3. The Economic and Political Context of Climate Policy in Alberta

Geoff Salomons and John R. Parkins

This chapter situates the Alberta Climate Dialogue (ABCD) deliberations within the political and economic context of the province of Alberta. We argue that overall the Alberta context is one that is generally resistant to public participation mechanisms. When public engagement is undertaken it is often designed to secure public acceptance of policy proposals rather than meaningful input into the design of such policies. We also note in this chapter a tension between high-profile provincial deliberations and low-profile localized deliberations that are less risky for conveners but also potentially less effective in forging policy alternatives. Despite these general tendencies, there are exceptions where political leaders and civil servants are genuinely open to more innovative approaches to public engagement. Some of the work by ABCD reflects these positive outcomes. By outlining the contextual challenges ABCD faced, it is our hope that other organizations seeking to design deliberative processes will gain a better understanding of how history and context inform the design and implementation public engagement.¹

The overview presented is this chapter uses a multi-scalar geopolitical approach to the political and economic context within which ABCD operated. The four citizen deliberations that ABCD members participated in were aimed at different levels of governance: municipal, regional, and provincial. We delineate the geopolitical factors at different scales and discuss key drivers and trends, recognizing the interconnections among the levels and how they shaped the operations of ABCD.

Political and Economic Context at Multiple Scales

International

Attempts to forge a global climate policy, primarily through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, have met with limited success (see the introduction). While agreements were initially formed and the creation of the Kyoto Protocol was thought to be at least a modest first step, the legacy of these multinational initiatives has been little more than agreements based on the lowest common denominator. As Harrison and Sundstrom (2010) argue, the primary reason for limited progress is that many nations came to the meetings (in establishing the Kyoto Protocol in particular) without completing the domestic political legwork. The legacy of Kyoto has thus been mixed, with some jurisdictions achieving their emission reductions (e.g., the European Union), some ratifying the protocol but failing to take action to achieve the agreed-upon reductions (e.g., Canada) and some failing to gain domestic ratification (e.g., United States).

Attempts to develop an agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol floundered in Copenhagen in 2008. The Canadian government’s approach to the international negotiation process under Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper could be characterized as minimalist at best and obstructionist at worst. While Canada is not a major player on the international scene, and essentially acquiesced in climate policy decisions taken by the United States, it also used the climate negotiations forum as an opportunity to defend the continued development and expansion of Alberta’s oil sands. In 2011, owing to a decade of failure by both Liberal and Conservative governments to enact any meaningful policies aimed at reducing emissions, Canada formally withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol (Curry and McCarthy 2011).

Federal

At the federal level in Canada, it was the Liberal government under Prime Minister Jean Chrétien that signed and ratified the Kyoto Protocol in 2002. However, very little was done in the following four years to achieve the results to which Canada had agreed. In 2006, a reunited Conservative Party of Canada, with strong support from its base in Alberta, formed a minority government. The party was staunchly pro-oil sands development. In the 2008 election, climate change was one of the central campaign issues, with all three major federal parties—Liberal, Conservative, and New Democratic—campaigning for some form of carbon pricing. The Liberals, under party leader Stéphane Dion, campaigned for a carbon tax as part of a portfolio of climate-friendly policies called “Green Shift.” The Conservatives and New Democratic Party proposed a cap-and-trade system. In the 2008 election, the Conservative Party secured another minority government, and in the same year, the global recession eclipsed climate change as an issue of concern as governments around the world scrambled to address more immediate economic concerns. In the 2011 election, the Conservative Party finally secured a majority government and further stalling on progressive climate policies ensued.

Despite repeated promises, the federal government continually delayed the implementation of greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction policies. Rather than an economy-wide price on carbon, the Canadian government under the Conservatives adopted a “sector-by-sector” regulatory approach to regulating GHG emissions (Government of Canada 2015). Prior to the federal election in October 2015, the Canadian government developed regulations on light and heavy transportation and on coal-generated electricity. According to the Canadian government, in 2011 these regulations covered approximately 30 per cent of Canada’s GHG emissions (Enviroment Canada 2014).

In addition to weak regulations on GHG emissions, Prime Minister Harper’s government was also hostile to environmental concerns. The day before the Joint Review Panel hearing opened on the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline, which would go from Alberta to the British Columbia coastline, Natural Resource Minister Joe Oliver (2012) issued an open letter calling anyone who opposed oil and gas infrastructure “radicals” with an “ideological agenda.” The ensuing 2012 budget included changes to Canada’s Environmental Assessment Act, which limited public participation and streamlined the process to allow for more timely approvals of major industrial or natural resource projects (Salomons and Hoberg 2014). These changes were later discovered to have been at the request of the oil industry (Paris 2013). The 2012 budget also included additional funding for the Canada Revenue Agency to conduct audits of charities to ensure compliance with legal limits of political activity such as lobbying. In Canada, charitable organizations are not allowed to spend more than 10 per cent of their budget on political activity. To date, the only charities that have been targeted for audits are those highly critical of the Conservative administration (Solomon and Everson 2014).

