at having lost the battle. They aren’t alone. The Town’s inability to fend off unsustainable development is the norm in this province. Decades of entrenched neoliberal rule has ensured that economic development and corporate interests always trump other aspects of the public interest. It’s the cardinal tenet of the Alberta Advantage.

Just listen to Chris Ollenberger, director of strategy and development for Three Sisters Mountain Village, rationalize the scheme. “This project falls into a category of provincial significance. It was deemed to be a project in the interest of the province, and so it has an order-in-council approval from cabinet that says this project will proceed,” he told Jeremy Klaszus. “The intent behind it was [that] if the entire province kind of thinks it’s good from the provincial government point of view, [then] a more localized subset of individuals wouldn’t be able to say ‘But we still don’t want it.’ ”

Alberta’s entire legal and regulatory regime has been specifically designed to both facilitate expedient development, be it of a subdivision or a coal mine, and provide the façade that it’s being done in a manner that is socially and environmentally responsible. This charade is necessary because, from the provincial government point of view, every major industrial project ever proposed—with the recent exception of much-needed clean-electricity infrastructure—is both “good” and “deemed to be in the interest of the province.” Inevitably “some localized subset of individuals”—a First Nation, say, that doesn’t want toxic leaks of effluent in its water supply, or a federal agency responsible for upholding federal laws, or the residents of a town that wants to salvage the last vestiges of a meaningful wildlife corridor—would prefer that, for once, their government account for the negative externalities of its reckless economic policies, but their concerns almost always fall on deaf ears.

Here are just a few of many examples during the same 30-year period that Three Sisters has been trying to build a golf resort, er, residential housing development, against the wishes of much of Canmore’s local population.

Against fierce opposition by the Piikani Nation and a host of Alberta environmentalists, the provincial government built the Oldman River Dam in the late 1980s and early 1990s to increase irrigation for commercial crops. Like development in Canmore’s Valley of Gold, it did so without an adequate environmental review or sufficient consultation with First Nations. The province also didn’t bother to get the necessary federal permits, and so one of the “localized subset of individuals” that didn’t want the dam because of its enormous adverse environmental impacts called the government’s bluff and took the case all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada. And won.

Inconveniently for the provincial government, which fought the case all the way, the SCC ruled that the federal government had to conduct an environmental impact assessment, and when it did, the panel concluded “that the environmental, social and economic costs of the project are not balanced by corresponding benefits and… that, as presently configured, the project is unacceptable.” They recommended the dam be decommissioned “by opening the low-level diversion tunnels to allow unimpeded flow of the river.”

The Alberta government, even without the putative legal might of a Sovereignty Act, refused. Last winter the reservoir behind the dam dropped to its lowest level in 30 years, and, unlike during the pre-dam natural river flows, the MD of Pincher Creek couldn’t pump water from the depleted reservoir, which looked more like a desert than a waterbody.

Here’s another one, from about the same time. Against fierce opposition from First Nations and the residents of Athabasca, the Alberta government approved the construction on the Athabasca River of North America’s largest pulp mill, despite the fact the province’s Environmental Impact Assessment Review Board in 1990 recommended “that the proposed pulp mill should not be approved at this time,” because there already were several other polluting pulp mills on the Peace–Athabasca river system upstream from several First Nations communities. Premier Klein, ever generous to large corporations, also provided a $264-million interest-free loan as part of what he himself referred to as a “sweetheart deal.”

At the announcement of the multi-million-dollar gift, Klein, heckled by protesters over what they perceived as a gross injustice, clenched his left fist and gave them the finger with his right. He was sending the same message that any “localized subset of individuals” receives from the Alberta government when they oppose a damaging industrial project, though generally the message is translated into more genteel language, such as “nonetheless, it’s deemed to be in the interest of the province.”

Dozens of such stories emerge from the Klein era, but he is perhaps most famous for “revamping” Alberta’s environmental regulatory regime while a minister and then, as premier, loosing a largely unplanned and unregulated oil sands industry that turned northeast Alberta into one of the biggest and most polluting industrial sites in the world (though you’d never know it from industry and government propaganda).

Even Alberta’s reluctant mainstream media report on the gargantuan levels of pollution, the unsecured cleanup liabilities, on yet another cover-up of pollution leaking into the Athabasca River and risking the health and well-being of yet another of those pesky “localized subsets of individuals,” this time First Nations, whose constitutionally protected treaty rights have most assuredly been broken.

How was this allowed to happen According to James Heydon in Sustainable Development as Environmental Harm, it’s because Alberta’s regulatory system is designed to maximize economic growth at the expense of all other interests. As part of his research Heydon interviewed 33 current and former senior officials in the provincial bureaucracy and the oil sands industry. He anonymized the interviewees so they could be more open and honest, which allowed for some of the quiet parts—usually hidden behind a smokescreen—to be said out loud.

Participant B, for instance, from the Alberta Energy Regulator, made it very clear that once a major project gets to a hearing, it will be approved. “And none of that… [is] actively transparent. It’s not in the hearing room, we don’t issue notices, we don’t tell people this is going on. It just happens.” Participant F, a senior member of the energy regulator, explained it this way: “We’re a development regulator. We do want development to take place, we believe that’s inherently in the public [interest].”

For anyone who follows these issues in Alberta, Heydon’s book confirms what we already know by now—and helps explain how a proposed coal mine on the Eastern Slopes, which was publicly opposed and rejected by both the federal and the provincial governments, a decision upheld by three different courts, is still alive and well when it should be “legally dead,” as Nigel Bankes, a University of Calgary emeritus professor of resource law, put it. Instead the Danielle Smith government has decided that the mine deserves another hearing—just the latest workaround to ensure “development takes place” no matter the costs.

All of this should sound familiar. The irony for Canmore is that Klein’s philosophy, which created enormous wealth for oil sands companies and a great many of the people who have recently moved to or invested in Canmore, is also at the root of Canmore’s development dilemma.

Klein’s legacy lives on in the likes of Premier Smith, who, at Tucker Carlson’s Calgary event, proudly introduced herself as a defiant libertarian conservative. She was delighted in 2023, the hottest year in the last 125,000 years, to curtail clean wind and solar projects in Alberta while pledging to double production in the oil sands.

Canmore’s fate, I’m afraid, is sealed.

Jeff Gailus grew up in Calgary and now lives in Montana. He is the author of Little Black Lies: Corporate and Political Spin in the Global War for Oil and is now writing a memoir.

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The post Valley of Gold appeared first on Alberta Views.

Of course, there are other, more banal reasons why such a patch of untouched forest would be anomalous in a city like Calgary: development and sprawl—phenomena far more of this place than those towering trees. As early as 1982, only a decade after the trail was first built, a Calgary Herald journalist remarked that she “half expected the trail to be gone and suburbia moved in.” Historically, Calgary’s untouched areas rarely remain untouched for long.

The Douglas Fir Trail owes its unlikely existence, and half-century longevity, to members of the nearby communities who have, time and again, rallied to its cause.

The trail winds up and down and across a steep escarpment that has never been entirely stable. City of Calgary officials noticed slope failures as far back as 1920, and such fragility requires occasional attention. In 1992 the City shut down the trail for renovations. Municipal officials partnered with the Edworthy Park Heritage Society, who in turn activated a crew of about 20 volunteers to spend sunny weekends helping out with the rehabilitation. In addition to repairing and rebuilding trail infrastructure such as bridges and railings, five different greenhouses took on the task of raising wildflower seedlings and native grasses to revegetate bare patches of the trail. Dogwood and fireweed. Wild roses and bergamot. Gooseberries and snowberries. Twenty-six varieties in all, each with a genetic link to the hillside’s ecosystem.

By the time the trail reopened in 1994, volunteers from the society, local Scout troops and other community organizations had contributed over 1,000 hours of labour to the revitalization project. The workers built seven new bridges, spread eight truckloads of sand, gravel and clay by hand over the pathways, and planted 5,000 wildflowers.

