A personal rant: When the first coal bed methane wells came into existence in my area I attended a public meeting at Pine Lake Alberta. The purpose of this meeting was to organize a surface rights group to deal with the issues that might arise from this massive energy project. I liked the idea of landowners sharing information and banding together for our collective benefit. The original group was the Pine Lake Surface Rights Action Group. I think I was member #56. We eventually changed the name to Alberta Surface Rights Group, to reflect the growing membership from across the province. After Ed Stelmach became Premier of Alberta the really bad stuff started happening! Over a relatively short term his government rapidly introduced the four land theft bills! Bills 19, 50, 36, and 24. In my opinion Bill 24, the Carbon Capture and Storage Statutes Amendment Act, was the final straw! This piece of legislation actually expropriated real property, without compensation or due process of law! I clearly remember sitting in the ASRGs lawyers office when we met with him in Calgary, getting advice on challenging this bill in the courts. His advice was to seek a political solution! ......in other words....change the government! I also clearly remember a province wide conference call with various other land and property rights advocates, where we decided to do whatever was necessary to get the Wildrose Alliance Party elected. The WRA had promised to repeal all 4 of the bills and legislate a Property Right Act so this kind of stuff could never happen again! Of course we all know what happened......We were successful in getting Wildrose MLAs elected in most of the rural ridings in southern and central Alberta! The highlight was we got Joe Anglin, a staunch property rights advocate, elected in the Rocky Mountain House/Rimbey/Sundre riding! This was our guy.......our voice in the Legislature! There was always a problem within the WRA, in that it was a coalition between the oil industry and the landowners. ASRG tried countless times to suggest the party strike a committee of stakeholders so we could find common ground and resolve our various issues. The party willfully didnt respond to these suggestions! The Wildrose Party has drastically changed since the election in 2012. They forgot who brought them to the dance and have run off with the oil boys from the Bow Tower! The leadership of the party manipulated the ouster of Mr. Anglin, because he was too vocal about standing up for property rights and the Alberta taxpayer! Shortly after this I resigned from the executive of my local WRA constituency association. I have nothing but good feelings for the hundreds of hard working people I was involved with in that party. They were all very salt of the earth types who had a vision of a truly grass roots political party that would give us an honest government that truly worked for the people of Alberta! This party was hijacked by the bag men from the energy industry.
Posted on: Fri, 17 Oct 2014 13:33:33 +0000
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