As project activities related to ABCD were winding down, the 2015 federal election ushered in a major shift in federal climate policy, with a majority government for the Liberal Party. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau quickly moved to meet with provincial premiers to discuss federal climate policy in time for the twenty-first Conference of the Parties meeting (COP 21) in Paris. Prime Minister Trudeau hosted a first ministers’ meeting with the Canadian provincial premiers on March 3, 2016, to discuss how Canada will meet its international climate change obligations (Prime Minister of Canada’s Office 2016). The discussions focused primarily on ways to price carbon in Canada.

Provincial

Under the long-standing leadership of the Progressive Conservative Association of Alberta, the political and economic context of climate change policy during ABCD’s operation was just as regressive as the federal one. Indeed, part of the interest in locating the ABCD research project in Alberta was the difficult context, with polarized opinions, entrenched interests, and government resistance to progressive climate change policies. Could deliberative democratic approaches to policy making move the dial on climate policy within the province? If so, Alberta could thus serve as a crucial example of applying deliberative processes to address intractable political issues. If deliberation were deemed successful in Alberta, the prospects for success of citizen deliberations on climate change policy development elsewhere could be encouraged and bolstered (Seawright and Gerring 2008).

The central economic issue in Alberta is oil and gas development. With the advent of in situ technology² that can extract significant amounts of oil sands resources without the need for strip mining, Alberta’s proven reserves ballooned from just under 5 billion barrels in 2002 to 180 billion barrels in 2003, according to the International Energy Agency’s estimates. With these reserves, Canada ranks third in the world behind Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, so the economic potential of the oil sands is vast. Even with oil prices at forty dollars per barrel, the total potential value of the oil sands is C$7.2 trillion, almost four times the size of the Canadian economy in 2014 (Statistics Canada 2016). This economic value presents a challenge for Canada, as it offers great potential to sustain wealth creation and stable revenues for the government, but at high environmental costs. Moreover, scholars consistently highlight that economic interests often hold a privileged position within democratic political process (Lindblom 1977). Political theorist John Dryzek (1995, 15) succinctly sums up the problem:

All liberal democracies currently operate in the context of a capitalist market system. Any state operating in the context of such a system is greatly constrained in terms of the kinds of policies it can pursue. Policies that damage business profitability—or are even perceived as likely to damage that profitability—are automatically punished by the recoil of the market. Disinvestment here means economic downturn. And such downturn is bad for governments because it both reduces the tax revenue for the schemes those governments want to pursue (such as environmental restoration), and reduces the popularity of the government in the eyes of the voters. This effect is not a matter of conspiracy or direct corporate influence on government: it happens automatically, irrespective of anyone’s intentions.

In oil and gas resource-abundant jurisdictions, there is the possibility for those economic interests to be magnified and the government “to exhibit the economic and political characteristics of a petro-state” (Homer-Dixon 2013). While various definitions exist, a petro-state is often defined either economically (an oil-producing jurisdiction with typically more than 30 per cent of revenue coming from oil revenue) or politically, with behaviour favourable to the interests of oil companies (Karl 1997; Ross 2012; Mitchell 2011). Thus, while economic data at the national level might lead some to question whether Canada is properly labelled a petro-state (Leach 2013), at the provincial level, where jurisdiction over natural resources lies, we see a different story. Since 1971, oil revenue as a percentage of total provincial government revenue has varied significantly but over the past decade has hovered between 20 to 30 per cent of total revenue (see Figure 3.1). The energy sector currently comprises approximately 23 per cent of Alberta’s GDP and over 75 per cent of its exports (Government of Alberta 2015b). Alberta also implemented a very low tax regime that features the lowest corporate tax rates in Canada (Government of Alberta 2015a) and, until 2015, had a flat personal income tax rate of 10 per cent. Alberta is the only jurisdiction in Canada without a provincial sales tax (Government of Alberta 2016). Despite these low revenue streams, program spending on health, education, and other services has typically remained comparable to that of other provinces (Taft et al. 2012).

Figure 3.1. Resource revenues as a percentage of total revenue from 1970 to 2013 in Alberta, with oil prices in 2014 dollars.

Source: Resource revenue data from Alberta Energy Resource Revenue Workbook;
Oil price data from BP Statistical World Energy Handbook.

In highlighting the “petro-state” label, we are less concerned with whether Alberta is rightly placed in the same category as other “petro-states” such as Venezuela or Saudi Arabia. As Shrivastava and Stefanick (2015, 12) suggest, “by explaining development performance solely in terms of the size and nature of the resource wealth, the oil and democracy literature often does not adequately account for the role of internal and external social, political, and economic environments in shaping development outcomes in resource-abundant countries.” Within this context our goal is to emphasize the privileged place that the oil and gas industry has within the Alberta political-economic context that distinguishes it from other jurisdictions. This privileging of the oil and gas industry has several ramifications germane to ABCD’s work.