Mike Bracko started running the Douglas Fir Trail not long after the reopening. He and his dogs have been regulars ever since. Bracko lives a four-minute walk from the trailhead, in the community of Wildwood. For 30 years he’s run the route nearly every day in the spring and summer, and at least twice a week during the winter. In 2016, on one of his autumn runs, Bracko found the trail blocked by metal fences hung with orange signs warning that the trail had been closed, again, “due to flood-related damage and stability concerns.”

Bracko promptly started a Facebook page called Save Douglas Fir Trail to draw attention to the closure. Repair work started on the trail the following summer, and Bracko used his Facebook page to rally volunteers to help in the effort just as the Edworthy Park Heritage Society had done in the early 1990s. Again community members assisted city workers in building new bridges, rope railings and stairs. The trail reopened in November 2017.

Those renovations, though, weren’t built to last. According to Amir Wazir, a geotechnical engineer with the City of Calgary, the structures installed in 2017 were designed in consultation with the Calgary Mountain Bike Alliance rather than with municipal engineers. “The trail wasn’t built according to city standards,” Wazir said, and had a design life of only two to five years. Sure enough, by 2023 city officials noticed enough degradation and erosion to close a long portion in the middle of the trail where, according to their press release, “the boardwalk, railing and steps have failed, and where the terrain has been deemed hazardous for public use.”

The city also announced an erosion and drainage study on the central slope. Wazir believes the city will complete the slope analysis by the end of 2024, at which time they’ll decide what to do next. In the meantime, the fences and warning signs went up on either end of the closed portion to keep users off the trail.

The trail owes its unlikely existence to community members who have, time and again, rallied to its cause.

Bracko fears that if the city’s analysis concludes the ridge is shifting, the whole trail may be permanently shut down. “Decommissioned,” Bracko said. “That’s a word I heard a lot back in 2017.” And just like in 2017, Bracko is calling on community members to step up and advocate for their beloved trail.

Elise Burgert, a former ranger at BC’s Golden Ears Provincial Park, will be one of them. Burgert moved from Vancouver to the Calgary community of Montgomery in the summer of 2023. “The trail is probably the most beautiful thing about the community and one of the reasons why I moved here,” Burgert said. She crosses the Bow River at Edworthy Park several times a week to walk her dog along the Douglas Fir Trail. “He’s a very adventurous dog,” she said.

Burgert rejects the city’s claim that the trail is too dangerous. “That’s not really a thing,” she said. “It’s just that they didn’t put in the effort of maintaining it. You can build a trail anywhere you want.” Burgert’s experience building and maintaining trails has taught her that such closures are too often permanent. She’s seen the same sort of thing happen in and around Vancouver. “Once you lose them, they’re gone forever,” she said. “It’s really easy to take away natural spaces, and really hard to [get] them back.”

After seeing the trail closure, Burgert reached out to Save Douglas Fir Trail on Facebook and offered to contribute to whatever community efforts were being planned. “Hopefully in the springtime there’s some [way] for people to get involved and help. That’s what I want to do. Just chip in and spend a day or two if possible with other people in the community and fix it.” Burgert believes the city could simply dig some culverts to help with drainage and build a bridge across the wash with two trees. In fact, Burgert figures she could do it herself with a chainsaw and some tools. She’s done it before. “When it comes to building trails, you just have to work with what you have,” Burgert said.

“I don’t think it’s equivalent to the moon landing to build a bridge there,” Burgert said. “The city just needs to want to.” If the city decides to close the trail instead of repairing and maintaining it, she’s confident the community would rally to maintain the trail themselves. This, she said, happens all the time where she’s from; BC employs a “more laissez-faire attitude” to trail maintenance. Instead of fencing off and closing down a trail, the government simply declares a trail unofficial. “You use it at your own risk,” Burgert said. “And if you want to get a group together to fix it, the government might support you. Otherwise they just stop putting the trails on official maps.”

Both Burgert and Bracko believe people will continue to use the trail whether it’s officially off-limits or not. “I’m not promoting civil disobedience,” Bracko said. “But I literally don’t know how they can close a trail.” He recalls when a part of the escarpment slid down during the flood of 2013. “It was actually pretty amazing what happened,” he said. “So many people use the trail that eventually everybody, including myself, made a trail through the tangle of trees.” And when the city closed the trail in 2016, people just removed the fences. “So it’s almost like no matter what h

appens—if it’s an act of God or if it’s the city—we’re still going to find a way to use the trail.”

Both Burgert and Bracko believe people will continue to use the trail whether it’s off-limits or not.

Still, if the city decommissions the Douglas Fir Trail and stops maintaining the stairs, railings and boardwalks, it could become inaccessible to all but the most adventurous users. This would be unfortunate. Many Calgarians use the trail nearly every day, especially in the spring and summer. “That’s their daily walk,” Bracko said. For locals intimidated by “actual wilderness,” the trail provides an opportunity to commune with nature a short walk from their own front doors. It offers social time, too. Women’s walking groups frequent the trail, and Bracko has seen three generations of families walking together during the summer months. “They hike as a family,” Bracko said. “It’s just the best thing.”

For Burgert, losing the trail would mean losing the wide view of her own neighbourhood of Montgomery, her new home, from the lookout on the other side of the Bow. “Every time I go up there I feel really magical,” she said. “I cross the river and hike up. I get a progressively nicer view of Montgomery.” She’ll especially miss its proximity. “Without the trail, I guess I’ll have to drive every time I want to go somewhere to get away from things,” she said. “Which is a completely different experience.”

Wazir, however, feels confident that the trail will eventually be returned to users. But he stresses it needs to be rehabilitated properly. If the analysis shows the slope isn’t safe, “then we’re going to make it safe,” Wazir said. “And then we’ll rebuild the trail according to the standards the city follows, and that will be for a much longer term than five years.”

This prediction could relieve the trail’s defenders, whether they are long-time trail runners like Bracko or newcomers like Burgert. “There is so much peace having something like that so close to home,” Burgert said.

Marcello Di Cintio is the author of Driven: The Secret Lives of Taxi Drivers.

Guillaume Nolet is a photographer who documents society culture and rural life. 

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The post Douglas Fir Trail appeared first on Alberta Views.

Masked characters handed out chocolate almonds. A Gorilla curated a banana-peeling contest. The silent antics of Chaplin and Buster Keaton danced on the wall. This was not a “wake” in the original meaning of the term. There was no chance the body could reawaken (though Keith would have approved of such a prank): the patron saint of impro had donated his body to science. Even after death, his lifelong desire for others to learn through exploration prevailed.

Months earlier, on March 11, 2023, the English-turned-Albertan mentor to comedians, actors, screenwriters, playwrights and directors around the world had died at Rockyview Hospital. The official cause was complications related to diabetic sepsis, though few would argue he had not lived a long enough life, least of all himself.

“Who wants to be 90?” he liked to joke. “Anyone who’s 89!”

Tributes flooded the internet, obits ran in The New York Times, the Hollywood Reporter, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail and the Calgary Herald. Keith’s former students, self-proclaimed “enfants terribles” of the Loose Moose,

Mark McKinney and Bruce McCulloch of Kids in the Hall, joked about playing the hat game (a collaborative challenge Keith invented) on his grave.

Johnstone is the author of the seminal text on improvisation, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (1979). He expanded on his formats, games and techniques in Impro for Storytellers (1999). He is the creator of popular competitive formats of improvisation including Theatresports, Micetro Impro, The Life Game and Gorilla Theatre. Today Theatresports is arguably the most popular invention out of Alberta after ginger beef. This team-on-team format is played on every continent except Antarctica.

Impro—or improv—is widely considered to have two traditions. Viola Spolin developed a series of exercises and games to train actors in the mid-1950s and taught these alongside her son Paul Sills at the University of Chicago. Sills founded the Compass Players in St. Louis and co-founded The Second City. Spolin and Sills trained Del Close, who went on to be the “Chicago style’s” most influential improvisation instructor and mentor to the likes of Tina Fey and Bob Odenkirk.

With some notable exceptions, fewer improvisers south of the border are indebted to the Johnstone style. According to Jeremy Lamb, an Austin-based performer, “Chicago-style improv is US football, while Johnstone is soccer: predominant in the rest of the world.”

