The oil sands province of Alberta: Where extreme weather meets extreme politics

The polit­i­cal cli­mate of Canada’s oil pro­duc­ing province is being upstaged by Moth­er Nature. Pro­longed heat and light­ning have pro­duced a nat­ur­al cli­mate emer­gency with fires black­en­ing the skies and con­sum­ing more than 2.3 mil­lion acres in a not-so-mer­ry month of May.

“Alber­ta is on fire,” pro­claimed the Mon­day, Vic­to­ria Day head­line on Glob­al TV’s web­site. Eighty-three wild­fires were burn­ing across the prairie province, 80 of them in for­est pro­tec­tion areas. Twen­ty-two fires were out of control.

Dur­ing three weeks of fires, near­ly 30,000 peo­ple have been dis­placed from their homes, with near­ly 11,000 cur­rent­ly wait­ing for per­mis­sion to return and see if hous­es and trail­ers are still intact.

The bore­al forests of cen­tral and north­ern Alber­ta and British Colum­bia are burn­ing. Con­se­quences of cli­mate dam­age, which is warm­ing the plan­et, have hit cen­ters of Canada’s fos­sil fuel econ­o­my — pri­mar­i­ly Alberta’s oil sands coun­try. Wild­fire sea­sons have length­ened, notably hot dry springs, and fires burn with greater intensity.

In 2016, a fire roared out of forests to burn part of the “oil patch” city of Fort McMur­ray in what John Val­liant, author of the book “Fire Weath­er: The Mak­ing of a Beast,” describes as “the largest, most rapid dis­place­ment of peo­ple because of fire in mod­ern times – any­where on earth… The Fort McMur­ray fire grew so big, so fast it over­ran the city in an after­noon and gen­er­at­ed its own stratos­pher­ic storm sys­tem in what had been a blue­bird Alber­ta day.”

The fires this year have spread thick smoke over Alber­ta and come to cov­er most of the rest of Cana­da. Alberta’s two largest cities, Edmon­ton and Cal­gary, are present­ly suf­fer­ing the world’s worst air quality.

Edmon­ton res­i­dents have been told to avoid being outside.

Beneath the so-called Omega Block – high pres­sure that is caus­ing heat and gen­er­at­ing fires — Alber­ta is feel­ing the heat of a con­se­quen­tial provin­cial elec­tion cam­paign. News orga­ni­za­tions are car­ry­ing instruc­tions on how evac­uees and fight­ers on the fire lines can vote in advance of the May 29th elec­tion date.

Alber­ta has often been called the Texas of Cana­da. The two locales bear marked sim­i­lar­i­ties in oil patch economies as well as attitude.

Both have also expe­ri­enced, of late, tem­per­a­ture extremes, fire and drought.

Alber­tans and their provin­cial gov­ern­ment have spent the last few decades rail­ing against poli­cies com­ing out of Canada’s nation­al cap­i­tal, tax­a­tion of the oil indus­try in the 1970s and 80s, and mea­sures tak­en to counter cli­mate change in the present century.

“It’s not like Ottawa is a nation­al gov­ern­ment: The way our coun­try works is that we are a fed­er­a­tion of sov­er­eign, inde­pen­dent juris­dic­tions,” Pre­mier Danielle Smith told her leg­is­la­ture late last year, as it passed some­thing called the Alber­ta Sov­er­eign­ty With­in a Unit­ed Cana­da Act.

The act sets the stage for Alber­ta to pos­si­bly dis­re­gard fed­er­al laws or reg­u­la­tions if its provin­cial leg­is­la­ture deter­mines those laws do harm to the province’s inter­ests or if leg­is­la­tors con­sid­er it con­sti­tu­tion­al overreach.

The dean of Uni­ver­si­ty of Calgary’s law school, Ian Hol­loway, minced no words describ­ing the leg­is­la­tion: “This is about as clear­ly an uncon­sti­tu­tion­al gam­bit as I’ve ever seen in my pro­fes­sion­al life­time: The pre­mier is engag­ing in a game of polit­i­cal chicken.”

Alberta’s polit­i­cal cli­mate has tracked Texas.

A busi­ness-dom­i­nat­ed con­ser­vatism, pre­vail­ing for more than forty years, has giv­en way to con­fronta­tion­al, tumul­tuous pol­i­tics of the far right.

The province has been epi­cen­ter to resis­tance against COVID-19 restric­tions and mask man­dates, and a hotbed for anti-vaxxers. Alber­ta has churned through eight pre­miers since 2004, only one of whom has fin­ished his or her term.

