Excuse my English, but that damned Potatogate just won’t stay shut.
Potatogate was the name given a year ago to the government’s secretive effort to sell 16,000 acres of Alberta public land, priceless native grassland, habitat for several threatened and endangered wildlife species, to a Tory supporter, allegedly to be plowed under and used to grow spuds for potato chips.
In November last year, it was the applicant, SLM Spud Farms 1317748 Ltd., and not the government, that gave in to immense public pressure and withdrew its application to buy the land, Louis Ypma of SLM whining that the public was misinformed. He was partially right: the public was and still is totally uninformed. What did SLM propose to pay for this scarce and priceless land, and did it really, seriously, need 16,000 acres to grow potatoes?
After the withdrawal, Sustainable Resource Development (SRD) Minister, Hon. Mel Knight, informed the Legislature that the government would continue dealing with our public land in the same way. Many environmentalists interpreted that as a threat of more monkey business as usual, more ad hokery and jiggery-pokery, and started calling for a new, open, and independent process for administering the half of Alberta that is public land.
Sure enough, the government recently advertised Potatogate II: the same priceless 16,000 acres as open for bids until Oct. 31st. The government still does not get it: it is not just the political aspect and secrecy of the Potatogate I process that was objectionable: the owners of this land, the people of Alberta, do not want it sold, period. This vast tract of increasingly scarce and rare native Prairie grassland is habitat to many of our threatened and endangered species, including a number of birds listed under the federal Species at Risk Act: including the burrowing owl, the ferruginous hawk and the long-billed curlew.
At the outset, some conservation groups were thinking they could get together and raise the funds to purchase the land by the deadline date. But then they were foiled by the Catch 22: a condition of the sale is that the buyer must plow, farm, and irrigate the land (again, how much of it is not clear). Thus, if you buy the land, you must destroy it as native grassland and priceless wildlife habitat, a condition that totally rules out purchase by any consortium of conservationists. Talk about stacking the deck in favour of spud farming!
After SLM Spud Farms withdrew, Mr. Knight is reported as saying the government “took a closer look at the land, saw a very viable opportunity here for agricultural development in the area,” and expects SLM to try again. As usual, when government forges ahead against and despite the advice of its own biologists and even its own Land Use Framework and the South Saskatchewan Regional Advisory Council, anonymous leaks are now springing forth. It is alleged that that the “environmental impacts” study that is part of the bid package was actually developed by SLM Spud Farms and has been accepted verbatim by Mr. Knight’s sustainable resource development department, despite allegedly being prepared by a retired fish and wildlife officer with no formal biological training, and thus not eligible to be a member of Alberta Professional Biologists, a requirement by SRD for its own new hires.
Informants are also alleging that this proposal was not discussed by the government caucus, and may have come directly from the office of the Premier as a directive. There is some sense to that, when you recall that that Premier Stelmach himself met July 29th last year with Forty Mile Council, where Potatogate I was being discussed.
Shortly after his appointment as SRD minister early in 2009, Mr. Knight delivered the all-time worst ministerial address to the annual conference of the Alberta Fish and Game Association. Many delegates observed that Mr. Knight, a farmer, sounded more like a minister of agriculture than an SRD minister.
Now, almost three years later, a hard question arises: why would a minister of sustainable resource development, the trustee and protector for us all of our public land and the wildlife that lives on it, push the sale of 16,000 priceless public acres of wildlife habitat and impose a condition that it be utterly destroyed as wildlife habitat by plowing and irrigating it for potatoes, surely the most environmentally unfriendly of all crops, considering the amount of scarce water, the insecticides and herbicides required? Surely it is the duty of the duty of a minister of sustainable resource development, as trustee for us all of our public land and wildlife, to say no to this alleged “agriculture-development opportunity,” even if directed otherwise by our farmer Premier, and especially no to Hon. Mr. Stelmach in his last days as a lame duck Premier.
But that is not likely to happen unless the owners of Alberta’s public land once again rise up and make life miserable for their MLAs, by reminding them that no meant no the first time and that Potatogate must be slammed shut finally and forever.
Bob Scammell is an award-winning outdoors writer living in Red Deer.