When Better Call Saul actor Odenkirk visited Calgary in the winter of 2014, he dropped in on a show at the Loose Moose on a day off from shooting Fargo, only to learn that this was in fact Keith’s theatre. Not only that, Keith lived in town and had lived and taught here since 1971, for more than half his life. Would Odenkirk like to meet him A May 19, 2014, caption of a selfie with Bob and Keith on Bob’s official social media reads:

“My fucking mind blew a gasket. Guys, I bought this book [Johnstone’s Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre] the day I met Del (Close)… and I made notes in it, and did the exercises in it with my dumb friends at college (Tim Thomas—a teacher in Rockford, Illinois) and it set me off on my life path.”

Mark Ravenhill, a British playwright, connected deeply with the techniques and theories in Impro, as Odenkirk had, and partook in a workshop with the man himself in London in 2017. He shared his first impression of Keith in an editorial for The Guardian:

“He arrives, a natural clown. His teeth sit widely and uncomfortably in his mouth, his trousers are high on a generous belly, his trainers are unfeasibly large. He’s carrying a plastic bag full of balloons, hats and cards containing lines of dialogue in gobbledegook. He grins, sighs and blinks at us through thick glasses.”

Today Theatresports is arguably the most popular invention out of Alberta after ginger beef.

Keith was born on February 21, 1933, in Brixham, England, a poor fishing town in the southwest county of Devon. His father was a pharmacist. The family of four lived above his shop. His mother, much younger and larger than his father, was prone to terrorizing her young children by chasing Keith and his sister around the kitchen table with a fire poker as a “game” while Keith’s father turned a blind eye. The first chapter of Impro begins, “As I grew up, everything started to grow grey and dull.”

Their home in Brixham was on the harbour, and, with the onset of the Second World War, became a target of German bombing. In 1940, at age seven, Keith was sent off to Glastonbury to a preparatory school, where he astounded his teacher with his ability to read at an adult level. There was no “Cat Sat on the Mat” for young Keith; he could read the newspaper aloud, having taught himself by memorizing comics. Keith thrived, was spared the cane and was deemed clever. He was recommended to attend the prestigious Totnes Grammar School. Here, though, things quickly went downhill. “I decided right before my ninth birthday not to believe a word the grownups said,” writes Keith. “And the next day I decided to see if the opposite could be true. I think it changed my life. I’ve been doing it ever since. It taught me to be looking for the obvious and not the clever.”

At age 10, while playing, Keith fell off a cliff. Suddenly he felt a different version of “self” take over as he grabbed onto branches and scrambled to safety. He realised he had developed a social self to please grownups that was not his authentic self. Verbal thinking and intellect interfered with being in the moment.

“Much of my work has involved ways of interfering with speech so that ‘something else’ can operate,” he has written. By recognizing a performer’s ability to bypass fear and be in a state of non-verbal thinking, magical things could be unleashed.

In his later work with Trance masks, Keith draws on this idea of human beings having many social selves. By creating large or expressive faces, performers stare into a mirror in trance and discover a mask character who frees them of their set idea of self.

Perhaps the worst stab at Keith’s childhood gusto was not inflicted by sharp branches as he scrambled to hang on to that cliff, nor by the bully whose pencil took out Keith’s eyesight in his left eye, but rather by his educators. In his blog he writes: “It’s difficult to destroy the curiosity of an ape, but Totnes Grammar School regularly achieved it.”

Keith went from being the top of his class to being at the bottom, and he wanted to understand why. “Students who are not eager to learn have been damaged. Instead of assuming that they were born that way, conscientious teachers should see it as a chance to heal the school-inflicted wounds.”

He eventually attended St. Luke’s teacher’s training college in Exeter and began teaching children in the government housing area of Battersea, experimenting with more playful and explorative forms of learning.

Keith writes in a chapter titled “Notes on Myself” in Impro: “I began to think of children not as immature adults but of adults as atrophied children.” Education left people atrophied, and with the wrong attitude to failure. Embracing failure was necessary to learn, according to Keith. He discovered techniques and ways to remove fear of failure, whether it was stage fright or writer’s block. Beginners of improvisation are taught to say “yes” to offers. In a TED talk, Keith’s iconic words appear on a title card: “There are people who prefer to say ‘yes’ and there are people who prefer to say ‘no.’ Those who say ‘yes’ are rewarded by the adventures they have. Those who say ‘no’ are rewarded by the safety they attain.”

Battersea and life in London was when the colour returned to Keith’s life as he met and exchanged ideas with kindred spirits: artists, filmmakers, actors taking in plays and films and live music together. After seeing Peter Hall’s production of Waiting for Godot, a life-altering experience that spawned a friendship and mentorship from Samuel Beckett himself, Keith was inspired to move from teaching into theatre.

Keith Johnstone influenced many star performers

Johnstone began as a play reader, and then taught acting and playwriting. He wrote and directed several plays himself at the Royal Court and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London for most of the 1960s. Here, Keith evolved into the impro pioneer who could teach the unteachable: the misfits and the outliers, the drama school stragglers.” One such straggler was Jonathan Pryce, who earned an Oscar nomination for his performance as Pope Francis in the film Two Popes. In an interview for the docuseries On Keith: Artists Speak on Johnstone and Impro, Pryce recalled Johnstone’s influence: “To me, Keith is the man who released any inhibitions I may have had when I went to RADA in the late 1960s.”

At that time in Britain, the Lord Chamberlain had to approve plays and scripts before they could be performed in front of an audience. Improvisation was strictly forbidden. Keith found a way around that by hosting open workshops, marking the beginning of his trademark side-coaching, or directed improvisation, another major departure from the Spolin tradition. Keith continued to work on the games, techniques and theory he developed at the Royal Court and through his work with Britain’s first travelling improv troupe: the Theatre Machine.

While teaching at the Royal Court Studio in the early 1960s, Keith became inspired by British professional wrestling, where the competition is fake, yet elicits a sports-like passion from an audience. As he says in Improvisation: The Origins of Theatresports: “The exaltation among the spectators was something I longed for, but didn’t get, from ‘straight’ theatre. Sometimes the performers would lie on the canvas and hug each other for minute after minute while the crowd yelled insults and witticisms. Our Royal Court audiences were like whipped dogs in comparison—probably because once an event is categorised as ‘cultural’ it becomes a minefield in which your opinion can damn you.”

Education left people with the wrong attitude to failure. Keith discovered techniques and ways to remove fear of failure.

Keith was a healthy young man of 40 who didn’t smoke—a real feat for any person in the 1970s. Yet in London he often felt ill or as if he couldn’t breathe. There was no room for Keith to continue experimenting. Keith accepted a visiting lectureship at the University of Calgary in 1972 and was offered a full-time tenure position in 1975. It was not until he emigrated to Alberta and arrived in the can-do, yeehaw, “git yer stompin’ boots on” Stampede culture of Calgary in the early 1970s that he blossomed into the world-renowned leader in the field of improvisation. “Calgary was a place where literally, physically and intellectually there was space,” said the late Kathleen Foreman, original Loose Moose member and former U of C Drama faculty member, in an interview for Theresa Robbins Dudeck’s Keith Johnstone: A Critical Biography.

Keith was consistently finding better ways of teaching and continued to work on his discoveries in improvisation. He hand-picked his U of C students for further experimentation outside of the university. Early drama students included Foreman, Dennis Cahill, Frank and Tony Totino, Veena Sood, Jim Curry, Dave Duncan and Betty Poulson. Keith preferred to keep the peace at the first sign of dissension from certain faculty members who did not feel his unconventional drama experiments were welcome on campus. He searched for an off-campus home for his growing gang of improvisers. They found one at the Pumphouse. There Johnstone and veterinarian Mel Tonken co-founded Loose Moose Theatre in 1977.

Cahill, current artistic director and an original member of Loose Moose, recalls, “We started doing weekly performances at the Pumphouse on Sunday nights. I think the improvisation is what really got people’s attention, just because there was nothing quite like it, not in Calgary, not really anywhere.”

