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.

Fooling the people won't work forever

Alberta's Tories (and even their federal counterparts, Harper's Conservatives) would do well to pay attention to the implosion of the G.O.P. south of the border.

As Ben Herbert points out in the New York Times, "The incredibly clueless stewards of the incredibly shrinking Republican Party would do well to recall that it was supposedly Abe Lincoln, a Republican, who said you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Not only has the G.O.P. spent years trying to fool everybody in sight with its phony-baloney, dime-store philosophies, it’s now trapped in the patently pathetic phase of fooling itself."

The G.O.P is "not a party; it’s a cult.... It is losing all credibility with the public because it is not offering anything — anything at all — that could be viewed as helpful or constructive in a time of national crisis. And it has been unwilling to take responsibility for its role in bringing that crisis about."

Sound familiar? The difference in Alberta, of course, is that we haven't had our crisis yet. But we will, if only because the well-entrenched Tories rule with an ideological certainty -- encourage rampant economic and industrial development and limit government oversight and intervention, except when government must step in to help encourage rampant economic and industrial development when lack of government oversight and intervention fails -- that leaves little room for the humility, common sense and balance they claim to embrace but don't.

As former Liberal leader Dr. Kevin Taft told me while I was researching a magazine article on the influence of think tanks on Alberta politics, "“I have a deep concern for the future of Alberta because it is being governed not by facts but by ideology,” says Taft. “Massive decisions are being made on the basis of faith rather than thought. Inevitably, those decisions end up being misguided… When the money runs out, we’re going to be in for rude surprise. And I think it may come sooner than we think.”

The Tories, like the conservative wing of the Republican Party, are fooling themselves as they try to fool us. Rather than develop sound policies and encourage a transparent and inclusive democratic process, they invest $25 million in a "branding campaign" aimed at showing the world "the true Alberta, the one we experience every day." But the Alberta portrayed in the Flash animation and TV commercials and billboards is not the Alberta I watched evolve since 1971. It is a fiction created to manipulate, rather than enlighten. A charade.

It is, ironically, also a mirror. The fact we need to spend so much money trying to show the world who we "really are" only indicates (to me, anyway) that the world already has a pretty good idea what we're all about -- backward, selfish, greedy, irresponsible, short-sighted -- and we don't like what they see. But rather than change our ill-conceived policies and rethink our collective behaviour, we've decided to use propaganda to create reality and rewrite history, in much the same way Stalin used his own government-sponsored PR machine to control his own people and consolidate political power.

No, instead of thoughtfully considering the nature of a future defined by climate change and a changing political response to its not insignificant impacts, Ed Stelmach's (neo)Conservatives simply march along with their ideological blinders on, betting our entire future on the hope that the world will let us develop the tar sands' "dirty oil" until it's gone, which, says David Keith, is hardly a sure thing.

When the world finally does decide to regulate carbon by making it really, really expensive to emit, energy companies will flee from Alberta like rats from a burning ship, leaving not only the Tories but all of us floating aimlessly in an empty lifeboat devoid of the wealth and clean water and healthy forests and yes, grizzly bears, that was once "the Alberta we experienced every day."

The good news (if you can call it that) is that ideologues like Bush and Cheney and Gingrich -- and Stelmach and Morton and Klein -- can't and don't change, a modern hamartia that eventually leads to their downfall. They are so wedded to an ideological ideal that they lack the personal and political flexibility necessary to navigate the fast-moving complexities of the 21st century, and as the rigid Titanic they constructed sinks into the sea around them, they resort to sleight-of-hand and facade -- a kind of political virtuality --- to buoy them up even as the water rises over our heads.

But that can only last so long in a democracy. Unlike Stalin's Soviet Union, the U.S. and Canada offer the people more in the way of alternatives. It may take awhile, and much social and environmental damage may be done in the meantime, but enough of us will finally realize, as voters have in America, that we have made a mistake. Swallowing our pride, we'll admit our complicity in these failures and make a change, swimming for the surface and tossing the ideologues out of the lifeboat, and then charting a new course for a sustainable and equitable society of which we can all be proud.

I just hope we don't wait too long.