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.