Foothills landowners fight to ‘Kill Bill 46’

Joe Anglin, Lavesta Area Group vice-chairman, addresses a group of landowners at the Highwood Memorial Centre in High River last Thursday evening. Anglin is protesting the proposed Bill 46. photo by Blair Braitenbach

By Blair Braitenbach
Staff Reporter

The provincial government’s proposal to split the Alberta Energy and Utilities Board (EUB) into two separate governing bodies through the highly controversial Bill 46 is leading Alberta down the road to fascism, according to one activist lobbying to stop the bill.
Joe Anglin, Lavesta Area Group vice-chairman, has been actively protesting and rallying landowners in a campaign called “Kill Bill 46,” which brought him to the Highwood Memorial Centre in High River last Thursday.
Anglin said the proposed bill robs Albertans of their democratic rights as landowners.
“We are heading down the road of fascism…one piece of paper at a time,” he said of allowing unelected officials in the EUB to make laws in private.
Bill 46 would establish an Energy Resources Conservation Board that would take applications and deal with matters related to oil and gas activity; while another board called the Alberta Utilities Commission would deal with matters related to those regulated parts of the electricity industry which would handle matters related to transmission, regulatory competition and applications for transmission lines.
Anglin said Bill 46 only increases the amount of distrust of the quasi-judicial EUB from rural landowners. After previous suspicions, Anglin proved he was being spied on by individuals posing as security guards hired by the EUB during a spring landowners meeting in Rimbey opposing a 500-kilovolt transmission line in the area. As well, undercover individuals posing as landowners were hired by the EUB and infiltrated Lavesta’s conference calls. Three EUB employees have since resigned or been fired in the wake of the scandal.
What has Anglin and many landowners calling for an end to the proposed bill are a few particular sections they argue will eliminate the public’s rights to be properly informed or to object when a contentious energy development is proposed. For example, Section 9 (3) of the bill states “the Commission is not required to hold a hearing where: Sec. 9 (3) (b) it appears to the Commission that no person will be directly and adversely affected in a material way by a decision of the Commission on the application.” Anglin argues the terms “material way” is a grey term and new to the current legislation and will only create a harder test for landowners to acquire a hearing.
“We don’t know what that means,” said Anglin at last Thursday’s address. “There are other values to land other than monetary.”
Further, Section 9 (4) states “the commission is not required to afford a landowner an opportunity to make oral representation or to be represented by counsel as long as the landowner is given an adequate opportunity to make a written submission.”
However, Bob McManus, assistant director of communications for Alberta Energy, argued that Bill 46 does just the opposite.
“The bill requires public hearings to be held if any person’s rights may be directly or adversely affected,” McManus said. “It guarantees affected parties the right to receive notice (and) the opportunity to learn all the facts about an application…This already exists in law with the EUB, so there’s no change to that at all, only an enhancement in terms of the information needed to be provided to landowners.”
McManus said the reason for Bill 46 and the creation of two new boards is based on the growth pressures in applications in both oil and gas and the electricity industries. The bill received first reading in the spring legislature and will be brought back to the fall session today (Wednesday) for second reading.
“By creating two separate boards…the regulatory process (will be) more efficient and more responsive to Albertans and industry.”
Myles Kitigawa, associate director of Toxic Watch Society in Edmonton, said McManus is not presenting all the facts. Kitigawa believes the public as a whole is going to be left out of the decision making practices when the EUB is making decisions.
“What (McManus) is not saying is they’re changing the definition of directly and adversely affected. They’ve changed it so that it’s a direct and adverse effect on land, rather than on people.
“Under this bill they’ll be able to pick and choose which direct and adverse affect they want to respect.”
In terms of environmental harm, Kitigawa argued Bill 46 will further exploit Alberta’s energy resources to international markets, in particular the United States.
“It is the last piece in a long con job that is electricity deregulation in Alberta,” Kitigawa said. “What it does is it takes away the last legal requirement for Alberta to consider public need for electricity in decision making on electricity.
“The reason why it’s important from an environmental perspective, when you think about electricity generation – the coal mining, the mercury emission, all the air pollutants, the greenhouse gas emissions that come out of power plants, the terrestrial impacts of running high voltage lines criss-crossing the province – all that impact to the environment and to human health is arguably justified when we’re trying to keep Albertans from having the lights go out. In a sense, we can accept these impacts if the people who receive these impacts – Albertans – also see the benefits of electricity generation.
Both Anglin and Kitigawa vehemently oppose Section 98 (2) that makes Bill 46 retroactive to June 1, 2003. If this section passes, the EUB will be resolved of any wrongdoings in the Rimbey spy scandal and will enable AltaLink, the company applying for the transmission lines, to reapply since their proposition was nixed after the spying incident.
Again, McManus said landowners and Anglin have Bill 46 all wrong.
“I think some people are reading far more into this than there is to be read,” McManus said. “They read certain sections and feel this is somehow going to lessen their right to be heard, but in fact the words in some cases are a cut and paste from already existing legislation, so there’s no change or omission of their rights to be heard.”
The cutting and pasting argument does not work for Anglin.
“What they’ve done is cut and paste from previous legislation and they’re making more of a nightmare than they’re cleaning up,” Anglin said.