According to leading petro-state scholar Terry Lynn Karl (1997), one of the political ramifications of petro-state politics is regime stability. While often referring to non-democratic regimes that are able to use resource revenue to appease or suppress opposition (e.g., members of OPEC), this stability can also emerge within democratic jurisdictions. Resource revenue augments budget revenue, allowing democratic governments to offer increased program spending while keeping taxes low. This short-sighted approach appears to reflect sound fiscal policy when revenues are high but creates significant budgetary deficits when commodity prices are low (Ryan 2013).

One of the consequences of such regime stability with regard to public deliberations broadly speaking is that public engagement processes can be employed to provide a democratic façade over decisions already made by the administration. Without significant electoral competition, there is little impetus to genuinely seek out and identify citizen preferences. Instead, public engagement offers a means of selling projects to citizens or facilitating the identification of desired outcomes (Davidson and MacKendrick 2004).

A second ramification of this petro-state behaviour is that it allows accountability linkages between the government and its citizens to be supplanted by accountability linkages between the government and the oil industry. The government becomes less responsive to the preferences of its citizens and more responsive to the preferences of oil companies (Karl 1997).

Third, the privileged place and the power of the oil industry in this context negatively impacts the democratic quality of governance in Alberta, a negative effect noted by a number of scholars (Shrivastava and Stefanick 2012, 2015; Adkin 2016). This democratic decline creates additional points of resistance to democratic innovations, particularly ones that are intentionally aimed at progressive climate policy development.

Finally, while not causally related to “petro-states,” Alberta has a unique political culture, predating the ascent of the oil industry. Jared Wesley (2011) argues that an overarching political code or culture based on autonomy, populism, and individualism exists within Alberta, and that those politicians and parties that have been most successful are those that tap into and actively cultivate this code. Electorally speaking, Alberta has been a conservative fortress, as the Progressive Conservatives held power for forty-four years. While in 2015 the left-leaning New Democratic Party swept into power, it is too early to tell whether this shift indicates a longer-term change in Alberta’s political culture (whether due to changing values or changing demographics) or is a one-off protest vote against the reigning Progressive Conservatives. At the federal level, electoral support in Alberta has consistently leaned to the right. No other province in Canada has had such a stable preference for conservative-leaning politics.

As expected, this political culture does not lend itself to significant action on climate change, especially if such action would potentially threaten the oil sands as the economic engine of the province. Polling data suggests that Albertans are more likely than other Canadians to be skeptical of climate change (Forum Research 2014), believe too much attention is paid by the federal government to climate change (Angus Reid Institute 2015), believe Canada is doing more than the rest of the world to deal with climate change, and have the most opposition to a carbon tax (Environics Institute for Survey Research and David Suzuki Foundation 2014).

Municipal

Municipalities face a wide variety of barriers to action on climate change, including more immediate priorities, lack of information, lack of capacity, and lack of knowledge (Robinson and Gore 2005). Moreover, at the municipal level, there is no single policy instrument that can leverage emission reductions over the whole of a municipality’s jurisdiction. Rather, municipalities must take the problem of climate change and use it as a lens for various aspects/areas of municipal policy making, areas which are also subject to other lenses, problem definitions, and other forms of contestation (City of Edmonton 2011). Despite these barriers, action at the municipal level has the potential to significantly impact climate change mitigation for a number of reasons.

First, as urbanization trends continue, the United Nations (UN) predicts that by 2030 approximately 60 per cent of the global population will reside within urban areas. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report notes that urban areas account for approximately 67 per cent to 76 per cent of global energy use (IPCC 2014). Urbanization leads to an increased emissions footprint for various reasons, whether it is increased consumption dependence on certain forms of transportation as a consequence of urban form or increased transportation required for goods (Satterthwaite 2009).

Second, municipalities have significant influence over the GHG emissions within their jurisdictions. A report drafted for the Federation of Canadian Municipalities estimates that in 2006 Canadian municipalities had direct or indirect control over approximately 44 per cent of national greenhouse gas emissions in Canada (EnviroEconomics 2009). Policy areas such as urban form (sprawl versus densification), transportation (i.e., roads, transit, cycling infrastructure), building codes, waste management, and commercial and industrial development all have an impact on GHG emissions. While the complexity of coordinating all these policy areas to address a single issue such as climate change is daunting, it is the municipalities which have jurisdiction, and so it is up to them to act on these areas.

Third, the immediacy of the municipal context provides people with more tangible and concrete projects with which to work. This immediacy and concreteness has the potential to overcome the various psychological impediments to climate action (e.g., Gifford 2011; Rachlinski 2000; Weber 2011). When unprecedented flooding along the Bow River in 2013 caused massive damage in Calgary, High River, and a number of other southern Alberta communities, climate change adaptation became a much less abstract issue for many municipalities.

