An Australian Coal Baron Subverts Alberta’s Democracy

The outsized influence of billionaires in the workings of ailing democracies has struck again.

In the process the billionaire weaponized an Alberta community in her bid to resurrect a project rejected by regulators: the Grassy Mountain metallurgical coal mine.

Rinehart’s subsidiary Northback Holdings won a resounding yes in an absolutely surreal referendum that asked residents in the historic coal mining community a highly deceptive question: “Do you support the development and operations of the metallurgical coal mine at Grassy Mountain?”

The deception involved an inconvenient matter of geography. The project is located not in the municipality of Crowsnest but in the neighbouring municipal district of Ranchland, which opposes Rinehart’s project.

Nevertheless, a community bombarded by corporate propaganda provided a resounding answer to a question impacting a different municipal district. Almost 2,000 citizens (71.8 per cent) voted yes to a coal mine located elsewhere, while 769 (28.2 per cent) voted no.

The preordained and socially engineered outcome surprised no one.

A great many people who live in the Crowsnest municipality work in B.C.’s neighbouring Elk Valley coal mines. Many more remember a time when coal booms offered high-paying jobs before the industry abandoned the community in the 1980s.

Ahead of the vote, Rinehart’s company flooded the community with promises of jobs and prosperity. (Rinehart’s motto is “Make our bank accounts great again.”)

After regulators rejected her project in 2021 for economic and environmental reasons (and three separate courts upheld that decision), Australia’s richest woman simply rebranded her company.

She then began a systematic campaign to reanimate the controversial billion-dollar project that many Albertans regard as a threat to water security.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith then opened a new political window for Rinehart. In 2022 she promised her supporters in the Pass that if they voted in favour of the mine in a referendum, she would push the project forward as premier.

With that political nod of approval, Rinehart’s company Northback Holdings has been unabashedly working for a yes vote for two years.

The Australian company lobbied provincial government and the local municipal district. It funded a school lunch nutrition program to win hearts and minds. And it inundated Alberta’s right-wing media platforms (True North and Western Standard) with coal propaganda.

During the referendum it plastered the community with “Yes” billboards. It put up “We are a coal town” signs. It canvassed citizens door to door. It wined and dined potential supporters. It even offered to drive the elderly to the polls.

Northback CEO Michael Young not only promised jobs and tax revenue but offered magical solutions for the mine’s environmental impacts with technologies that don’t exist. He dismissed selenium, a toxic fish killer created by coal mining, as an “education problem.”

In broad daylight, a referendum designed to build a false social licence for a foreign company completely undermined the fundamental principles of democracy.

For starters, it ignored a brazen conflict of interest by the referendum’s sponsor, the Municipality of Crowsnest Pass.

In 2021 the municipality quietly signed a multimillion-dollar deal to sell a water licence to Northback Holdings for the proposed project. Rinehart’s company drafted and approved the contract. Not surprisingly the company has refused to release 12 secret communications with the municipal government on the matter.

The referendum also ignored another problem. Since when does one Alberta municipality that signs a deal with a foreign company get to vote on a project that will be built in another district that is opposed to the scheme? In what democracy are such practices allowed?

And what about the people downstream? More than 200,000 Albertans depend on water from the Oldman River basin. In 2021 regulators concluded that Rinehart’s project would seriously compromise water quality and quantity in a region dependent on ranching, tourism, irrigation and food processing.

In an angry letter to the premier, the mayor of High River, Craig Snodgrass, directly addressed this democratic deficit in an appeal to Smith’s duty to put the rights of Albertans first, before those of an Australian billionaire.

Snodgrass noted that the mine’s environmental impacts would affect the health and quality of life of southern Albertans all the way to Lethbridge and beyond. “There is a deplorable lack of public consultation taking place, and the impacts should be widely communicated beyond Crowsnest Pass and MD of Ranchland No. 66.”

“The non-binding referendum being conducted in the Crowsnest Pass should not be considered as the only voice in this decision-making process,” he wrote. “Consideration should be extended to all of Albertans downstream of the headwaters, who will experience profound repercussions created from these operations.”

He concluded by saying that all Albertans, First Nations and municipalities located within the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains will be deeply affected by any decisions regarding coal mining and all deserve to have a say in these matters. “You don’t have to listen very closely to hear the voices of concern, you just have to listen.”

“No further coal mines should be allowed on Alberta’s Eastern Slopes,” he wrote. “There is no balancing act that can be accomplished when we are dealing with threats to our water.”

David Thomas, a spokesperson for Crowsnest Headwaters, a local group opposing the mine, told The Tyee that Rinehart’s campaign clearly exploited “the demographics of an aged, insular population that feels left behind by economics and social change.”

The outcome “does not change the surreality of a vote in one municipality determining events in another municipality,” he said. “We now have the unedifying spectacle of Crowsnest Pass fighting MD Ranchland over a mine that would be in MD Ranchland.”

He said that his grassroots group will “escalate our campaign of education along the Eastern Slopes and downstream along the Oldman River system to warn municipalities, irrigation districts and food processing companies that their source of clean water is now facing a clear and present danger.”

The next chapter in the coal fight will begin next week when the Alberta Energy Regulator holds public hearings in Pincher Creek on Rinehart’s applications for more coal exploration on Grassy Mountain.

The authority of the AER to conduct such a hearing has already been questioned by the courts.

However, the regulator, which is funded by industry, has chosen to ignore those legal challenges.