"My Canada doesn't include Alberta"

I ran across a blog today that kind of turned the world on its head.

I often struggle with the fact I'm from Alberta, which is one of the least progressive, least sustainable, least environmentally friendly places on the earth. And yet it's part of Canada, which, despite some similar problems of its own, still has a lot going for it.

Back to the blog. After reading an article in Explore Magazine about the slaughter of wild horses in Alberta, the anonymous blogger wrestles with the same demons for awhile and then declares: "Yes, I'm proud to be Canadian. But my Canada doesn't include Alberta."

Have a look for yourself. It's quite brilliant.

The Grizzly Bear Manifesto Word Cloud

Albertans, not just grizzly bears, need Knight in shining armour

Today, Calgary Herald columnist Robert Remington suggested that "the optics give the distinct impression the Alberta government is not serious about protecting the iconic grizzly, as evidenced by its decade of dithering over listing the grizzly as a threatened species, contrary to the recommendations of its own advisers and scientists.

"One would think that Knight would want to live up to his title as the sustainable resources minister, as one national newspaper so wryly editorialized recently, but he shows the typical Alberta government inability to make a bold decision with his continued waffling on a threatened status for the grizzly, even when that decision should be a snap in the face of the evidence."

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Mr. Remington's "impression" is bang on, though I would suggest that it is much more than just a matter of "optics." The evidence of mismanagement goes far beyond the government's dithering on the decision to list the grizzly bear as a threatened species. So far, there is plenty of evidence that the government has no intention of implementing the various strategies set out in the recovery plan it adopted in 2009. In fact, even a cursory reading of the plan indicates that the government has not invested the human and financial resources the plan stipulates would be necessary (see pages 39-42).

The real reason that Minister Knight and his predecessors -- Ted Morton and Mike Cardinal -- haven't taken any meaningful steps to recover grizzly bears is because to do so means a wholesale change in the way they manage the landscape. In fact, an entire library of scientific research conducted over the last two decades indicates that it would likely be impossible to honour all the current Forest Management Agreements and oil and gas leases on the books today and recover grizzly bears. (Click here for one example.) The two are simply incompatible; current and future levels of development will not allow us to maintain grizzly bears in Alberta outside of national parks. This would seem to be in direct contravention of Alberta's legislation and policy, and the overwhelming wishes of the citizenry.

Of course, the impacts of such unsustainable levels of development won't stop with grizzly bears. It will also  extirpate mountain caribou, decrease the number of elk and other species that hunters value, and significantly decrease the quantity and degrade the quality of the clean and abundant water that is the foundation of our society.

Believe it or not, listing the grizzly bear as a threatened species will do little to benefit Alberta's grizzly bears. Because Alberta doesn't have species-at-risk legislation, the listing of the grizzly bear as "threatened" does not require the government to do anything: hunters could still shoot threatened grizzlies and unsustainable levels of industrial activity could still take place in critical grizzly bear habitat, which (as Mr. Remington points out) is the real death knell for Alberta's grizzly bears. However, listing the iconic grizzly bear as a threatened species would be a symbolic act, a formal recognition of a much bigger problem.

Like canaries in coal mines, the grizzly bear is warning us about our overzealous industriousness. We simply cannot continue to treat our foothills and forests, our mountains and our valleys, like factories that churn out products and profits for us to consume like locusts. Alberta, it seems, is The Lorax made manifest.

As Mr. Knight's boss, Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach, often likes to say, we must balance the needs of the economy with the needs of the environment on which we all depend. When Premier Stelmach invokes this phrase, it's usually a cliche meant to justify further industrial development. We need our legal and political systems to reflect the opposite, that economic activity must take place within the very real limits that nature imposes on us. There is no more room for industrial development in the Eastern Slopes, Swan Hills and other places that support grizzly bears and clean water. In fact, we have a long road ahead of us just to repair the damage that the Tory's populist politics have inflicted on our province.

It's not just grizzly bears but all Albertans who need leadership from Mr. Knight. If we are to maintain the things we value in this province -- grizzly bears, clean and abundant water, healthy fisheries and game populations -- we are going to have to make hard decisions about how much more of the landscape we can industrialize and urbanize. We also need stronger legislation to protect these values, and we need a far greater degree of transparency in our democracy.

Let's roll up our sleeves and get busy.

 For more information on the politics of grizzly bear conservation (not to mention a great read), pick up The Grizzly Manifesto at your local bookshop in May. Visit the The Grizzly Manifesto webpage to learn more and read an excerpt.

Says Sid Marty, "Gailus delivers a left hook to Parks Canada's bogus claims to put conservation ahead of tourist development, and gives a well deserved right cross to our cynical Alberta Government, which seems bent on letting grizzly bears blink out into oblivion. If you care about wild bears and wild lands, read this book."