Finally, knowledge and capacity barriers at the municipal level can potentially be addressed through coordination and collaboration between municipalities. International associations such as International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) have worked to help municipal governments coordinate, collaborate on, and disseminate strategies for environmentally sustainable policies and programs (ICLEI 2017). In Canada the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) also has a Green Municipal Fund, which allows for funding and training for sustainability initiatives at the local level, thus increasing the capacity of cities to implement policies and programs for climate mitigation and adaptation (FCM 2015). This capacity at the municipal level allows for a streamlining of climate change mitigation and adaptation policies, multiplying their effectiveness and reducing the costs of implementation.

Consulting on Environmental Regulation in Alberta

Public deliberation on environmental policy in Alberta coincides with several waves of international environmentalism as well as several waves of intensive resource development over the last fifty years. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Province of Alberta enjoyed a wave of populist environmentalism that translated into several remarkable provincial initiatives. Among them was the formation of the Environmental Conservation Authority in 1972 with broad powers and a public advisory committee mechanism to respond to growing concerns by residents across the province regarding water quality issues and oil industry development. This new body made extensive use of multiple public advisory committees that were “semi-independent bodies comprised of volunteers who chose to study any issue they deemed important, passing resolutions accordingly” (Stefanick and Wells 2000, 370). Coupled with these early regulatory innovations, the research and practitioner community hosted an international conference on participatory approaches to environmental decision making in 1977 which resulted in a two-volume proceedings containing fifty papers on the emerging theoretical and practical aspects of public involvement in the development of environmental policy and regulation. In these proceedings the author notes that “a diverse array of formal channels are now open to individual citizens who wish to become involved in matters of public policy” (Sadler 1977, 2).

Although this early enthusiasm for an open, inclusive, democratic approach to environmental policy development was met with subsequent pushback and retrenchment from government and industry at various junctures during the 1980s and 1990s, a key point in this history involves persistent tensions between the centralized, command-and-control aspect of government regulation at the provincial scale and the decentralized and market-oriented approaches to environmental governance at regional and local scales. Examples of public consultation at the provincial scale include the development of the Alberta Forest Conservation Strategy in 1995 and Special Places 2000 (Schneider 2001; Stefanick and Wells 2000). Contrasting these approaches are local initiatives such as community-based public advisory committees in the forest sector (Parkins 2006) and similar processes in the energy sector. For example, regional approaches to public engagement are reflected in the “synergy groups.” Synergy Alberta has a mission to foster and support “mutually satisfactory outcomes in Alberta communities by providing information, mutual learning, communication, skill development, facilitation and resources” (Synergy Alberta 2016).

Regional public consultation is also linked to land-use planning processes in Alberta (Parkins 2011). The Land-use Framework was officially launched in December 2008 with seven specific planning regions. According to the Alberta Land Stewardship Act (Government of Alberta 2009, 5), land-use planning is intended “to create legislation and policy that enable sustainable development by taking account of and responding to the cumulative effect of human endeavor and other events.” The heart of this planning process includes a Regional Advisory Council, a multi-stakeholder group intended to bring forward local insights and perspectives on land-use issues. Other regional governance mechanisms include the province’s Water for Life Strategy—released in 2003—which provides the opportunity for regional stewardship organizations to give feedback to the province regarding the governance of water resources (Government of Alberta 2003, 2008). One such organization based in southern Alberta, the Oldman Watershed Council, partnered with ABCD to host Water in a Changing Climate, a one-day deliberation on water governance and climate change adaptation.

One of the great strengths of regional initiatives such as the Land-use Framework or the Oldman Watershed Council is that people who are most directly impacted by land- and resource-use policies (who have material interests) have a say in the process and can contribute a sense of local knowledge and local values to improve decision making. There is also good reason to enact environmental policy based on ecological boundaries as opposed to more arbitrary geopolitical boundaries. Yet, as scholars have noted, the problem here is that “much of what passes under the rubric of stakeholder involvement has more to do with assuring and legitimating the goals of sponsoring managers than introducing new perspectives and knowledge or empowering those who occupy the spectator mainstream or live on the margins of community and society” (Kasperson 2006, 321). In other words, local stakeholder processes are vulnerable to local political and economic elites, particularly when publics in these regions are directly dependent on resource industries for their livelihood (Parkins and Sinclair 2014).

Consulting on Climate Policy in Alberta

Reflecting a centralized province-wide approach to public engagement on environmental issues, climate policy in Alberta is summarized here with reference to Adkin (2014). Her paper offers important context for the work of ABCD. One key aspect of policy development on climate change is the international flavour of public concern and political pressure. From international Indigenous rights organizations making note of changing impacts on Indigenous cultures in the Arctic, to growing levels of concern expressed by climate scientists, Alberta’s lack of response to climate challenges has been noted outside the province and the country (Adkin 2014).

