‘WILD WEST’
New Wildrose leader talks of taming Alberta’s oilpatch.
Brian Jean, the newly elected leader of Alberta’s Wildrose Party, doesn’t put much stock in opinion polls, even as they show he’s got a fighting chance of scuttling the carefully orchestrated re-confirmation of the province’s long-ruling Tories under the new leadership of Jim Prentice.
“Our government has been in power for 44 years … and to think that an upstart little party like Wildrose made up of ordinary Albertans is going to be able to take them down is, quite frankly, humorous,” Jean says over coffee Monday, on the eve of an expected election call in Alberta. “I am running to hold them to account. I want to make sure that someone keeps their feet to the fire.”
But if by some “miracle” Jean, 52, gets to form the next Alberta government, life for the oilpatch could look a lot different.
The lawyer, former Conservative MP for Fort McMurray-Athabasca, and admirer of the late premier Peter Lougheed, doesn’t like what’s happening in the province’s oilsands region and wants to change it.
“It’s the wild west up in Fort McMurray,” says the leader of the official Opposition, suited up for a get-to-know meeting with the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.
Too many licences have been handed out to developers competing with each other on all levels, he says, driving up costs, requiring the import of labour from across Alberta and around the world, while forcing workers to spend hours a day commuting to oilsands plants before 12-hour shifts. Meanwhile, the provincial government is running up a deficit after an oil price crash that should have been planned for. With 50% of the world’s free oil, he says the region is too important to be poorly run.
“I would suggest that the pace of the oilsands doesn’t need to be sporadic,” says Jean, whose party is tied for voter support with the Tories, according to recent polls. “It needs to be well-planned. We have to have a long-term vision. We have 1.9 trillion barrels, a gift from God. And what do we do with it? We give licences to people who sporadically come in and control our life and diminish our quality of life.”
First floated by Lougheed, the idea of provincially managed oilsands growth may be heresy to the oil establishment, which would rather call the shots itself, and a better fit for the left than for the Wildrose, which with its slash-spending mantra sits at the right of Prentice’s Tories.
Prentice’s answer, which reflects the wants of the oil community, has been to support oil sands growth by building more export pipelines while ratcheting up the province’s climate change policies.
Yet Jean (pronounced like blue jean), who replaced Danielle Smith after her unsuccessful defection to Prentice’s ranks, said the province is already interfering in the oil economy, but it’s doing it poorly. “If you are going to interfere, do it right,” he says, stressing that if elected he would be very hands-on to ensure the benefits of the oilsands are more directed at Albertans.
“There are up to 60,000 to 80,000 [oil workers] in Alberta at any one time that pay taxes in other provinces,” he says. “They live in camps. Their quality of life is not good and so they go on national TV and talk about what a bad place it is. That is because they live in a work camp. If you want to move to Fort McMurray and work, move to Fort McMurray and work.”
Like Prentice, Jean wants to see construction of more oil export pipelines to eliminate the discount on Canadian oil because of its dependence on the U.S. market.
He says his pipeline strategy will be announced during the campaign, but hinted he supports greater value creation in Alberta, including refining and upgrading. It’s another area of potential discord with the oil industry, which would rather make use of its own systems than build new facilities at high cost in the province.
Jean said aboriginal opposition to pipelines in British Columbia could be reduced by showing positive that lifestyle changes can come with development.
“I know that aboriginal communities want the same things that we want,” said Jean, who has relatives in three bands in northern Alberta. “The truth is, in northern Alberta, aboriginals are happy, they are successful, most of the communities are dry or at least people don’t have the same issues as communities around Canada, because they are working.”
Jean threw himself into the race to fix the province’s health care due to the illness and recent death of his 24-year-old son, Michael, of lymphoma. His main goal is to shrink a “bloated” provincial bureaucracy, including health care delivery he believes is driven by process rather than healing.