Last December's announcement from Energy and Minerals Provincial Minister Brian Jean ruffled some feathers with High River's Mayor Craig Snodgrass.
Minister Jean announced the new 'Coal Industry Modernization Initiative' (CIMI), and recently, some representatives from Environment and Protected Areas joined the mayor and two town councillors to answer questions.
The meeting took place on Tuesday, March 25, from 1 to 2 p.m. in Council chambers with Wade Clark, Assistant Deputy Minister of Energy Policy Division for the Department of Energy and Minerals, along with some of his colleagues.
You can watch the entire meeting on the Town of High River's YouTube channel.
Snodgrass said the town's stance on coal mining on the Eastern Slopes of the Rockies hasn't changed since the provincial government rescinded the 1976 coal policy.
He said it comes down to three key points:
"The first one is no further coal exploration or development will be permitted on the Eastern Slopes of Alberta. The second piece that's really important is we have historical operating mines up in the north, you know, as we move through this, we're not looking to kill anything that's existing, so the existing coal mining operations in the Hinton and the Grande Cache areas will be permitted to retire gracefully, although they wouldn't be allowed to expand so, what they have today they're allowed to finish up and then we move on. And then the third one if just the reclamation of the lands that occurred down south here when the government rescinded the 1976 coal policy, and they allowed these guys in and they went at it hard and fast and did a lot of damage up there. So, we'd be making sure that those coal companies had to reclaim the damage they did."
During the Minister's announcement in December, Jean also shared that the Grassy Mountain Coal Project is once again a go.
Mayor Snodgrass expressed his concerns during the March 25th meeting about the Grassy Mountain Coal Project, as local creeks flow into the Old Man River watershed. The Old Man River is the major source of water for Southern Alberta as it joins the Bow River, which then joins the South Saskatchewan River, and it flows right through Saskatchewan and Manitoba to Hudson's Bay.
Corb Lund, an Alberta singer-songwriter, also recently spoke out against the new Coal Industry Modernization Initiative.
You can read much more on the links to recent provincial studies in the Corb Lund article.