CAN NDP DUCK CRITICISM OF ITS GREEN BONA FIDES?
Do you remember what you were doing on April 28, 2008? Probably not.
The date doesn’t have the significance of a Dec. 7, 1941, or a Sept. 11, 2001.
Unless, I suppose, you’re a duck.
In that case, April 28, 2008, is a date that will live in infamy.
It was the day approximately 1,600 ducks died after landing on a toxic Syncrude tailings pond.
The duck disaster made headlines around the world, embarrassed the Progressive Conservative government of the day, and resulted in a sensational trial. Syncrude was eventually fined $3 million in October 2010.
Then-environment minister Rob Renner declared: “We need to do what we can to greatly reduce the chances of it ever happening again.”
But just three days later, it happened again. This time, more than 200 ducks died after landing on a Syncrude tailings pond.
When Renner called journalists together for an emergency news conference, he seemed so distraught you’d think he knew some of the ducks personally.
What had him so upset was the knowledge that Alberta was losing the public relations battle over the oilsands. Dead and dying water fowl gave credence to critics who called it “dirty oil.”
Those critics included the Calgary-based Pembina Institute, which complained about the ever-increasing size of tailings ponds: “Industry and government need to take responsibility for the environmental performance of the oilsands.”
And then there was the NDP opposition, with its two MLAs: Brian Mason and Rachel Notley.
In 2008, Mason called the duck deaths a “disgrace” and demanded ( but didn’t get) an emergency debate.
“They’re spending a lot of taxpayers’ money trying to convince the world that we’re environmentally responsible,” Mason said at the time. “Let’s be environmentally responsible — that’s the first step.”
The NDP pledged to be much more environmentally responsible, if it ever formed the government.
Poof.
The NDP is the government. But you wouldn’t know it from reading recent news releases from the Pembina Institute.
In an advisory this week reminding us of the 2008 “Syncrude ducks incident,” Pembina complained that the size of tailings ponds has continued to rise under the NDP: “In 2008, the ponds contained 732 billion litres of fluid tailings waste.
That has doubled to roughly 1.4 trillion litres today, and is planned to grow for at least another two decades.”
Birds continue to die after mistaking the ponds for safe landing spots.
More than 100 perished last September, performing a swan dive, so to speak, into the credibility of the eco-friendly NDP.
The birds’ demise reminded us that the NDP — so loud in opposition when tailings ponds killed ducks under the PC watch — is also having trouble protecting wildlife.
You could easily argue, as the NDP government often does, that it inherited massive environmental problems from a succession of foot-dragging PC governments.
In a bureaucratically worded statement Wednesday responding to Pembina’s complaints, the government said it is working “to develop a science-based regulatory program that will require the reduction of oilsands tailings ponds in a safe, efficient way.”
It’s hoping to eventually turn the oilsands ugly duckling into a swan. But there are no quick or easy solutions.
Except critics always seem to think there are.
This week, former Alberta Liberal leader Kevin Taft wrote an op-ed based on his new book, Oil’s Deep State, arguing the government of Rachel Notley is as much a puppet of industry as were 44 years worth of PC governments.
“Rachel Notley may be in office, but the oil industry is in power,” wrote Taft.
It’s a nice pithy comment, but it overly simplifies the political reality of governing Alberta. I mean, if Taft had become premier, do you think he’d actually be advocating, as he does in his book, that the oilsands be eliminated by 2050?
As Taft was railing against Notley for not going far enough on the environmental front, Alberta’s official Opposition, the United Conservative Party, was reminding us it thinks Notley, and Ottawa, have gone too far.
Wednesday afternoon, UCP Leader Jason Kenney held a news conference to say he not only supports Saskatchewan’s newly launched legal fight against a carbon tax, but he wants intervener status in the case.
The NDP likes to say that being attacked by both sides proves it has found the sweet spot in the middle where most Albertans sit.
Has it? Or is it sitting in the middle of a vise that is being squeezed by impossible-toplease critics on all sides?
Politically, the NDP government might be feeling, if not like a dead duck, maybe a bit like a sitting duck.