In Calgary Keith found the freedom to create new techniques and create performance formats, beginning with Theatresports, which quickly exploded. In Impro Keith writes, “Now that I’m teaching ‘playwriting’ in a Canadian university, I’ve adapted from this early game into a way of teaching narrative skills. Two students obey a third, who tells them what to say and do.” This is the source of the “Typewriter Game,” a narrative exercise played in impro theatres everywhere, where a player mime-types a story for others to fill in. Big discoveries happened with the early students at Loose Moose and the company grew. Early houses frequently sold out.

Keith travelled in the summers while he was at U of C, and then further developed techniques he began abroad in his classes in Calgary and at the Moose. He developed The Danish Game, a component of Theatresports, while teaching in Denmark. Maestro Impro was originally created in the Netherlands, but Keith developed the format further at Loose Moose. Cahill says, “At some point, Keith started to introduce the theory behind the games, which, if you were going to teach or invent your own games, was invaluable.”

Keith retired from U of C in 1995, and, instead of a gold watch, was given a balloon ride. He handed over the artistic reins to Cahill in 1998, but often returned to teach or co-direct. Generations of Loose Moosers have made waves in the entertainment industry since, such as Pat Kelly of CBC’s satirical news radio program This is That.

“Probably the greatest influence Keith had on me was teaching me that a performer ‘should not try to be interesting’—being average was more compelling,” Kelly said. “It unlocked everything for me when I understood that being subtle worked. It has informed everything I’ve done in comedy.”

Dave Lawrence, creator of the cult hit FUBAR, says, “Studying with Keith from such a young age helped me with FUBAR [for] the simple fact that characters need to be altered. I don’t think I would have known that if it weren’t for Keith.”

Keith pioneered huge parts of this now ubiquitous art form right here in Cowtown, beside his beloved Rockies. Yet he got no rewards or prizes; he was never white-hatted. There’s no mention of this legend’s name on the webpage of the University of Calgary’s drama department, where he taught for nearly 25 years, no plaque or scholarship or rehearsal space named after him on campus. Improvisation at the Loose Moose Theatre—having miraculously survived the pandemic—receives minimal provincial funding compared to other more “respected” art forms such as ballet and scripted theatre. To this day, Keith and his work have received no formal recognition from the local community or the provincial government.

As Mark Ravenhill wrote in his editorial for The Guardian about his workshop with Keith:

“After one class, I try to tell Johnstone what an inspiration he has been to me. He’s evasive, ducking my attempts to praise him. He is wary of the guru status that many in improvisation have given him. ‘It stops them inventing for themselves,’ he says. What’s the thing he is proudest of in his life He stares into the distance for a long time, then says: ‘I did once invent a totally new way of peeling a banana. I’m very proud of that.’ ”

Back at the Pumphouse last June, Dennis is wrongfully declared the winner of the banana-peeling contest, Mark McKinney leaps to his feet in mock protest, telling Tony Totino he was robbed, “and this shit has been going on for years!” Dave Lawrence, dressed as his FUBAR character Terry, attempts to patch in a group in Brazil, sending screeching feedback through the string quartet’s performance of Beethoven. Terry yells down at the crowd from the booth: “Sorry. I boned it right up!” They roar with laughter and heckle him, the perfect summation of Keith’s teachings: embrace failure, be obvious, misbehave, relax, the competition isn’t real.

Immanuela Lawrence is a comedy writer, improv performer and co-creator of FUBAR: Age of Computer. She lives in Calgary.

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The post Alberta Was His Finest Laboratory appeared first on Alberta Views.

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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The post Frontenac House Poetry Quartet 2022 appeared first on Alberta Views.

Before reaching the lookout I turned onto a smaller dirt trail, and in a few steps I’d left the bustle behind me. Hiking steadily downhill through a forest of brawny old-growth spruce and fir trees, I emerged onto the breezy expanse of gravel beds braided with aqua ribbons of glacial melt, all rushing to fill the lake.

My destination lay four kilometres and 500 metres higher up the rubbly valley—the glacier whose meltwater fills that lake. There, I would rendezvous with several scientists at the Peyto Glacier research site, a cluster of small, weather-worn buildings perched on a rock-cluttered knoll. Built in the 1960s, the site is a living legacy of a worldwide glacier inventory project in which Canada played a key role, and where research continues.

To reach the site I skipped and splashed through shallow rivulets until I reached a larger channel pulsing toward the lake, considerably wider and deeper. Switching my hiking boots for lightweight sandals, I stepped into the icy flow. With a hiking pole to steady me gripped tightly in each hand, the water surged at my knees as my feet sought out the flattest stones that didn’t wobble. I was immersed in the rushing headwaters of the Mistaya River, which feeds the North Saskatchewan River, water that flows through Edmonton to central Saskatchewan and ultimately to Hudson Bay, where polar bears hunt for seals on its winter-frozen surface, and walrus, dolphins and orca swim and feed.

Just as I feared being flushed into the lake and beyond, I reached the north bank. Boots back on and invigorated head to toe, I located the start of the foot-hewn trail. Two thankfully smaller creek crossings later, I ascended the steep hogsback moraine ridge. Finally the glaciology buildings emerged into view, with the glacier tongue beyond. While some of the scientists and bulky equipment reach the site by helicopter, for those who hike the same route as me, it’s just another walk to work.

Caroline Aubry-Wake is one of those researchers. A Ph.D. student with the University of Saskatchewan’s Canmore-based Coldwater Laboratory, she works under John Pomeroy, Canada Research Chair in Water Resources and Climate Change at the university. Her work contributes to his team’s studies to understand how retreating glaciers, changing landscapes and a warming climate are affecting water resources in mountain basins in the Canadian Rockies. Her first visit to Peyto Glacier, though, was in winter, when she and friends skied the popular Wapta Traverse. Carrying avalanche and glacier safety gear plus sleeping bags and food, they skied 40 kilometres across sparkling icefields and glaciers where the only tracks are made by skiers, wind or wayward wolverines, spending nights amidst the icefields in Alpine Club huts.

“I really enjoy spending time on the Wapta,” Aubry-Wake said. “Whenever I go for fun, it also helps me with my science, to see how the landscape evolves in the winter. I can take that understanding into my work.”

In autumn 2017 she launched her Ph.D. project at Peyto. She’d previously spent two summers studying glaciers in Peru’s Cordillera Blanca while earning her masters in earth and planetary sciences at McGill University. For her doctorate she’s working alongside Pomeroy and fellow Ph.D. candidate André Bertoncini to study how wildfire smoke influences glacier melt, by comparing years with a lot of fire activity in Alberta and BC—including 2017 and 2018—with the years that followed, such as 2019, when fires were fewer but a soot layer from previous years darkened the glacier surfaces and increased the melt rate.

Glaciers will shrink 60–80 per cent by the end of this century. The biggest loss is predicted to occur between 2020 and 2040.

Her work with the Coldwater Lab includes computer modelling, collaborating with other scientists to examine conditions at Peyto Glacier from the early 2000s through to 2090 in an effort to understand how the North Saskatchewan River basin will function when Peyto and most of the Rockies glaciers have completely melted. Previous studies by the Western Canadian Cryospheric Network have demonstrated that some 300 glaciers in the mountain national parks of the Rockies were lost between 1920 and 2005. And a UBC study led by professor emeritus Garry Clarke and published in the journal Nature Geoscience in 2015 determined that, based on conditions and trends relative to 2005, the volume of glacier ice in western Canada will be reduced by 60 to 80 per cent by the end of this century. Few glaciers will remain in the interior and Rockies regions, the study concluded, while glaciers nearer the Pacific Ocean, particularly those in northwestern BC, would survive “in a diminished state.” The biggest loss, they predicted, would occur between 2020 and 2040, with potential implications of those reduced/depleted glaciers including “impacts on aquatic ecosystems, agriculture, forestry, alpine tourism and water quality.”

After the summer of 2021’s record-smashing high temperatures across western Canada, however, and the dry weeks with smoke thick as dryer lint from BC wildfires that followed, many doubt Peyto, and other Rockies glaciers with similar characteristics, will last half that long.

