Alberta’s Brian Jean on Trudeau’s losing radical environmental agenda

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Somewhere in Ottawa, the soon retiring NDP MP Charlie Angus must be rubbing his hands in glee. Thanks to his mischief, the oil and gas sector’s biggest players have been squelched. Mission accomplished!

Not only has Angus figured out how to hijack parliamentary committees, routinely hauling energy company CEOs into Ottawa for public scoldings, his successful push for a new “greenwashing” rule in omnibus Bill C-59 has achieved his desired effect. Several blue-chip companies, including the Pathways Alliance group of oilsands companies, have scrubbed all content from websites and social media.

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And it’s not because their content is wrong or misleading. The law is so poorly constructed from the get-go, anyone with an axe to grind can harass companies with no end of frivolous litigation. In the meantime, it’s looking to be sunny days and a new revenue stream for activists.

For weeks now, I’ve been asking Angus for a conversation. I’m genuinely curious to understand how he convinced a majority of fellow travellers in Ottawa to endorse such debilitating legislation. Hearing not a peep or a whisper of engagement, I reached out to Brian Jean, Alberta’s minister of energy and minerals, for his take on the fallout from these threatened sanctions on corporate speech.

Jean, 61, is at his home in Fort McMurray — the “Promised Land,” he chuckles — when we connect virtually, looking forward to heading into the long weekend and spending time with his five-year-old daughter. Yet, I note, this red-headed man with the bushy beard is still dressed for business in a dark blue suit jacket and button-down shirt. (Incidentally, the comparison with Alfred E. Newman and Mad Magazine is neither accurate nor fair, but there’s no category in Bill C-59 to defend against a such a spurious claim.)

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Jean has lived in this northern Alberta community most of his life, working as a lawyer and then representing locals’ interests as a politician — in Ottawa as a federal Conservative for a decade (2004-2014), and, following that, as a provincial MLA and the last leader of the Wildrose Party before its merger with the United Conservative Party in 2017. Shortly after the May 2023 Alberta election, Premier Danielle Smith chose Jean to handle the energy portfolio.

The Alberta-based energy companies Jean has spoken with about the “greenwashing” rule in Bill C-59 are afraid, he reports. It’s very uncertain legislation and the reverse-onus, “heinous.” And yet, Jean believes the supporters of this bill — the NDP, the Liberals, the Bloc Québécois — understand the implications.

“They recognize what’s going on in the rest of the world. They’re losing the argument. The world is moving away from the radical environmental agenda that some of these folks are espousing and they know because of that loss, they need to double down.”

Angus isn’t the only one celebrating in Ottawa; Green Party MP Elizabeth May, longtime champion of Bill C-226 (now law), is reportedly “thrilled” to see Canada move forward on an “environmental racism” strategy, whatever that means.

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Jean worked with May in Ottawa, and while he respects the person, he doesn’t respect the policy. “If we want to talk about real racism and real tragedy,” Jean counters, let’s talk about energy security and energy poverty.

“I think the federal government has been, frankly, negligent in their inability to allow our energy to flow to the world to displace energy poverty. Just terrible,” Jean asserts. What he’s saying echoes what I heard Smith say at COP28 in Dubai last November.

More than any other politician in Canada, this long-time politician from Fort McMurray knows what it feels like for people in the oil patch when the industry comes under siege.

Bestselling author John Vaillant has just released a book, Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast, sharing apocalyptic stories of the May 2016 wildfire that devoured many homes in Fort McMurray, including Jean’s. I read the book; it’s yet another harsh whack at this community. Locals are portrayed as money-hungry workaholics who love their expensive toys. The oilsands are depicted as a wasteland; “mile upon mile of black and ransacked earth pocked with stadium-swallowing pits and dead, discoloured lakes.”

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Jean hasn’t read the book — and after seeing the raw emotion in his reaction to yet another swipe at his community — I encourage him not to read it.

“This person (Vaillant) is responding based on an emotional response about oil,” he laments. “An emotional, illogical response about a product. Not a place, but a product. They’re trying to demolish and undermine the community to fulfill their agenda, about a product, that the only place in the world they can actually speak out freely about is here.”

We agree, this is tricky; there’s a risk that all this hostility towards the oil and gas sector only hardens corporate resolve to get their money out. While energy ministers are often accused of being shills for industry (and there’s no doubt Jean knows what’s said behind closed doors), he makes it clear that it’s the people he represents. He’s not shy about asking for more corporate reinvestment in Alberta. “We had a lot of (corporate) layoffs last year. I’m not happy with that at all,” he reports. And he’s also not happy with the buildup of work camps to support fly-in-fly-out transient workers at the oilsands sites. “Are we going to build the best work camps on the planet or the best communities?” he rails.

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But, unlike Angus, Jean’s preferred approach to industry is carrots, not sticks. “Carrots are great because you can put them where you want them to go and people will follow. Sticks, you know, they don’t work so well because you don’t know where they’re going to go after you hit them.”

If Jean is a shill for anyone, it’s the people of Fort McMurray. Calgary and Vancouver have just been ranked by the Economist Intelligence Unit in a top ten list of the most liveable cities in the world for 2024. Jean’s aim is for more Alberta cities to be included on that list, including Fort McMurray.

“Its one of the best places in the world to live,” he pitches. “It has five rivers. It is beautiful. It has the highest per capita income of any households in Canada. It has some of the most amazing innovation … and more patents than anywhere in the country.”

Fort McMurray doesn’t just want money, they want people, he concludes. “And people staying away from the place actually adds to the narrative of the eco-green agenda.”

No one, not even Angus, is going to mute Jean’s pitch for his hometown.

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