Business as usual for Stelmach

Back when Ralph Klein was premier, you could count on tonnes of back room shenanigans between his party and business leaders in Alberta. Basically the Klein government would do almost anything to give business what it wanted, in particular what the oil business wanted. Well Ralphie's gone, replaced by Ed Stelmach who has desperately been trying to paint his government, made up of basically the same people, is different from Ralph's. Well in some sense it is different, it is much leakier. The provincial Liberals have obtained emails about a controversial development near Balzac which apparently show that the government has bent over backwards to give the developers what they want. So much for change.

The tone of the emails seem to indicate that approval for the project, including diverting upwards of 5000 cubic metres of water a day from the neighboring watershed is pretty much a done deal. Add to this the $5 million of taxpayer dollars already committed to the project by the government and you have more of the full steam ahead and damn the consequences to anyone thinking that permeated the Klein government. The only consideration is how much money the project could bring to the developers and how much of that money is likely to be funneled into the Alberta Progressive Conservative party in the form of donations. No consideration of the environmental or social consequences of the project is likely to have been done. All objections by neighboring cities, towns and municipalities will be ignored. In other words, it's business as usual for the Alberta Government. Ed Stelmach is turning out to be a more soft spoken version of Ralph Klein. No wild outburst, but the same ill-conceived policies.