Albertans elected the United Conservative Party (UCP) to rejuvenate the energy sector and bring back the thousands of jobs lost in recent years due to the downturn in oil and gas prices. They did not elect the UCP to destroy rural roads and stick taxpayers with the tab.
Nonetheless, that is basically what the UCP is proposing to “help get rigs back in the field,” as the County of Barrhead councillors learned this week to their collective shock.
An e-mail that was sent out recently to Alberta municipalities by the permit firm Roadata Services Ltd. highlighted a potential danger from the UCP’s platform, specifically the portion called “Creating Jobs in Oil and Gas.”
Noting that there has been a 75 per cent decline in oil and gas exploration activity since 2014, the UCP pledges to reclassify service rigs as off-road vehicles and to replace rural road permits with an annual provincial permit.
Right now, an oil and gas company has to go through a local permitting process in order to move service rigs through a rural municipality like the County of Barrhead.
This effectively allows the municipality to direct companies away from roads that are in poor condition and theoretically recoup the cost of any damages caused by overweight equipment.
The UCP’s plan would completely erase that local oversight. Oil and gas companies would have free rein to move service rigs however and whenever they like through rural areas, and the cost of repairing wear and tear on back roads would fall to ratepayers.
As Roadata puts it in their e-mail, removing the ability for municipalities to provide local road approval for overweight permits “will have a severely negative effect” on the municipality, its infrastructure and its ratepayers.
The platform provides no rationale for this change, though one can assume it would be easier for oil and gas companies to operate if they didn’t have to deal with municipal governments to get permits. Perhaps in other municipalities it is a major hindrance to get those permits.
That said, it’s not “local oversight” that’s driving down oil and gas exploration, it’s low oil and gas prices.
As the Rural Municipalities of Alberta (RMA) puts it in a letter, this is less likely to create jobs than it is to destroy rural bridges and roads while increasing municipal costs. This hurts more than it helps.
Hopefully, the municipalities speaking out against this potential change (which includes the County of Barrhead) can sway the new government to re-think this part of their platform, or at least do a more extensive consultation before pushing full steam ahead with these changes.
The UCP might claim that “the election was all the consultation needed,” but come on. You can’t expect rank and file Albertans to know every single aspect of the UCP platform, or for their votes to represent a ringing endorsement of every single campaign promise.