National and international pressure resulted in two large-scale public consultations in Alberta, one in 2002 and a second in 2007. In response to federal government GHG emission reduction targets as agreed to in the Kyoto Protocol, in 2002 the Province of Alberta opted for a policy that established emissions intensity targets. Stakeholder consultations at that time “served mainly to make sure that the draft policy was acceptable to representatives of large emitters, and to learn what kinds of objections could be expected from ENGOs” (Adkin 2014, 6). Beyond the involvement of key stakeholders, consultation was limited in this 2002 consultation to an online survey with approximately 260 participants. At the same time, the provincial government worked hard to convince Albertans that implementation of the Kyoto Protocol, and the implementation of policies necessary to achieve reductions, would mean the destruction of the Alberta economy. Summarizing the efforts of politicians, a government minister notes, “Alberta was vocal in its opposition to ratifying the Protocol and undertook an initiative to call for an alternate solution to climate change that was ‘made in Canada’” (Government of Alberta 2003, 4).

Following the release of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, the context for public consultations in 2007 was somewhat different from the process five years earlier. The IPCC report reiterated the dire consequences for inaction on climate change, and the salience of climate change concern was palpable. Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth created a broader public awareness of the climate challenge, and all the federal parties in Canada proposed serious carbon pricing policies in the run-up to the 2008 national election, as noted above (Harrison 2012). In 2007, the extent of broad-scale public engagement was more significant, with 2,600 responses to online workbooks, but the focused remained squarely on the interests of key stakeholders. Two multi-stakeholder roundtables were held, with emphasis on economic interests in the province (Adkin 2014). The consultation did show, however, a significant shift in public interest and perception of climate change wherein “a strong majority of respondents expected government action on this issue to include absolute emission targets” (McMillan 2007, 1, as quoted in Adkin 2014). In summarizing the legacy of these public consultations on climate policy in Alberta, Adkin concludes that “the impetus for climate change policy has not come from provincial political leadership, the existence of a strong left or green party, the importance of agriculture or ecotourism to the province’s economy, awareness of the foreseeable costs of global warming for the provincial economy, the efforts of a handful of publicly engaged scientists, or the small but persistent environmental community” (Adkin 2014, 19). Climate change policy development in Alberta occurred in response to international and national pressures, resulting in centralized and stakeholder-based public consultations that were managed in order to achieve particular outcomes that would not negatively impact the energy sector.

A key regulatory change in Alberta during this time was the Specified Gas Emitters Regulation (SGER), which came into effect in 2007. This regulation requires any large facility that emits over 100,000 tonnes of GHGs to reduce its emission intensity. Failure to achieve such reductions required the company to either purchase offsets or pay fifteen dollars per tonne into a Climate Change and Emissions Management Fund for emissions that exceed the facility’s emission reduction target. This regulation essentially put a price on carbon for large emitters. However, restricting the policy to a handful of large facilities and the minimal charge per tonne levied for GHG emissions limit the efficacy of this policy (Dyer et al. 2011). Effective GHG emissions reductions would require higher carbon pricing, more in line with British Columbia’s economy-wide carbon tax of thirty dollars per tonne.

According to the Alberta government’s own emissions modelling at the time, it hoped to achieve its greatest emissions reductions through investment in carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology (Dyer et al. 2011, Figure 1). CCS technology sequesters carbon emissions from large GHG-emitting facilities, such as coal-fired electricity generation facilities, and stores that carbon underground, thus removing the emissions from the atmosphere. The Alberta government under the Progressive Conservatives allocated 1.5 billion dollars to fund two large-scale CCS projects. The hope was that demonstrating their technical feasibility would encourage their adoption by other companies, but without adequate financial incentives (such as a substantial price on carbon) other CCS projects were not financially viable, and in 2014 the program was scrapped.

Implications for ABCD

Reflecting on this context for public consultations on climate policy in Alberta, there are several notable implications for the evolution of public engagement processes within the ABCD project. Given the launch of this project in 2010, it is noteworthy that the previous ten years were marked by a shift toward the right in federal politics and ongoing intransigence and delays in formulating federal leadership on climate policy. Coupled with this national context, the Government of Alberta extended their foot dragging with high-profile campaigns against ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, several rounds of province-wide consultations with stakeholders, and limited progress on meaningful policy development addressing climate challenges. All of this took place amid growing recognition worldwide of the scientific evidence and the obvious impacts of climate change, not to mention international awareness of Alberta’s role as a carbon-intensive energy producer.

