Country singer Corb Lund talks upcoming Edmonton shows, coal mining petition

Corb Lund will make three Edmonton stops for his tour at the end of May. He talks about what fans can expect and the progress on his coal mining petition.

Corb Lund will make three Edmonton stops for his upcoming tour at the end of May, while also talking about his coal mining petition to try and stop mining on the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains. Corb Lund joined CTV Your Morning Edmonton’s Kent Morrison about what fans can expect and the progress on his petition.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Kent Morrison: You call this the “Bottom of the Deck” Tour, why did you decide to shuffle up the old hits?

Corb Lund: We did a couple shows here in Edmonton last year where we did Five Dollar Bill and Hair in My Eyes Like a Highland Steer, two of our early records in their entirety and it was so much fun and people liked it. So we decided to do the whole tour on that. We’re doing two nights in most of the cities in western Canada. We’re doing full albums. We’re doing Five Dollar Bill and Hair in My Eyes Like Highland Steer one night in running order, and then the next night we’re doing Horse Soldier! and Cabin Fever.

Kent: That is gonna be fun. Does it feel like old friends or strangers at this point?

Corb: It’s really wild because that stuff is 20 years old now, and I don’t even know where my head was at when I wrote some of it. It’s almost like learning somebody else’s tunes.

Kent: You’re in Edmonton now because of your advocacy work and your petition to stop coal mining in the Rocky Mountains. How is that going so far?

Corb: The petition is going well. Our effort to stop coal mining is not going really well because we’re still here, six years later, fighting the same coal mine that the government agencies decided was not a good idea four years ago. It’s called Grassy Mountain, that’s one of the southern Alberta mines, and the federal government, provincial government, and three Courts of Appeal determined that it was not in the public interest in 2021 or ’22 and they shut the whole thing down. Somewhere, somehow, we’re fighting the same coal mine all over again.

Kent: What’s your message to the premier now, as you have these conversations again with the government?

Corb: Polling has shown over and over that Albertans don’t want these mines, including a good chunk of UCP voters. That’s one of the unique things about this. I’ve said it every single interview for six years, I have no partisanship in this, I don’t care about any of the parties, I don’t particularly like any of them, but this is just about saving the water. This is an interesting issue because it spans the political spectrum.

A lot of left-leaning people are against coal mining in the Rockies, but a good chunk of ranchers, farmers, hunters, fishermen, who maybe vote UCP, are also not in favour of this. It’s still baffling to us why the government is still pushing for Grassy Mountain and all these mines when the public doesn’t want it, the upside, economically, is tiny, and the royalty rate is low. It’s a handful of jobs that are being automated away as we speak. It’s going to eliminate tourism jobs and agricultural jobs and the whole thing doesn’t pencil out.

Kent: Northback says that the project will produce steel-making, create hundreds of jobs and meet high environmental standards. What do you say to that?

Corb: There’s a lot to say about that. It’s a handful of jobs. If you read their shareholder facing materials, they’re bragging about how they’re aggressively embracing automation to lower labour costs. So on one side of their mouth, they’re saying jobs. The other side, they’re saying less jobs. And you have to balance that against the effect it’s going to have on the tourism industry, the ag industry, and the biggest thing of all, is the cleanup at the end. We don’t have the tightest, that’s a myth. People say that all the time, that we have the tightest environmental senate. We don’t.

In my opinion, the Alberta Energy Regulator has been captured by industry and they make most of their decisions based on industry. It’s hard to explain this whole issue that I spent six years on in a five minute interview. What I’ll say is this, on one side of this fight, you’ve got a billionaire coal baron with a team of lawyers, a team of PR people, a team of their own hired scientists who stand to make a ton of money on this. On the other side, you’ve got Albertans like me and the ranchers that brought me into this. It wasn’t left-leaning environmentalists, incidentally, that brought me into this, it was ranching families from Western Edmonton.

On our side, I’ve got a career to build and work on and I have no time for this. You’ve got ranchers who’ve got cattle to raise and all the people on this side of it are not making money off this. The only thing we have to gain from this is clean water. You have to really consider the source because the coal companies are in a real PR blitz right now trying to tell us how great it’s going to be. I’ve spent six years on this and I’ve met with as many pro-coal people as anti-coal people. I’ve put my brain on it and it doesn’t make any sense in my opinion, and it’s going to be bad for Albertans and bad for Alberta.

We’re having a big slate of events next weekend, Saturday, Sunday and Monday, starting at the Bar U Ranch. The Nelson Ranch is part of the historic Bar U Ranch on the cowboy trail. A bunch of us, me and a bunch of the ranchers who brought me into this are doing a mounted ride to draw attention to this issue. We’re going to make stops in Longview, on High River, Calgary and Edmonton over the three days. Part of the purpose of this is to show that this is not just urban people concerned about this. It’s rural people as well and First Nations people and small town people. It’s drinking water, right? It’s pretty universal.