Top: Peyto Glacier, 1902. Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, V653/NA-1127. Bottom: Peyto Glacier, 2002. Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies.

Aubry-Wake’s work and that of other researchers all contribute to the Peyto’s valuable role as the North American glacier that has been continuously studied the longest. The first photograph of the ancient ice tongue was captured in 1896 by American explorer Walter Wilcox. The lake was known then as Doghead Lake—exactly what it resembles from any high point near its south end looking north. Wilcox renamed it for his guide/outfitter, Bill Peyto, who would later become one of Canada’s first national park wardens. First published in National Geographic magazine in 1899, Wilcox’s image shows the glacier extending nearly to the lake, providing a reference point that remains valuable today.

The first scientific studies recording the glacier’s position began in 1933, and from 1945 to 1960 Peyto was among several of the Rockies glaciers regularly surveyed by the Dominion Water and Power Bureau, which became the Water Survey of Canada. Peyto’s role grew when it was included among five glaciers in western Canada to be mapped and extensively measured annually from 1965 thru 1974 as part of Canada’s contribution to UNESCO’s International Hydrological Decade.

With the viewpoint parking area just a 30-minute drive from Lake Louise up the Icefields Parkway, Peyto Glacier retains its status for two main reasons. “First of all, it’s accessible. It’s not that easy to get to, but it’s easier to reach than a lot of other glaciers in the Rockies: just a three-hour hike in,” Aubry-Wake explained. “The second reason is historical. This glacier has been studied for so many years, and so many different projects have been done in that location. There’s a lot of data and information on that environment. It’s quite rare to have such a long data set to build upon.”

Temperature records in the Rockies were surpassed in summer 2021 not by fractions of degrees but by as much as 3ºC and 4ºC.

That extensive information base proved especially relevant in the summer of 2021, when temperature records were surpassed not by fractions of degrees, as is usual with such records, but by as much as 3ºC and 4ºC. In the town of Banff, where records have been kept since 1887, the temperature reached 37.8ºC on June 29, beating the previous high of 33.9ºC set in 1937 (during a prolonged drought known as the Dirty Thirties). Peyto Glacier’s melt rate was soon far surpassing the 25-metre annual average for the previous quarter century.

“It melted so much and so fast,” Aubry-Wake said. “It was incredible—badly incredible—how much change happened in one season. The toe collapsed and it retreated by 200 metres. And because we have years of data, we can put that extreme event from summer of 2021 in context. If we only had data for as long as five years, it would be really hard to quantify how different that summer was.”

In winter, glaciers appear to be asleep when they’re buried under a blanket of snow that conceals their boundaries and crevasses—where shimmering blue ice splits apart where the bedrock supporting the glacier steepens. In summertime, warm temperatures cause creeks rushing with meltwater to flow on the ice surface, making the glaciers seem alive. But when winter snows aren’t sufficient to maintain the glacier’s volume, that lively melt signals that the glacier is dying.

As one of about 1,160 glaciers remaining in Alberta, all found in the Rockies’ eastern slopes, Peyto provides information that’s representative of hundreds of small glaciers that scientists don’t have the resources to study. Data recorded at Peyto, including air and surface temperatures, precipitation amounts, humidity, wind speed and direction and more, is recorded and transmitted via satellite directly to researchers’ desktops at the Coldwater Lab in Canmore and to Natural Resources Canada in Ottawa. In addition to contributing to Canada’s network of studied glaciers and associated freshwater resources, information from Peyto is shared with the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and with Parks Canada, within whose boundaries the headwaters of Alberta’s key rivers are protected. The data is also shared with downstream industries, including mining, hydro power, irrigation, tourism and ecosystem services. And it’s shared with Alberta Environment and Parks to facilitate water management and allocation decisions.

Draining to the north to feed the North Saskatchewan River, Peyto shares similar characteristics with nearby Bow Glacier, which also descends from the Wapta Icefield. As the headwaters of the Bow River, that glacier contributes to the freshwater supply of Alberta’s most populated region, flowing through Banff, then Calgary with its 1.4 million residents, and on to the southeast of the province, where it joins the Oldman River to form the South Saskatchewan River. The North and South Saskatchewan rivers then merge to course toward Lake Winnipeg and ultimately drain into Hudson Bay. Meltwater from the Wapta Icefield helps sustain no less than three provinces.

Left: Scientists at the Peyto Glacier research station (built in the 1960s) after a day spent studying glacial composition and melt rate. Right: Researchers May Guan, Steve Bertollo and Scott Munro set up monitoring equipment on Peyto. This image was taken in 2011; the ice they’re standing on has since melted and formed a large lake. Photos: Lynn Martel.

When asked how Alberta is preparing for a diminished freshwater supply as a result of our glaciers melting, Jason Penner, communications adviser with Alberta Environment and Parks, replied that “glaciers are a relatively small component of Alberta’s freshwater supply.” “While retreating glaciers are a concern, notably in late summer and in drier years, seasonal and year-over-year variability of precipitation has a much greater impact on water supply in Alberta,” he said.

With less snow and ice will come smaller streamflows. Less water will be available to balance things out during hot, dry periods, when it’s needed most.

When averaged out over the year, the annual contribution of glacier-melt to rivers in Alberta might indeed seem small, as low as 4 per cent. But in late summer, when rainfall is usually at its lowest and all the previous winter’s snow is gone, that number jumps to as much as 30 per cent of river flow. Glacier ice is nature’s savings account for water.

“Summer 2021 really showed the role of glaciers in the regional hydrology,” Aubry-Wake said. “This is exactly what’s useful about glaciers: when it’s hot and dry, they provide more water. That’s the fundamental glacier functionality. They help us to be more resilient to dry periods.”

But extra glacial melt has its limits. The heat in the summer of 2021 resulted in Environment Canada recording 219 daily maximum temperature records broken or tied in Alberta, and 49 provincial sites registering all-time maximum temperatures. Alpine wildflowers shrivelled, thousands of oxygen-starved fish died, crops withered and Alberta reported 66 excess deaths—that is, 66 people here died from the heatwave. Those extreme temperatures didn’t happen in the late-summer weeks, though, but from June 25 through July 7. The following five weeks brought only minimal rain, resulting in the province spending $136-million to help Alberta ranchers with feed and water costs.

By November, water levels in the Bow River were at less than half of the average of all observations recorded in the 125 years the Water Survey of Canada has been measuring the river, said John Pomeroy. As of early May 2022 the Bow remained unusually low. Levels were expected to increase as soon as snow melted at higher elevations and spring rainfall arrived.

“Overall, streamflows from most Canadian Rockies rivers were very high as deep snowpacks melted in the heat dome of late June and early July 2021,” Pomeroy said. “Then [they] dropped to half of normal or lower from mid-July onwards as the drought reduced mountain runoff and depleted groundwater that would feed these rivers. The Milk River in southern Alberta had its natural flow go to zero in July. But glacier-fed rivers such as the Athabasca, Sunwapta and North Saskatchewan stayed with high flows due to rapid glacial melt in the heat.”

With that, Rockies glacier melt reached a critical juncture. “As glaciers disappear, this extra water in drought and heatwave years like 2021 won’t be there,” Pomeroy said. “2021 appears to be a tipping point for some Canadian Rockies glaciers. Air temperatures were the highest ever recorded on Peyto and Athabasca. Algae are growing on the wildfire soot and keeping the glaciers dark, so they heat up in the sun and melt fast. Other, larger and colder glaciers such as Athabasca will soon follow Peyto’s path to destruction.”

None of this is news to Pomeroy. But what did surprise climate scientists—not only in Canada but around the world—about the western Canada heatwave was that those temperatures hadn’t been expected for another three decades.