In some respects, the intransigence of Albertans is not surprising. A stable and conservative political culture, along with recognition among many Albertans that strong climate policy would negatively impact the energy sector and their way of life, caused understandable concern about the implications of strong climate policy for the future of the province. Yet, by the end of the 2000s, surveys showed that Albertans were growing more aware of the need for strong climate policy. Going into the year 2010, at the inception of the ABCD project, there was palpable concern within policy communities about the lack of progress on climate policy in Alberta, coupled with optimism and a sense that perhaps Alberta was ready to take on more meaningful and more vigorous climate change responses.

One of the initial objectives within ABCD was to work toward implementing a high-profile provincial dialogue on climate change. In the end, ABCD was involved in and sponsored a series of municipal, regional, and topical deliberations. There are several reasons for this shift in approach within the project, but one aspect relates to the shift in public consultation more generally within the province. In the 1990s, the Alberta government initiated a number of province-wide consultations on topics ranging from forest policy to protected areas and climate change, but these high-profile consultations were often heavily criticized and did not always yield the kind of social acceptance that government and industry leaders were hoping to achieve (e.g., Stefanick and Wells 2000). In response, the provincial government moved toward regional approaches to public consultation on environmental issues (Parkins 2006). In line with this shift, the ABCD project found success in adopting a localized and focused approach to public engagement.

Looking more specifically at the four citizen deliberations ABCD members participated in, we see a number of ways in which the context shaped those events. Recognizing the unique position that municipalities have in relation to climate policy, ABCD looked for opportunities to partner with the City of Edmonton. The first deliberation that ABCD members participated in was Edmonton’s City-Wide Food and Agriculture Citizen Panel (Food and Ag Panel). This deliberation was convened by the Centre for Public Involvement (CPI), a not-for-profit organization jointly funded by the University of Alberta and the City of Edmonton that provides leadership on effective methods of public involvement, mostly for city initiatives. The purpose of the Food and Ag Panel was to provide input into the development of an initiative called fresh, Edmonton’s food and urban agriculture strategy (Centre for Public Involvement 2012).

The inception of fresh addressed two quite different spatial factors, one a global trend and the other a local development. First, fresh had its roots in the growing interest in urban agriculture and food security internationally and nationally that has increasingly been finding tangible policy expression as an urban planning issue (Kaufman 2009). Second, fresh came about through the efforts of a local not-for-profit network, the Greater Edmonton Alliance (GEA). GEA built public awareness and support for expanded food security and the preservation of prime farmland within Edmonton’s municipal boundaries, and very successfully mobilized hundreds of Edmonton residents to attend a series of public meetings to express these desires to Edmonton’s City Council. Initially Edmonton’s mayor and council offered their support, if not enthusiasm, for the development of a food and urban agriculture strategy that would include extensive public involvement. However, as it became apparent that the majority of the public saw a food strategy as the mechanism to protect Edmonton’s remaining farmland from development, many members of Council and the mayor at the time (a Conservative and a real estate developer) became less enthusiastic about the food strategy and the associated public participation processes. The farmland in question has some of the best agricultural soils in Canada (Hanson and Schrader 2016), but the area was also identified as an ideal residential and service location to support adjacent chemical refining and manufacturing industries (KlineGroup 2008). Accordingly, the area was approved for development in 2010.

The citizen deliberation associated with fresh was a great success on many fronts, but it had little impact on the final food and urban agricultural policy process. The recommendation with the greatest support from the Food and Ag Panel was to “create and/or amend zoning, bylaws, fees, and taxes to prohibit developments on good fertile agricultural land, particularly the northeast farmland” (City of Edmonton 2012, 2). While this recommendation echoed the results of other public engagement processes associated with the development of fresh, the final draft of the food and urban agriculture strategy, written by City of Edmonton staff, did not mirror this emphasis. Instead, following the mayor’s very vocal lead, City Council approved a vague strategy that included no protection for agricultural lands within Edmonton’s boundaries (Hanson and Schrader 2016). The result of this public process was disillusioning for some, and disappointing for many others. It reinforced a sense that the government remains largely beholden to petro-state politics whereby the interests of oil and gas are placed ahead of environmental, social, and other resource management concerns (Waller 2012).

While some members of the ABCD team undertook research on Edmonton’s Food and Agricultural Strategy, more intensive efforts were focused on ABCD partnering with the City of Edmonton’s Office of the Environment on a long-term policy response to city energy and climate challenges. The high-level environmental strategic plan, The Way We Green, was the overarching framework within which the City of Edmonton developed a climate action strategy (City of Edmonton 2011). The Citizens’ Panel on Edmonton’s Energy and Climate Challenges, developed jointly by ABCD and the City of Edmonton, involved citizen-based discussions on five policy levers that the Office of the Environment determined had the greatest potential for reducing Edmonton’s greenhouse gas emissions and dependence on fossil fuels (Pembina Institute and HB Lanarc 2012).

