Coal mines ‘going to be one hell of a mess for taxpayers to clean up’: Corb Lund

Activist and musician Corb Lund joins Alberta Primetime's Michael Higgins to discuss his anti-coal mining petition.

Activist and country artist Corb Lund joined Alberta Primetime’s Michael Higgins to discuss the signatures he collected for his anti-coal mining petition, and why he and his team won’t quit until coal mining stops in the Rocky Mountains.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Michael Higgins: Under legislation, to have a successful petition meant collecting roughly 178,000 signatures. Where’d you land?

Corb Lund: 206,000 or something like that, despite the weather challenges. If I ever had to do this again, which I never would, I would only run it in the summer. The weather is a huge factor, but despite the weather challenges, our canvassers were soldiers who got out there and got the job done.

MH: What did it take to actually do that?

CL: A lot of organizing and a lot of grit from a lot of people. It was really gratifying to see. It was a historic moment because it brought a lot of Albertans together, rural and urban, First Nations, and small towns from across the political spectrum. We had signatures from 84 or 85 out of the 87 ridings, except for a couple of really remote ones up north.

It was a lot of work and a lot of effort, sleepless nights, and a lot of uncertainty because we didn’t know the number until the very end when we actually got the sheets back. We had gas, but we really didn’t know so we had to keep the foot on the gas pedal until the end. But it was a really great experience. A lot of our canvassers expressed how much camaraderie they felt, and they’d met a lot of great people they would have never met otherwise because of the breadth of the support on this thing.

MH: How much pushback did you get along the way? This is a divisive issue because there are Albertans who support coal mining activity and the potential economic benefits that could come with it.

CL: More importantly, there’s an Australian billionaire woman who’s behind a lot of these coal companies, who is very intent on getting our coal, so they have very deep pockets. I’ve run into some opposition in person, but not much. A lot online, though, so you don’t know how much of that is real and how much of it is robots or whatever, but certainly there’s some pushback.

I expected there to be some because there’s a lot of money at stake. This is a classic case, in my opinion, of a foreign billionaire coming from Australia and lobbying the living heck out of our government to regulate in favour of the industry rather than in favour of Albertans. One of the arguments I hear from Albertans who are pro-coal projects is jobs. But you have to look at jobs. It’s not a magic wand that you can wave to mitigate all the downstream effects because you have to look at every project individually.

I’m not anti-resource, but you have to look at each project to see if it makes sense. When you look at the cost benefit on this, the cost is going to be very high and potentially really damaging. The upside is very small because they’re offering a handful of jobs while at the same time aggressively bragging about how they’re embracing automation to reduce labour costs. Also, the impacts have to be measured against the agricultural sector or the tourism sector.

In the end, the royalty rates are really low, so the economics of this really don’t make sense to me. I tell every fiscal Conservative, I’m one of them, that if you really are concerned about the taxpayer, this is a golden opportunity to save us billions. Because I guarantee that at the end of this 20 years from now or whatever it is, when the coal is gone, there’s going to be a hell of a mess left to the taxpayer to clean up.

MH: A few weeks back at an unrelated news conference, the premier said she was meeting with you later in the day. What did Danielle Smith commit to where a successful petition is concerned?

CL: Not much because I went into the meeting with Laura Laing, a rancher west of Nanton, Alta., who brought me into this six years ago, and our only asks of the government were two things. One, the most important one, is if we get our number, which we have and Elections Alberta will confirm that in a couple of weeks, make it a fair fight and don’t mess with our question. Because we spent a lot of time specifically wording the question in a very specific way. It’s been approved by Elections Alberta, and by the time they approve our signature count, there will have been over 200,000 people who, by law, have to read the question as they sign it or have it read to them.

So I said the main thing I’m asking from you guys is just assurance that you won’t mess with our question because we’ve put a lot of work into it, and 200,000 people will have signed it, so please if we are on the referendum, use our verbatim question. Then she said two or three times, “well, I don’t see why we wouldn’t.” Then she conferred with her chief of staff and the end answer was, “this is almost verbatim. I don’t see why we would change your question, unless there’s some kind of legal or financial issue.” But the whole thing is a legal financial issue, so that’s a hell of a loophole. I’m just appealing to the public and to the government itself to be fair about this, and if we do get our signatures approved by EA, that they honour our question that 200,000 people would have signed.

The key thing I’m talking about is the projects that we mentioned. Because Grassy Mountain, which is a project that was refused for not being in the public good around three or four years ago by the feds, the provincial government, as well as the courts of appeal, they all said it can’t go forward because it’s not in the public interest. And somehow, it was revived. Somebody in the government really, really, really wants Grassy to go in because I think it’s the foot in the door, the thin edge of the wedge.

That’s the key thing that they were pushing back on us about in the meeting: whether or not Grassy Mountain deserved to be allowed to go ahead or not. Our position is that it very much should not be because Albertans have already fought this mine once and had it turned down by every level of government. It’s just frustrating how many times Albertans have to say no to the same foreign coal company, the same project.

MH: When we spoke earlier in the campaign, you made a point of stating that you were not approaching this process from a political partisan standpoint. That said, now that you’ve gone through this, what kind of window has it given you to politics in Alberta?

CL: It’s gross and I don’t like any of the parties. I don’t like any of them. I don’t trust any of them. I have no affiliation with any party. Municipal politics I can stomach because it’s local enough that it can be real and actually get this stuff done. I was kind of a cynic before, but after six years of dealing with government ministers, I mean it’s the best system we’ve got, I guess, but it’s gross.

I think this whole project is crooked. I think it doesn’t make any sense economically and it certainly doesn’t make sense ecologically. To my eye, it burns up a lot of political capital because there are a lot of UCP voters who are also not in favour of these mines like ranchers who brought me into this, irrigating farmers, hunters, fishermen. I don’t understand why the government is so hell-bent on these mines when it doesn’t make sense politically to me. The polling shows over and over that 78 per cent of Albertans don’t want them, so I don’t know what’s going on but it doesn’t seem square to me.

MH: Is this the first hurdle of a rather long race? What are you prepared to face moving forward if Elections Alberta verifies the petition?

CL: I’d say in the six years I’ve been at this, this is probably the fourth or fifth of a long series of hurdles, certainly many hurdles to come.

MH: And you’re prepared to defend this?

CL: Both the government people and the coal companies have, in my opinion, been so disingenuous with me so many times, I have my heels dug in. Me and my team are not going anywhere at all until we get legislation to stop this ridiculous mining up there.