Minister Knight, will you please stand up and take responsibility for your actions

One of the first things my parents taught me as a young lad growing up in Alberta was to take responsibility for my actions. So when I, as a five-year-old, went next door with a friend of mine and broke every window in my neighbour's two-story playhouse, I had to pay to clean up my mess.

I remember sitting on the thinly carpeted basement floor with my angry father, emptying my two-foot-tall Santa Claus piggy bank onto the floor in our basement. It was all the money I had in the world, and I had just invested it in learning a very important lesson: Either don't make a mess in the first place, or be prepared to clean it up when you do.

I always thought it couldn't get any worse than former Alberta Minister of Sustainable Resource Development Mike Cardinal, who once explained to the CBC that "natural resources had to be developed because natural resources had to be developed." This was in response to a news story about the killing of a famous grizzly bear near Hinton. Her name was Mary, and she had been poached from a road and left to rot by someone who apparently didn't much care for grizzly bears and all that they represent. The journalist had done her homework and knew that too many roads were the problem, so she had asked Minister Cardinal about the situation in Alberta. He said then that roads weren't a problem, and besides, they were here to stay because natural resources had to be developed because natural resources had to be developed. Such is the logic here in Alberta.

Now Minister Knight in Shining Spin has to deal with the enviromental debt racked up by Minister Cardinal and the rest of his Tory antecedents, who are intent on turning every hecatre of Alberta forest into money just as fast as they can. For more than thirty years now, the Tory government has allowed unrestricted forestry and oil and gas development to destroy Alberta's mountain, foothills and boreal ecosystems. What little is left of them are the only places left for grizzly bears to live, and Knight knows better than anyone that he's been left to clean up the mess made by his Tory cronies.

Like his outbursts toward anti-tar sands advocates, he's sounding a little frustrated these days. Today he suggested that conservation groups should help fund government efforts to protect grizzly bears. “They’re keen in buying advertising, maybe they could think of a better way to use that money,” he told The Calgary Sun.“If they felt that $150,000 wasn’t enough, perhaps they’d like to bring some contributions to the table.”

I'm not sure what political science courses Mr. Knight took in university, but he seems to forget that it's HIS responsibility to manage the provincial budget so that he can afford to pay for wildlife management and, when he and his Tory bedfellows don't plan very well, to recovery species that they've pushed to the edge of extirpation.

There's only one way for Mr. Knight to ensure that grizzly bears remain a part of Alberta's cultural and natural heritage. Grizzly bears can only survive in areas with very low road densities, and the road densities in Alberta's grizzly bear habitat are off the charts thanks to the Tory's policy of unregulated industrial development.

Knight and his SRD minions have tried to trick Albertans into believing that the government can recover grizzly bears (and caribou) by "bar[ring] access to roads built in sensitive areas," but such promises are nothing more than pipedreams. For one thing, trying to make ammends in a few "sensitive areas" is not going to recover grizzly bears. That would have been like me replacing one of the two dozen windows I had broken and calling it good. If grizzlies are to be saved in this province, it will require a hell of a lot more work (and money) than that.

The other hole in Knight's pipedream promises is that there is no way to "bar access" to enough of the tens of thousands of kilometres of roads and trails and cutlines that criss-cross western and northern Alberta. It just can't be done. When the U.S. government started its grizzly bear recovery program, it tried to do just what Mr. Knight wished he could do. But they couldn't. It just cost too much money to put armed guards at the entrance to every road 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So they just removed the roads and didn't build any more.

Our American neighbours invented what used to be everywhere and called them "roadless areas." That's right Mr. Knight: other politicians, with the same pressures to provide ordinary people with jobs and rich people with more of what they already have too much of, choose to make sure a good deal of the land they oversee has NO ROADS. Why, just today, The Denver Post wrote an editorial supporting a government plan to keep 4.2 million acres of public land free of roads. That's 17,000 square kilometres, Mel, the size of Banff and Jasper national parks combined. In a state roughly one-third the size of Alberta. Closer to home, Montana has more than 20,000 square kilometres of roadless areas.

They do this because they know that it is unhealthy and unwise to road, timber, drill, mine and otherwise make a mess of every square inch of your backyard. If you do, wildlife populations disapper, water quality and quantity declines, and soil begins to fill your streams, destroying fisheries. Roadlesss areas help to protect all of these things, which Albertans have said over and over and over again that they value. And you and your people just ignore us and continue flushing it all down the toilet.

And now you want Alberta's grossly unfunded environmental groups to pay to clean up your mess? You've got to be kidding.