The Citizens’ Panel on Edmonton’s Climate and Energy Challenges (Edmonton Panel) was ABCD’s largest and most extensive deliberation. City administrators viewed the Edmonton Panel as an opportunity to build public support, and thereby Council support, for the strategy. In an interview with an ABCD member, city administrator and lead author of the Energy Transition Strategy, Jim Andrais (2015) stated, “I think that without [the Edmonton Panel] we don’t even get into City Council.” The Edmonton Panel made key contributions to the Energy Transition Strategy, including adopting guiding values that were reflected in the city’s strategy, and perhaps more importantly, instilling confidence in city administrators and Council that they would have the support of Edmontonians in approving and implementing this broad strategy that would impact various aspects of city life. As noted by Robinson and Gore (2005), muncipalities face wide-ranging challenges in developing climate policy; the Edmonton Panel overcame public knowledge and information barriers by linking energy and climate challenges to issues such as housing, transportation, and industrial development.

The relative success of the Edmonton Panel, including the fact that it was able to overcome some of the contextual factors operating against such an initiative that have been outlined above, is the result of several factors. First, ABCD was able to partner with a jurisdiction already committed to pursuing more robust climate policies. ABCD was able to link up with an already existing policy process and show how public engagement could strengthen, encourage, and embolden elected officials to take strong action. While some jurisdictional questions emerged, such as how the City could encourage the greening of the provincial electricity grid, the central policy levers under consideration were well within the City’s control.

The second factor was electoral results that reinforced the climate policy agenda. At the beginning of the project, ABCD’s main liaison with City Council was then Councillor Don Iveson, who was tasked with taking up the city’s environment and sustainability initiatives. After the Edmonton Panel, a municipal election was held and Don Iveson was elected mayor of Edmonton. This fortuitous event placed an individual at the centre of municipal decision making who was in the room during the Edmonton Panel and understood the quality of deliberation that occurred. It allowed Mayor Iveson to be a vocal proponent of the Edmonton Panel’s work, as well as to push for the development of the Energy Transition Strategy. This political support allowed the Edmonton Panel to connect with a focused, existing policy process and provide sufficient public support to punch through the broader petro-state factors otherwise impeding the development of climate policy in Alberta.

Finally, given the strong influence of the energy industry and petro-politics in Alberta, along with associated climate skepticism, the Edmonton Panel worked hard to gather representative interests from across the spectrum of political views and perspectives on climate change. This diversity of interests on the panel was instrumental in bringing conclusions and recommendations from the panel forward to the City of Edmonton. These contextual factors involving demographics and perspectives on climate change in Alberta were recognized by the ABCD project and were a key factor in the design of the deliberations.

The Alberta Energy Efficiency Choices (AEEC) deliberation emerged out of a partnership between ABCD and the Alberta Energy Efficiency Alliance (AEEA). The AEEA is a non-profit stakeholder group interested in advancing energy efficiency within the province (Alberta Energy Efficiency Alliance 2015). AEEC was a province-wide deliberation on energy efficiency, the results of which the AEEA hoped would be helpful in its lobbying efforts with the provincial government (Haas Lyons 2014). In order to appeal to a seemingly hostile provincial government, AEEA felt that it was necessary that the AEEC discussions be as broadly representative as possible. If only a subset of the population, such as Edmontonians or even urban residents, were represented, it would be easier for the government to dismiss whatever findings came out of the discussions. The timing of the AEEC discussions also coincided with what AEEA believed was a policy window. At the time, Alberta was the only jurisdiction in North America without an energy efficiency program, and, according to AEEA executive director Jesse Row, the governing Progressive Conservatives were showing more signs of openness to energy efficiency than to other climate change-related initiatives.

The AEEC deliberation focused on how the government should implement or fund energy efficiency programs. After a brief introduction to concepts such as market transformation, and the various proposals, participants separated into smaller online discussion groups to discuss whether energy efficiency should come through regulations, or through incentives funded by general revenue, additional taxes, or the climate fund paid into through the SGER policy (see chapter 7). AEEA felt this would give them some information about public acceptance regarding certain options with which to approach the provincial government. In keeping with the move toward focused, stakeholder-based public deliberations, this deliberation on energy efficiency is consistent with government interests in supporting tightly organized, focused, and “niche”-oriented public engagement on specific themes. This approach to engagement is low-profile and low-risk for government agencies.