“What happened in BC and throughout the Canadian West during the summer and fall of 2021 should be regarded as a 9/11 alarm that wakes us all up to the climate emergency,” said Bob Sandford, a Canmore-based senior adviser on water issues and Global Water Futures Fellow with the UN University Institute for Water, Environment and Health. “We’ve known for a long time that this day would eventually arrive if we continued to ignore the warnings and the evidence of the risks we were taking,” he said. “But we didn’t expect that climate change impacts projected to appear by mid-century if we didn’t act now to dramatically reduce carbon dioxide emissions would arrive 20 to 30 years early. The West got slammed.”

While a study published in 2021 by Brandi Newton, a hydroclimatologist at Alberta Environment and Parks, showed that from 1951 to 2017 winter precipitation—from November to April—decreased, “November–April precipitation in the Rocky Mountains is projected to increase in the future.”

At the same time, Aubry-Wake’s modelling work found that overall, looking at data from 2000 to 2090, a decrease in future streamflow is predicted. “We’ll have more rain falling, more snow falling—mostly more rain, because it’s warmer, so less snow overall,” she said. “But we’ll still see a decrease in stream flow of about 7 per cent.”

This is because while snow and ice serve our needs by storing water, when rain falls, water flows away. That leaves less water available to balance things out during hot, dry periods, when it’s needed the most. In short: More spring runoff means shrunken rivers in summer.

Meanwhile, with glaciers all around the planet melting, including the massive icecaps of Greenland and Antarctica, more liquid water becomes available to an already energized water cycle. Climate change, Sandford pointed out, is all about water. “It’s estimated that even at 2°C of warming, the concentration of water vapour in the atmosphere could increase by as much as 20 per cent, with a commensurate increase in its power to further amplify warming,” he said. “We must get control of carbon dioxide emissions so that we can limit the damage and the impacts that water—and, in its absence, drought and fire—can visit on the world. If more people understood this, there might be less resistance to climate action.”

Considering that Alberta has had some of the most expensive environmental disasters in Canada’s history—the June 2013 southern Alberta floods resulted in $1.7-billion in insured damage, while the May 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire cost $3.8-billion plus an estimated $6-billion in uninsured damage—it would make sense, Sandford suggested, for Alberta to be leading the transition away from fossil fuels to more sustainable energy sources.

During the NDP term of office (2015–2019), Sandford said, the MLA for the Banff-Kananaskis riding, Cam Westhead, and Environment Minister Shannon Phillips made several visits to the Coldwater Lab in Canmore. But with the Rockies glaciers melting faster than ever, neither Alberta’s current environment minister nor the region’s latest MLA have shown any interest in the scientists who monitor our water, or in their findings. “Minister Phillips was the last provincial politician, MLA or otherwise, to ever visit us in Canmore or to take an interest in our research,” he said.

Researcher Caroline Aubry-Wake, who studies how soot from forest fires darkens a glacier’s surface and increases melt rate. Photo: Lynn Martel.

Researchers aren’t alone in voicing their concern. Recreational climbers and professional mountain guides, who spend countless days year-round amidst millennia-old ice, season after season, are noticing routes becoming inaccessible. “Our final surprise was the view of the Peyto Glacier from the glacial research station,” wrote Association of Canadian Mountain Guides member Maarten van Haeren in August 2020 in a publicly accessible conditions report. “The glacier has a large new collapse in the centre (about 100 m × 60 m in area and ~30 m–40 m deep), and the traditional access from looker’s right to gain the glacier was a 10 m strip of ice that was not underwater. If I had another Peyto Hut booking, I would approach via the Bow Hut trail. Certainly disheartening to see these drastic changes from last year to this year.”

In 1940 the Icefields Parkway from Lake Louise to Jasper opened to automobiles, having been travelled as the “Trail of the Glaciers” by commercial packtrains for decades. The federally funded project had provided employment during the Great Depression. In 1961 the road was paved and upgraded to its current state. At least a million vehicles from every corner of North America drive it annually, mostly in July and August, their occupants stopping at strategically placed glacier viewpoints. It’s consistently rated among the most scenic drives in the world. Alberta licence plates outnumber those of all other jurisdictions combined. Families large and small disembark at pullouts, reciting the glaciers’ names—Victoria, Crowfoot, Snowbird, Athabasca, Angel—as if rendezvousing with friends.

Glaciers have been part of the Rockies landscape longer than people have—more than 11,000 years. Today we hang photos and paintings of them on our walls; local companies use their proximity to the ice-capped Rockies to attract employees. We boast of “our” Rockies when we travel. And by the time today’s children become parents, they will look to many of these high cirques and hanging valleys and see only rock.

It’s not only our landscape that’s changing, but even our language. Historically, the term “glacial pace” meant something was happening so slowly as to be imperceptible. Not anymore. “It used to be that if you wanted to see how a glacier was changing, you had to go every 10 years or so to be able to notice the change,” Aubry-Wake said. “And now it’s like, oh, three months later.”

Lynn Martel explores and documents the mountain world. Her latest book is Stories of Ice (Rocky Mountain Books, 2020).

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When the Canada–US–Mexico Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) investigated the matter in 2020, it gathered credible scientific evidence of what Alberta government officials have long denied and some scientists and engineers have long known: that oil sands tailings ponds are leaking their toxic contents into groundwater. Alarm bells went off in Ottawa. The federal government sent scientists to northern Alberta to discern the origin of the leaking chemicals, and Environment and Climate Change Minister Jonathan Wilkinson finally acknowledged the gravity of the situation. “The conclusions of the [CEC] report are very troubling, and certainly they cannot be ignored,” he said. “The oil sands tailings issue is a problem we are going to have to address.”

After decades of neglect, the provincial and federal governments are now in a regulatory footrace to see who will be first to create regulations to guide if, how and when treated “oil sands process water”—a euphemism for the dangerous liquids left over from the mining of bitumen—can be discharged into the Athabasca River.

Not surprisingly, Indigenous leaders and elected representatives downstream of the oil sands, from Fort Chipewyan to the Arctic’s Beaufort Delta, are just as opposed to the idea of dumping toxin-laden waste in the Athabasca River as southern Albertans are to the prospect of digging new coal mines on the Eastern Slopes. “We’re not supportive of this,” NWT Environment Minister Shane Thompson told his colleagues in the NWT legislature about proposals to alleviate the tailings problem by flushing it downstream. “This has been a very long issue for our Indigenous governments across the territories, all the way up from the Beaufort Delta all the way down to Fort Smith.”

Jesse Cardinal, executive director of the Athabasca Keepers of the Water, was even more blunt. “Releasing tailings to the watershed is not a safe or just option for solving Alberta’s growing tailings crisis,” she wrote in a letter to Steve Guilbeault, a former Greenpeace activist and, as of 2021, Canada’s new minister of environment and climate change. “It is a handout to oil companies that allows them to avoid reclamation costs. It is a decision that [means] northern Indigenous communities and lands will remain a sacrifice zone for the profit of settler governments, southern populations and some of the world’s richest corporations.”

First Nations, environmentalists and downstream residents have long understood that oil sands companies promised never to release tailings water, treated or otherwise, into the Athabasca River. They say industry representatives led people to believe that the tailings—vast quantities of sand, clay, leftover bitumen, toxic chemicals and water—would be stored safely in pits and eventually reclaimed on land, when the mines closed.

There is ample evidence for their position. For 50 years, treatment and release of oil sands process water has never been overtly mentioned in the applications and approvals for oil sands mines. Instead, tailings and waste-water management plans describe “end pit lakes” and “tailings landforms” as the destiny of the toxic byproducts created by washing gigatonnes of bitumen-infused soil in hot water and chemicals. Likewise, neither the provincial nor the federal government created regulations to allow the release of oil sands process water, even as the volumes of tailings ponds have swelled beyond all expectations. But a range of historical documents makes it clear that releasing tailings water was always the likely end game—and that it’s been happening all along.

In the beginning, industry engineers and scientists assumed oil sands tailings would behave like others they were familiar with, for mineral and coal mines. These operations’ noxious slurries are treated in a two-step process: Let the suspended solids (i.e., the tailings, or “fines”) settle to the bottom and then treat and release the remaining waste water. In coal- and mineral-mine pits, the solids are relatively large and heavy, so it takes only a matter of weeks for the particles to drop out of the water column and congregate on the bottom, allowing the waste water to be promptly treated and released. Engineers have been doing this for more than a century, and the physics and chemistry of the process are well known.