Let's make no bones about it: The Alberta Tories have made a huge mess and it will cost them millions of dollars every year from now until my daughter is an old woman to fix it.

The first thing they can do, of course, is stop building more roads in the first place, but as I pointed out in an earlier post, Mr. Knight's ministry is at this very moment allowing Foothills Forestry Products (and probably Weldwood too) to build an ecologically unsutainable network of roads in core grizzly bear habitat, even though Alberta's grizzly bear recovery plan stipulates that it's not allowed.

Once they've stopped building more roads, they can get out their wallets and start paying to clean up the mess they have made. Now that we're all in the business of telling other people how to spend their money, here's a few suggestions for No-Money Mel.

1. Stop subsidizing the oil and gas industry to the tune of millions of dollars every year.
2. Charge more royalties for the trees and oil and gas that you're giving away to the corporations that are destroying our forests and wetlands.
3. And if that doesn't work, why don't you and your fellow MLAs, who are after all the ones calling the shots, just take it out of your pensions?

After all, it's your mess, and you're going to have to clean it up somehow. Got a piggy bank?

Read more about the Torie's failure to make room for grizzly bears in Alberata in The Grizzly Manifesto.

Grizzly bear recovery in Alberta a "sham"

Albertans (and Canadians as a whole) should be very concerned about the Alberta government's disengenuos approach to grizzly bear recovery. Like oil-addicted Pinnochios, Alberta politicians and bureaucrats tout their successful efforts to responsibly manage and recover Alberta's beleaguered grizzly bear population when nothing could be further from the truth.

The latest sign of spin was on April 3, when Minister of (un)Sustainable Resource Development Mel Knight told CBC National, “We see success with these programs, and we’re going to continue to operate these programs.”

The programs to which he refers have done nothing to recover Alberta's grizzly bear population. While the government has adopted a recovery plan and drawn up maps of core grizzly bear habitat, little if anything has improved on the ground in the eight years since Alberta's Endangered Species Conservation Committee recommended that the grizzly bear be listed as a threatened species.

In fact, neither of SRD's two webpages devoted to grizzly bear management and recovery even mentions what the government's recent status report calls the single most important aspect of grizzly bear conservation and recovery: limiting road density and motorized access into grizzly bear habitat.

Not surprisingly, things have actually gotten worse over the last eight years. During a recent Google search, I discovered that Knight's Ministry of Sustained Untruths recently approved a Forest Management Plan that ignores its own grizzly recovery plan and puts grizzly bears at greater risk of extirpation. The plan is for the E8 Forest Management Area, which is located just south of Knight's electoral riding, in one of the most productive grizzly bear population units in the province.

Despite the fact that nearly all of the E8 Forest Management Area has been designated core grizzly bear habitat, the forest management plan allows Foothills Forest Products to exceed the road density thresholds for core habitat as stipulated by the grizzly recovery plan. The density of roads that Foothills Forest Products will build over the next 10 years likely will not allow grizzly bears to persist in this area.

The government also brags about its supposed Bear Smart Program, but it is really nothing more than a website and a few pamphlets. The government claims to spend $150,000 a year on its Bear Smart Program, but this insufficient token is nothing compared to the millions of dollars the Alberta government spends every year on other publicly funded education programs.


The only real Bear Smart improvements in Alberta communities (like Canmore) have been because of the commitment and hard work of local citizens, and have very little to do with the efforts of Minister Knight and his SRD minions. This is something that George Hamilton, priority species manager with Alberta Sustainable Resource Development, admitted at a 2008 forestry workshop I attended and wrote about (read Bearly With Us).

Perhaps the greatest tragedy of all is that even if Minister Knight in Shining Spin does decide to list the grizzly bear as a threatened species, the decision will afford no protection whatsoever to our grizzly bears. Unlike any other place on the planet, the Alberta government could still allow hunters to kill threatened grizzly bears. And Knight will almost certainly allow forestry and oil and gas companies to continue to build roads and otherwise destroy the critical habitat on which Alberta's grizzly bear depends.

The good news is that not everyone's a two-faced L*@!. The only honest spokesperson in Alberta's Ministry of Species Extinction appears to be its priority species manager, the aforementioned George Hamilton, who told The Edmonton Journal that, in fact, "the Alberta government has finally decided that it does not want to recover grizzlies."

As for investing enough money into the actual recovery of Alberta's grizzly bears, well, Mel Knight, a senior politician in one of the wealthiest jurisdictions on the planet, told CBC that those nasty conservation groups should foot the bill. Nothing like passing the buck, Mel!

Want more details? Look for The Grizzly Manifesto on store shelves in mid-May.