Miners suffer while elite play green-is-great, coal-is-bad card

Premature mine closures ensure once-proud resource communities will continue to die

He carried in his hands a heavy, worn ledger, the words inside written in slanting, almost feminine script.

But those same hands, ones that had carefully jotted down the names and accompanying percentages, year after year, were not those of any woman.

They were scarred and calloused, belonging to a man who’d spent decades underground at the face — a hewer of coal.

He was a neighbour and comrade to my father and rep for the local National Union of Mineworkers. In his spare hours, he’d laboriously tally from dutifully dropped-off-at-the-door medical reports the various percentages of coal dust present in the lungs of those he called mates.

There were men in that book who’d hit 90 per cent.

How they managed to breathe at all seemed an utter mystery to me. A greater puzzle was why it took governments of various stripes almost 20 years to finally acknowledge that the reason for the widespread pneumoconiosis — or black lung as it was called by those in the colliery village where I was born — was due to the seemingly obvious fact these men toiled underground in a coal mine.

Eventually, compensation was paid. For my father, it amounted to the equivalent of about $2,000 — admittedly worth more back in 1979, but still a small recompense for losing a third of his lung capacity by the time he’d hit 40.

Such are the real victims of coal. So when folk such as our relentlessly glib federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna announce — somewhat belatedly for many a miner — that coal is terrible for health, I wonder “what took you so long?”

But, of course, it isn’t the well-being of a single, solitary coal miner that McKenna’s yapping on about.

Just like her provincial colleague here in Alberta, Shannon Phillips, she’s merrily oblivious to the fate of the men and their families in those small towns across Canada who did the literal dirty work that successfully powered this country for so long.

No, McKenna and Phillips, along with their political bosses Justin Trudeau and Rachel Notley, adore playing to the green-is-great lobby, the leaders of which would never dream of setting foot in towns such as Wabamun and Forestburg. Nor would names such as Hillcrest (189 dead) and Coal Creek (130 fatalities) ever darken the course syllabus in the muchvaunted environmental science department at the University of Alberta.

It’s odd that back when such a cheap source of energy was urgently required, no one cared much about the environment or global warming, and politicians spared not a single thought for the safety and health of those who toiled to dig that coal from the earth.

Now that they spy extra votes along with a clear moral conscience, they merrily declare it’s war-on-coal time folks.

Yet they still give the shaft to the men who mine it. Tradition dies hard, it seems.

For despite the usual rhetoric about looking after those affected by the premature closing of mines across Alberta, the end result is the same, sad affair played out down the decades — throw some quick cash at the men, blather on about retraining and new opportunities, then nip off sharpish and let the towns and their collective pride slowly whither and die.

Come on, is Amazon really going to set up its second headquarters out in Hanna, while returning to college to train to be a successful software engineer at 48 years of age only happens in the make-believe of Hollywood.

No, the proud history and sacrifices made by the coal mining families of Alberta will soon be dust in the Prairie wind — silent victims of this war on coal, a battle they understood better than anyone, yet no one ever sought their advice.

So let the bells ring, the elites discovered coal is dirty, dangerous and bad for you.

Bully for them. My greatgrandfather could have told them that. But he was a miner, so no one asked him either.