Oil sands tailings, it turned out, are less co-operative. They’re contaminated with some of the same chemicals found in coal and metal mine tailings, such as selenium, cadmium, mercury and arsenic, but they harbour much finer particles of silt and clay. They also have troubling contaminants unique to bitumen: polycyclic hydrocarbons, naphthenic acids and high concentrations of salt. As the rainbow trout that have been used to test the lethality of tailings pond water can tell you, it is an acutely toxic mix.

It can take decades, even centuries, for silt and clay fines to settle out in oil sands tailings ponds, and even then, these “fine fluid tailings” remain in a mobile, semi-aqueous state akin to quicksand. This has left industry in a quandary: They can’t reclaim the solids if they can’t harden them, and they can’t treat water that’s awash in solids. Worse, every time the water is recycled for reuse in the extraction process, the chemicals and salts become ever more concentrated.

In 1973 a report entitled “An Environmental Study of the Athabasca Tar Sands,” prepared for Alberta Environment, identified the wicked problem government and industry had created for themselves: “Present technology… does not provide adequate clarification of the [tailings] water to permit total recycling” and “clay and bitumen contaminants preclude the discharge of tailings water to the Athabasca River.” The report also included a warning: The inability of industry to remove the array of toxic chemicals and solids from oil sands tailings was “the most imminent environmental constraint to the future expansion” of oil sands mining.

The warning, like so many others in Alberta, was ignored. Despite the publication of dozens of papers and reports over the following decades warning of the risks and uncertainties, the Alberta government happily approved oil sands mines as fast as industry’s engineers could draw up the plans, and the tailings ponds grew. By 2009 they contained nearly 800 billion litres of waste water, and waterfowl were dying in the ponds by the hundreds each year. Meanwhile, even as First Nations people downstream complained of deformed fish and debilitating health effects, including high rates of rare cancers, Alberta politicians and government scientists declared that this rash of development couldn’t possibly be polluting the Athabasca River.

The Great Canadian Oil Sands Duck Fiasco in 2008 brought unwanted international condemnation to the oil sands and forced the province’s hand. In 2009 the Energy Resources Conservation Board (predecessor to the Alberta Energy Regulator, or AER) finalized Directive 074, codifying tailings standards that required companies to capture and dry as much as 50 per cent of new tailings waste by 2013. Emboldened by the new policy, then-premier Ed Stelmach assured the world that oil sands companies would have to eliminate tailings ponds within “a few years.”

Directive 074 was a dismal failure. Industry outright ignored its obligations, and by 2013 tailings volumes had increased to almost one trillion litres. Not a single oil sands operator had complied with its commitments to reclaim new tailings. But rather than enforce the regulation and demand that tailings be cleaned up, the ERCB looked the other way—then quietly scrapped the regulation. High on optimism and oblivious to irony, then-premier Alison Redford boasted to a crowd at the Brookings Institution, a Washington, DC, think tank, that “tailings ponds will disappear from Alberta’s landscape in the very near future.”

She must have had in mind a geologic timeline, because today some 1.4 trillion litres of fine fluid tailings and almost 500 billion litres of contaminated waste water fill the ponds. An analysis by the Pembina Institute, which has been warning Albertans for decades about the growing tailings pond debacle, concluded that the province’s new tailings management policy, Directive 085, will allow cumulative tailings volumes to increase for at least another 15 years.

Oil sands mines got approved despite no feasible way to treat their waste water.

Given the unwillingness of successive Alberta governments to adequately regulate the oil sands industry, it boggles the mind how blind the federal government has been to a problem you can literally see from space. The Fisheries Act, passed in 1868, just a year after Confederation, is Canada’s strongest water protection law, because it prohibits “the deposit of a deleterious substance of any type” in “water frequented by fish.” Nonetheless, the federal government left the management of industrial water pollution to the provinces for more than a century.

Around the turn of the last century, the Canadian government belatedly realized the provinces weren’t adequately protecting water from pollution. Pulp and paper mills (1992) and metal and diamond mines (2002) were the first to be subject to stronger effluent regulations, followed by municipal waste-water regulations in 2012. Somewhat incredibly, given how long we’ve known—or should have known—that coal and oil sands mines were depositing “deleterious substances” in creeks, rivers and groundwater, we’re still waiting for federal effluent regulations to be enacted.

“It’s absolutely amazing,” says Martin Olszynski, an associate professor of law at the University of Calgary and an expert on environmental and natural resource law. “The insane thing that people don’t understand about environmental law in Canada [is] we’ve never had regulations authorizing any deposits of deleterious substances in relation to oil sands mining. But that doesn’t mean [companies] weren’t depositing waste water—of course they were.”

How much they’ve deposited over the decades is difficult to say. Public record-keeping has been poor, but in 2009 Alberta environmental scientists Kevin Timoney and Peter Lee concluded that “contaminant discharges to the Athabasca River are common.” They cite a few examples, including a 1982 fire in a Suncor waste-water pond that sent flames 90 metres into the air and an unknown quantity of contaminated water down the river, closing the commercial fishing season on Lake Athabasca and reportedly causing illnesses in Fort McKay.

In 2007 human error led to the escape of 10 million litres of contaminated waste water from Suncor’s waste-water ponds. But total licensed discharges from the Suncor ponds the same year were more than 1,000 times that amount. “The total discharge from all companies,” Timoney and Lee warned, “is unknown.”

How did so many oil sands mines get approved without having a technologically feasible and cost-effective way to treat their waste water In most other first-world democracies, you don’t get your permits until you have demonstrated to the regulator that you know how to clean up after yourself. In Canada, and Alberta in particular, a simple “we’ll figure it out later” is all that was needed to scrape 1,000 km² of boreal forest off the face of the earth.

“We’re stuck between a rock and a hard place,” said Olszynski. “We have 1.4 trillion litres of fluid tailings, and that’s an environmental hazard. But we should never have allowed it to get to this point. That’s a regulatory failure.”

The oil sands industry wants to treat and release waste water from tailings into the Athabasca River.

Whatever the oil sands industry did or didn’t promise in the 1960s and 1970s, there’s no doubt it now wants to treat and release the waste water from its massive accumulation of tailings. Corporations and industry trade groups are quick to point out that oil sands companies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on research to solve this problem, and that we needn’t worry, because they have everything under control. John Brogly, water and tailings director for the Canadian Oil Sands Innovation Alliance (COSIA), maintains that “we have dozens of different ways to treat the water to ensure it can be released safely with no harm to the environment and downstream users.”

Oil sands companies have begun to develop some potential technologies to treat both fluid tailings and the remaining waste water. Suncor, for instance, has created a “permanent aquatic storage structure” (PASS) that modestly reduced fluid tailings inventory at its Base mine in 2018 and 2019. Several companies are building pilot pit lakes to see if they can forever store fine fluid tailings under several metres of fresh water. Brogly pointed to two examples of new technology that can treat oil sands process water. One involves a combination of filtration and absorption, whereby coke, a by-product of oil sands upgrading similar to charcoal, filters out the fines and absorbs unwanted organics such as naphthenic acids. Another example is a sunlight-activated treatment process called SolarPass. It uses a proprietary photocatalyst that, when added to water and exposed to sunlight, will purportedly treat and eliminate potentially harmful organic components in water.

But these proposed technologies are still in their infancy. When COSIA assures us that “we have dozens of technologies” to treat and release waste water safely into the environment, what they really mean is they’re testing dozens of ideas that might someday work at the massive scale required. It’s troubling that 50 years after Great Canadian Oil Sands started accumulating fluid tailings, the same industry that spared no effort or expense to innovate the necessary technology to expand oil sands production at breakneck speed still doesn’t have a single waste-water treatment system capable of cleaning even a fraction of its polluted water at any meaningful scale.

Inspired by how activated carbon removes contaminants in home water filters, Syncrude engineer Warren Zubot is now using petroleum coke—a by-product of the company’s upgrading process—to filter out contaminants in tailings water (results shown above). The rub, as always, is cost.

