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Alberta must clean up oilsands or risk U.S. markets: Morton
News Articles Featured | Edmonton Journal | September 09, 2011
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EDMONTON - Progressive Conservative leadership candidate Ted Morton says if Alberta doesn’t clean up its act in the oilsands, Ottawa will step in to regulate and Americans will stop buying the province’s energy.
At a meeting with The Journal editorial board Thursday, Morton committed to improving environmental outcomes in the oilsands and highlighted the work he has already done to meet that goal.
“In the same way that conservatives think it is wrong to leave a financial debt to the next generation, I think it is wrong to leave an environmental debt, or environmental mess. I see that as part of being a conservative,” Morton said.
“In addition to it being the right thing to do, it’s also the necessary thing to do. If we don’t do it, we risk two things.”
The first, he said, is loss of jurisdiction to Ottawa. “Ottawa will take over,” he said, explaining the federal government “has lots of potential legal venues” it can use to come in and regulate the oilsands if the provincial government fails to do so.
“It also risks loss of market access, certainly to the United States. We’ve just seen the latest version of the campaign against Keystone XL (pipeline) — it’s really just a chapter in the larger saga of the campaign against the oilsands.”
Morton noted that the U.S. State Department’s recent report on the environmental impact of the $7 billion pipeline makes reference to the role the Land Stewardship Act will play in improving environmental impact of the oilsands.
Morton was a key driver behind the implementation of the act when he was minister of sustainable resource development.
The Wildrose Alliance attacked the legislation and successfully turned land rights into a political wedge issue that ignited political opposition, particularly in rural Alberta.
Morton told the editorial board the province was “slow to respond” to the attacks and could have done a better job explaining the law to Albertans. The legislation was subsequently revised to address Albertans’ concerns but rival leadership candidates continue to call for its repeal.
Morton maintains the law is critical to helping Alberta develop in an orderly way, balancing development pressures with environmental conservation.
“Anybody who cares about better environmental outcomes and just getting conservation and stewardship on the policy map realizes that to lose the Land Stewardship Act at this point would be giving up a decade,” he said.
“The anti-oilsands lobby is very smart, very well-financed, very well-educated, very well-connected, and relentless. Because they believe that increased CO2 emissions is going to do serious long-term damage to planet Earth and human life.”
He said activists tried for many years to force American legislators to increase the price of gasoline in an attempt to reduce driving, and when that didn’t work focused their attention on the source of the oil.
“The better our environmental results become in the oilsands, I suspect the more intense the campaign against them will become,” Morton said. “Because it’s not really about the oilsands per se, it’s about less expensive, or relatively inexpensive, gasoline.”
Morton, a fiscal hawk and social conservative, said he has abandoned plans for separate policing and pension plan programs and will instead focus on implementing policies that are within reach.
For example, he said he plans to continue supporting the right of parents to pull their children out of school when sex and religion come up.
“Policy making is the art of the doable,” he said.
Tagged with: alberta, ted morton, progressive conservatives
