Musician Corb Lund joins Alberta Primetime host Michael Higgins to discuss his resubmission of a petition to prohibit coal mining on the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains, after amendments to legislation cancelled his original petition. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. Michael Higgins: It doesn’t look like the Bill 14 amendments are holding you back. What’s keeping you motivated to make this petition happen? Corb Lund: I’ve been involved in this fight against coal mines in the Rockies for six years now. So a few extra weeks is no big deal. We’re happy to jump through whatever hoops we have to in order to get the mining stopped. MH: How did the amendments with Bill 14 land with you? CL: It was just another pain in the butt from the government. But like I said, we rolled our eyes and reapplied and used the time to build an even better team of IT people and canvassers and organizers and lawyers. We have a pretty good team ready to go now. As far as logistics, it basically just pushed us back a month or so. We just got caught up in the changes. I don’t know what the reason was for it. The premier had been saying she was anticipating the results of the petition, that the rules are out there to be to be followed. Then we applied and she changed the rules. Whatever, it doesn’t matter, we’re going forward. MH: Was there a point at which you thought you would have to pay the increased application fee, from $500 to $25,000? CL: It was pretty clear from the beginning we were not subject to that, so it wasn’t a factor for us. We’ve been fighting these coal mines for five or six years now, some people longer than that, but this Grassy Mountain Mine keeps coming up over and over. It was turned down in 2021 by the federal government and the provincial government. The coal companies appealed three times in court, and the appeals were thrown out. Polling in the province time after time has shown that 70 per cent of people don’t want it, and still the government has let them reapply, even after they said it was a dead project. It was rejected on all fronts. Then Minister Brian Jean apparently reached out to the AER (Alberta Energy Regulator), the regulatory body, and told them to consider it an advanced project. Somebody in the government really, really, wants this mine to go through, and the public really, really doesn’t. That’s where we’re at. The wording of our petition is specifically worded to include Grassy Mountain. In Edmonton, there’s a similar mine in the in the Bighorns called Blackstone, which Edmontonians should be concerned about. That mining project is at about the same spot as Grassy is. It’s in the approval process. That one is at the headwaters of the North Saskatchewan River, which feeds Edmonton. MH: Anticipating you’ll get a green light again, what is the message you’ll take to Albertans to get them to sign the petition? CL: There are two things about it. One, there’s a lot of really compelling reasons not to have irresponsible coal mining at the headwaters of our water supply. That should be pretty obvious to most people, and I’ve mentioned over and over I have no political partisan dog in this fight. I don’t like any of the parties. It has nothing to do with parties. This is a really wide coalition of Albertans that don’t want this. The people that brought me into this were not leftists. They were generational ranchers whose water was going to be ruined and some of their land was going to be ruined by coal mines. We’ve slowed them down, but they’re still coming. They’re just grinding away. This Grassy Mountain Mine is at the headwaters of The Old Man River, which feeds 200,000 people downstream and feeds a food processing industry in Lethbridge. It includes areas which are pristine fly-fishing areas. When I was asked to come into this thing, I didn’t really know much about it, and I didn’t have a dog in the fight. I spent about six weeks meeting with people and reading as much as I could find on the issue from all sides. It just doesn’t add up. The environmental impacts don’t add up and the economic impacts don’t add up. We keep hearing over and over about these jobs, and we all understand jobs. But the word ‘jobs’ is not a magic wand you wave that mitigates all the effects of the project. We’re talking about a few hundred jobs in the Crowsnest Pass area. It doesn’t take into account anybody downstream, it doesn’t take into account the effect on agricultural jobs, tourism jobs. I always tell fiscal conservatives I don’t care about parties. What I say to people who are probably UCP voters is that it’sokay to criticize your own team when they made a mistake. I don’t care who you vote for. I’m not trying to change your vote. I’m just trying to tell you if your team makes a mistake, you got to call them on it. They made a really big mistake on this coal thing, and they keep pushing it. To the fiscal conservatives out there, I stake my reputation on this. In 10, 20, 30 years from now I guarantee those coal mining companies will be gone, and the mess will be left to the taxpayer to clean up, and it will be billions. MH: You’re a well-known Albertan who has long opposed coal mining activities. Has anyone from the government reached out to you to discuss your concerns? CL: I’ve spoken to many, many ministers. Frankly, I hate saying this, but I knew more about the issue than any of them. They don’t know what they’re talking about, they just make stuff up. You can tell from what they say. I know the issue so intimately that when they talk to me, I can tell they’ve only been told about it from the coal mining industry. They don’t have any understanding of the effects this is going to have. They keep saying they can mitigate the contaminants. The coal mining companies are in full PR mode right now. The shiny advertisements and all kinds of stuff over social media. I would love to talk to one of those folks a in a moderated public debate, because I just don’t think they’re telling the truth. MH: Are you worried Albertans might be getting petitioned out? CL: I don’t know. It’s not my concern. I’m just focused on the coal issue, and we’ve had a seriously overwhelming amount of support already, and we haven’t even really started. So I don’t think that’s a factor. I think the majority of Albertans care enough about the water and the mountains that they’ll do the right thing. I’d also like to say if you’d like to help us, go to coalpetition.ca and sign up to be a canvasser. We need lots of canvassers. We’ve got a bunch already, but we need more.