Many chemical engineers and environmental toxicologists believe that with a concerted effort and more money, industry could cobble together the technologies required to detoxify oil sands tailings water. That they haven’t done so is simply because they haven’t been made to do so. That needs to change.

Mandy Olsgard, an environmental toxicologist who worked for the AER during the brief reign of the Alberta NDP, worries that the province can’t be trusted to adequately manage pollutants. “We need to get federal effluent regulations under the Fisheries Act, our most robust piece of legislation, rather than [wait for] a captured provincial government to develop a system for approved releases.” Olszynski adds that federal regulations could provide, for the first time, a legal mandate for a more robust oil sands monitoring program, to ensure that regulations protect the aquatic environment.

One reason for hope is that the federal government has invited First Nations people to the table to help develop new regulations. The process is called the Crown–Indigenous Working Group, and it’s the first time the feds have engaged Indigenous communities in the development of effluent regulation under the Fisheries Act.

Strong rules are not guaranteed. The development of industrial effluent regulations is always a battle fought behind closed doors. Corporations, industry trade groups and even provincial governments routinely lobby the federal government to keep regulations weak, flexible and cheap. First Nations and the NWT government, on the other hand, want the most protective and restrictive regulations they can get. “We strongly support the cleaning of tailings ponds, but we don’t want the cleanup to mean [the creation of] environmental impacts in the Athabasca River and downstream,” said Bori Arrobo, director of sustainability at the Fort McKay First Nation. “We don’t want to swap one environmental liability for another.”

Olsgard maintains it’s way too early to talk about releasing treated tailings. We don’t know the condition of the Athabasca River below the mines before oil sands development started, because monitoring data before 2010 is inadequate. And more research is needed to better inform people living downstream, especially First Nations, about how to identify environmental and health protection goals and work back from there. “We’ve moved beyond acute risk and into the space of chronic, sub-clinical toxicity,” she says. “We don’t want fish with deformities or whose populations crash because of reproductive effects. Those are the protection goals my colleagues and I are pushing for.”

Though industry is pushing hard for “treat and release,” other strategies could keep water pollution low enough to protect environmental and human health. Monique Dubé, an environmental toxicologist who headed the Oil Sands Monitoring Program from 2017 to 2020, says the focus must be on a holistic and integrated water management strategy. “Certainly, some water will have to be treated and released, but a lot of water could be more effectively managed for treatment and reuse,” she says. “This alternative needs to be on the agenda; it’s certainly on the agenda for Indigenous communities in the region, and it absolutely needs to be for industry and governments.”

Some oil sands companies propose to create more end pit lakes and artificial wetlands to store the toxic fines, but little evidence exists that these ersatz waterbodies will remain stable and safe over the long term.

The best alternative would be to mandate that companies remove the fines and treat the leftover waste water back to its natural state. Oil sands companies could then choose to reuse the water, construct clean wetlands, or release certified clean water into the river, greatly reducing environmental impacts on a landscape on which First Nations hope to resume their traditional hunting and gathering activities for generations to come.

The rub, as always, is cost. To adequately treat contaminated oil sands waste water will not be cheap. The more polluted the effluent and the stricter the limits on pollution, the more expensive treatment will be. Consider: An average high-end waste-water plant at a metal mine can treat five million m³ of waste water a year and cost $50-million to build. To process just the current volume of stored oil sands tailings and waste water by 2070 would require eight such plants running full tilt for 48 years, with eight more plants needed to treat the new tailings (~40 million m³) produced each year. That’s 16 treatment plants, for an initial capital cost of roughly $800-million.

The per unit operating costs for an oil-sands-specific treatment plant might approximate those of desalination plants used in Israel: $2–$4 per m³. Total cost Somewhere in the neighbourhood of $5-billion to $9-billion, probably more when you factor in delays and hiccups and inflation.

Of course, the solids—sand, clay, silt, bitumen—have to be removed before the waste water can be treated. Finding a way to store this toxic mix is perhaps the bigger challenge than treating the liquids. “The solids are arguably more contaminated,” says Olsgard. “When you bring in the solids and the liquid tailings… and you place them in forests and lakes and wetlands and release them to the river What does that look like It’s a complete unknown.”

In August 2021, less than a year after then-Minister of Environment and Climate Change Jonathan Wilkinson went public with his concerns about the oil sands tailings ponds, he rejected Riversdale’s application to build the Grassy Mountain coal mine in southern Alberta. “The Government of Canada must make decisions based on the best available scientific evidence while balancing economic and environmental considerations,” he wrote in a statement justifying his decision, which was celebrated by mine opponents across southern Alberta. “It is in Canada’s best interests to safeguard our waterways for healthy fish populations like the westslope cutthroat trout, respect Indigenous peoples’ culture and way of life, and protect the environment for future generations.”

If these sentiments had been taken seriously when assessing and approving oil sands mines, Alberta wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place. For generations, politicians and CEOs have thrown caution and integrity to the wind, prioritizing GDP, jobs and profits over clean water and healthy communities—and nowhere more so than in northeastern Alberta.

But perhaps things are improving. If a single coal mine is now considered too risky for Alberta’s fish and waterways, and if respect for the rights and lifeways of Indigenous peoples is so important, then surely preventing the oil sands industry from further damaging the Athabasca River with toxic waste water should be a similarly high priority for new environment minister Guilbeault. An environmental impact assessment and strong regulations are the least the federal government can do to ensure that the residents of Fort McKay and Fort Chipewyan and the NWT are treated with the same respect as people in Lethbridge and Calgary.

Jeff Gailus grew up in Calgary and lives in Montana. He’s writing a memoir on family, history and fascism.

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by dee Hobsbawn-Smith
University of Regina Press
2021/$26.95/240 pp.

Having spent the better part of my life defending my hometown, Lethbridge, against stereotypes, I am realizing I may harbour a few about Calgary. This is one of the reasons why the essays in dee Hobsbawn-Smith’s book Bread & Water were so refreshing: step aside, oil barons and cowboys, this is the Calgary of little old houses on the Bow River, small restaurants with a lot of gumption, and local produce in a region that some associate only with fields of exported alfalfa and feedlot-fattened beef.

Hobsbawn-Smith’s short-lived but influential restaurant, Foodsmith, was one of the first in Calgary to feature local producers. In a charming prairie take on the “100-mile diet” Hobsbawn-Smith recalls the reaction of her mother—who had been a dryland farmer in Saskatchewan for decades—to the experiment. She quips, “Don’t those BC writers know that some of us have been eating locally our whole lives?”

Hobsbawn-Smith inherits some of the straight-talking style of her mother, but hers is infused with a deep love of the art of cooking that includes the language of fine dining (cassoulet, confit) even if the lamb was raised in Olds and she picked the rhubarb herself. In her essays she impressively manages this collision of worlds with a wholesome, approachable style. “I simmered the tomatoes with a few leeks into a melting fondue and dumped them into the bean pot, so good with braised lamb,” she writes, closing with, “every baba and nonna knows that.”

This is a mouth-watering book, highlighted by a commitment to and celebration of local producers. The most memorable scenes always take place in her kitchen with a wood stove roaring and a soup bubbling. She is at her best describing the textures and smells of favourite recipes and walking the reader through the process of cooking. The writing is visceral as she describes barley risotto with grilled sausages, Alberta gouda on a fresh slice of bread, or roasted tomatoes from Black Diamond.

Most of the essays revolve around food—its rituals, frustrations and pleasures—and Hobsbawn-Smith shares valuable insights about being a woman in the culinary world in the early 1980s when fewer than 25 per cent of the students at the Vancouver Vocational Institute’s program were women. In some essays she is honest about the trials of the food industry: stress, high demands, sexism. In others, she waxes poetic about a loaf of bread or a particular honey. A few read more like sponsored travel writing, and I loved a surprise essay about a meeting with Wiebo Ludwig. But generally the book is rich with memories and insights into the role of cooking in the author’s life and her appreciation of local producers.

Megan Clark is a public librarian from Lethbridge.

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