A grizzly future for Alberta

It’s 9:00 p.m. and as I write this the provincial election results are pouring in. Not surprisingly, the Alberta Tories are heading for another major majority. This is bad news for Alberta’s grizzly bears, which shouldn’t come as a surprise either. But there is hope hidden in the numbers if one cares to look close enough.

The PC Alberta website claims that Ralph Klein’s government has protected the environment while enhancing economic development. Nothing could be further from the truth. Since the Alberta Tories took power in the early ‘70s, they have sacrificed the province’s abundant natural assets at the altar of unfettered economic development. And no PC premier has done it better or more efficiently than King Ralph.

Under the tutelage of the Tories, Alberta has become one of the wealthiest political jurisdictions in the world, but it has also become one of the worst stewards of the environment found anywhere. If one compared Alberta to the countries of the world, it would be very near the top in per capita GDP (our prime indicator of wealth) and very near the bottom in terms of amount of the landbase protected (a good indicator of commitment to environmental protection).

The Tories have only protected 1.4 per cent of Alberta’s landscape, a number so low that most developing countries exceed it by orders of magnitude. True, the federal government was farsighted enough to establish national parks in what became Alberta, and they are big and bountiful and beautiful. But they are few, and they are not enough to protect things like biodiversity and water, which are at the very heart of Alberta’s long-term prosperity.
This is not the whole story, but it is a pretty good indication of what is and is not important to Ralph’s PC Party. And the grizzly bear is not. There are only 500-700 grizzlies left in Alberta, an extremely small population of North America’s most sensitive carnivore. The Tories were forced to recognize this in the late 1980s, when they drastically reduced the number of hunting tags that were handed out. But that has been the extent of the efforts made to make a place for grizzly bears in Alberta.

The government did develop a grizzly bear management plan in 1990, but it was never implemented. More recently, the Alberta Endangered Species Conservation Committee recommended that the government list the grizzly as a threatened species, but this too has fallen largely on deaf ears. Hunting permits were reduced again, but a near-record number of grizzlies were killed anyway. A recovery team was brought together to develop a recovery plan (for a species that hasn’t even been recognized as threatened), but it was so dominated by industry and government officials that it is so weak it will do little to address the issues that imperil the grizzly bear today.

No, it’s obvious that grizzly bears are not high on the Tories’ priority list.

But the good news is that the Tories’ grip on power has weakened; democracy seems to have returned to Alberta. It’s not over yet, but the Tories appear to have lost 10 seats and 20 per cent of the popular vote. David Swann replaced Mark Hlady, giving Calgary its first Liberal candidate in years, and Mark Norris, the Tories’ minister of economic development, looks like he’ll be looking for a new job tomorrow. The Liberals and the NDP together will hold one-third of the seats in the legislature, providing a much-needed opposition to a Tory majority that has steamrolled across Alberta for 30 years.

While this won’t likely change much over the next four years, it just may bode well for the next election and the distant future. For this a few grizzly bears may be dancing in their dens.