Last spring, a no-con­fi­dence vote in the gov­ern­ing Unit­ed Con­ser­v­a­tive Par­ty pushed out Pre­mier Jason Ken­ney.

Ken­ney was a for­mer fed­er­al cab­i­net min­is­ter and friend of busi­ness. He led his par­ty to a con­vinc­ing vic­to­ry in 2019, only to face a rebel­lion by his party’s base that his poli­cies weren’t con­fronta­tion­al enough. Leaked con­ver­sa­tions quot­ed Ken­ney describ­ing crit­ics in his par­ty as “lunatics… try­ing to take over the asy­lum.” Vot­ing for a new leader, par­ty activists picked Danielle Smith, a radio talk show host fond of rail­ing against “the mob of polit­i­cal correctness.”

Ken­ney quit his seat in the Alber­ta Leg­is­la­ture as Smith assumed pow­er. He deliv­ered a part­ing state­ment decry­ing polit­i­cal extremes left and right, and warn­ing: “From the far right we see a venge­ful anger and tox­ic cyn­i­cism which often seeks to tear things down rather than build up and improve our imper­fect institutions.”

The lat­est polls show a tight race between the Unit­ed Con­ser­v­a­tives and oppo­si­tion left-lean­ing New Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty, led by for­mer Pre­mier Rachel Not­ley. The New Democ­rats under Not­ley gov­erned the province from 2015 to 2019, the sin­gle break in fifty-five years of con­ser­v­a­tive rule. They intro­duced a car­bon tax over furi­ous oppo­si­tion from the right.

Smith used her radio show to rail against the fed­er­al government’s COVID-19 restric­tions and vac­cine mandates.

As pre­mier, she has also tak­en aim at reg­u­la­tion of the oil and gas indus­try. Alber­ta sent its own sep­a­rate del­e­ga­tion to the recent COPT 27 Cli­mate Con­fer­ence in Egypt as a ges­ture of no-con­fi­dence in Canada’s fed­er­al envi­ron­ment min­is­ter. “He clear­ly is hos­tile to our oil and gas sec­tor: He’s clear­ly try­ing to step into areas he’s got no busi­ness reg­u­lat­ing,” said Pre­mier Smith.

An increas­ing num­ber of Alber­tans are final­ly get­ting enough of the excess­es of ener­gy devel­op­ment. The rul­ing Unit­ed Con­ser­v­a­tives faced a furi­ous back­lash when they tried to ease reg­u­la­tion of open pit min­ing on the east slopes of the Cana­di­an Rock­ies. Sim­i­lar reac­tion has blocked efforts to “remove” provin­cial parks. One provin­cial poll showed two-thirds sup­port for set­ting a nation­al goal of zero net emis­sions by 2050.

The New Democ­rats are run­ning on tra­di­tion­al good gov­ern­ment issues.

They’re pledg­ing to increase cor­po­rate tax­es, gen­er­at­ing rev­enue that would go to improve edu­ca­tion. They promise a per­ma­nent ban on coal min­ing in the Rockies.

Not­ley has pledged repeal of “this hor­ri­ble” Sov­er­eign­ty Act, deem­ing it a threat to new invest­ment in the province.

The Unit­ed Con­ser­v­a­tives are play­ing the oil card, warn­ing that the New Democ­rats would cap oil and gas emis­sions – the indus­try is a big pol­luter – and stymie oppor­tu­ni­ties to increase pro­duc­tion in the oil sands of north­ern Alberta.

As they make their way to polls through the smoke, how­ev­er, Alber­tan face a choice not dis­sim­i­lar to some U.S. states with ultra MAGA Repub­li­cans top­ping the bal­lot: Do they want to fan the fires of right wing pop­ulism with a con­fronta­tion-prone gov­ern­ment and pre­mier? Do they want to bring cul­ture wars to Cana­da? One Unit­ed Con­ser­v­a­tive can­di­date has com­pared trans­gen­der chil­dren in schools to feces in cookies.

“I know, Ms. Smith, you’re keen on fight­ing,” Not­ley told her oppo­nent in their one head-on-head TV debate. “You want to fight with Ottawa. You want to fight with the media. You want to fight, fre­quent­ly, with your for­mer self. It’s actu­al­ly quite exhaust­ing… Every day is a new dra­ma. You (mean­ing, the vot­ers of Alber­ta) just don’t need to put up with this.”

Rain this week has briefly damp­ened Alberta’s fires.

We’ll see next week if the polit­i­cal land­scape has a fiery future.

Edi­tor’s Note: Cross-post­ed to PostAl­ley Seattle.