For the Water in a Changing Climate (WCC) project, ABCD partnered with the Oldman Watershed Council (OWC) to conduct a one-day deliberation on climate change issues within a watershed (see chapters 5 and 7). The partnership with the Oldman Watershed Council was not connected to any particular policy moment. This lack of clear policy influence lowered the stakes for the deliberation as a whole. There was no overarching decision or outcome that would encourage opposition from actors hesitant about climate policy or suspicious of public engagement processes. As a result, it served more as a pilot project for both ABCD practitioners and the OWC to explore the process of climate change issue framing at a regional scale and to identify tangible responses and recommendations that are developed by citizens. For ABCD practitioners, this allowed them to experiment with a more organic and open-ended process to frame the issues and set the agenda (Blue 2015). Unlike the Edmonton Panel, which had a much more focused and rigid agenda, the WCC allowed participants to set the range of issues to be discussed. Deliberations also allowed ABCD practitioners insight into the challenge of thinking about meaningful responses to climate challenges in a local and regional context. In this regard, local context and a recent major flood event in southern Alberta conditioned the recommendations from participants. For instance, participants called for “education and information about how to deal with extreme weather events.” These outcomes offered insight into the challenges of situating a global challenge like climate change within a regional watershed management context.

Conclusion

This review of public consultation in Alberta speaks to a number of important points in the history of the ABCD project. While the initial vision for ABCD was to convene a high-profile, provincial-level deliberation on climate policy in Alberta, despite several attempts to initiate project activities with provincial counterparts, the project never achieved this vision. Instead, ABCD found fruitful ground for public deliberation at the municipal level in Edmonton with both the Food and Ag Panel and the Edmonton Panel. While ABCD and AEEA did conduct province-wide online discussions about energy efficiency choices, the quality of the deliberations was significantly lower than the municipal deliberations. What the AEEA project achieved with regard to breadth, it sacrificed with regard to depth. Similarly, the WCC deliberation was limited in its quality due to time (one-day) and resource constraints. At the same time, our review of public engagement in Alberta reflects a growing distaste for centralized, high-profile engagements on behalf of the provincial government, and our experience in ABCD is entirely consistent with this shift in public taste. The implications of this trend toward regional, smaller-scale, issue-specific deliberation is taken up in other chapters of this volume in relation to linking public deliberation and system change (see chapters 2 and 8).

Throughout this process, there are a number of key lessons learned. The first is that despite significant institutional and structural forces to the contrary, it is possible to conduct robust deliberative events on topics that are deeply divisive, provided one can find a willing and well-resourced partner with purposeful and well-intentioned links to policy development. The Food and Ag Panel and the Edmonton Panel both fed into ongoing strategic planning processes which provided them with a more tangible connection to the policy-making process. Unfortunately, the Food and Ag Panel did not have the same level of political support enjoyed by the Edmonton Panel, which contributed to the relative success of the latter. The AEEC and WCC deliberations were initiated primarily by ABCD members and partner organizations but had less connection with the policy-making process, fewer resources with which to operate, and no tangible commitment from decision makers on what to do with the recommendations.

A second lesson is how an organization such as ABCD (and other organizations looking at these sorts of processes) defines the success of deliberative events. Some definitions focus on the quality of the deliberations and the influence on participants whereas others define success by substantive changes to policy. With regard to the latter, even the most planned and resourced deliberation ABCD conducted (the Edmonton Panel) had arguably modest influence on the overall development of Edmonton’s Energy Transition Strategy. Rather, it provided political support for the policies outlined in the discussion paper (Pembina Institute and HB Lanarc 2012) that fed into the overall Energy Transition Strategy. And yet this contribution should not be diminished. As green deliberative theorist Walter Baber reminds us, “decision processes that are insufficiently democratic are politically unsustainable and, therefore, will eventually prove to be ecologically unsustainable simply because they will not be able to endure” (Baber 2011, 198). While it may not have substantially altered climate policy in the City of Edmonton, the Edmonton Panel arguably provides the Energy Transition Strategy with significant democratic buttresses to resist stakeholders who might otherwise attempt to weaken the strategy’s long-term goals.

Finally, in places like Alberta where public engagement is often little more than public relations, the learning curve for implementing high-quality public deliberation is steep. Demonstrating public deliberation and learning from these experiences with our partners offers an important step toward breaking the old moulds of public consultation in Alberta and offering fresh alternatives.

Notes

1. The authors of this chapter were involved in various ways with ABCD. Geoff Salomons, a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Alberta, served as a research assistant for ABCD from September 2012 until the project’s end in 2015. While providing research support for all the ABCD projects, he also served as a table host and note taker for both the Edmonton Citizens’ Panel on Climate and Energy Challenges (Edmonton Panel) and the Alberta Energy Efficiency Choices (AEEC) online discussions. John Parkins, a professor in the Department of Resource Economics and Environmental Sociology, was involved in the ABCD project from the outset as a member of the steering committee, as an observer of the Edmonton Panel, and as a supervisor for a graduate student who conducted research with participants of the Edmonton Panel. His work on public deliberation in Alberta predates the ABCD project with attention to public engagement on issues related to natural resource management.

2. Typically, the term “in situ technology” refers to Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD), whereby steam is injected underground to melt the viscous bitumen to a more fluid oil and water emulsion, which can then be extracted more easily. The additional energy required to generate the necessary steam increases the carbon footprint of in situ oil sands when compared with conventional oil sources.

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