Edmonton Sun January 15, 2008

By NEIL WAUGH

Mr. Ed goes to Washington later today.

More to the point, finding someone at home in Power Town might be a tough chore, with the presidential primary season in full swing.

Even if Premier Stelmach tracks down some American pols willing to listen, it may be hard to tell if the message is "we're still open for business."

Or is it "Yankee stay home?"

The premier's plan is to brief congressmen on "trade and investment opportunities, and continue the theme that former-premier Ralph Klein took to the American capital about Alberta being a "secure and reliable supplier."

Supplier of what is the unanswered question.

Because if it means more dubious deals like EnCana, Husky and other Canadian oil companies have cooked up to ship millions of barrels of raw bitumen and thousands of jobs down the pipeline to Texas, Illinois and Ohio, then Stelmach's trip across the Medicine Line may be bad medicine for the Alberta Tories here at home.

With some top Tories pushing for an election kick-off shortly after the Feb. 4 throne speech, opening the taps to even more unrefined resources heading south is not necessarily good news for a premier with a huge undecided vote hanging over him.

But there's a flip side to Ed's Washington Adventure.

"As responsible stewards of the environment we are committed to greening our growth," Stelmach vowed.

Alberta's precious landscape will no longer be sold off and dug up.

Alberta Sustainable Resource Development Minister Ted Morton was trying to signal what's coming down the road with his Land Use Framework Initiative - the cornerstone of Stelmach's green growth strategy - in a speech to the Calgary Chamber of Commerce last week.

"The only certainty is that almost no one will be completely happy," Morton winked.

Which surely means that it will actually have some hard rules in it. Not pretty words lifted from a mindless Travel Alberta infomercial.

The timing of Stelmach's voyage up the Potomac to deliver his green message was unfortunate on another front. That is, unless you are the Pembina Institute, the Sierra Club of Canada, Toxics Watch and the Prairie Acid Rain Coalition.

They're in Federal Court later today to begin presenting their case that the fed's environment department and the Alberta Energy and Utilities Board broke the law when they gave the thumbs-up to Exxon Mobil's $8-billion Kearl oilsands project north of Fort McMurray.

"The environmental assessment of the open pit mine project was flawed and the project should be halted until a proper assessment has been completed," spat Ecojustice lawyer Sean Nixon.

He described the hole that the American energy giant wants to dig in the pristine northern boreal forest as "larger than 20,000 football fields."

Nixon accused Stelmach of "seeking to assure Americans that there are no environmental problems associated with dirty tarsands development."

Meanwhile, back in Alberta, ads began popping up on TV screens yesterday from an outfit called the Albertans for Change Society. It's really a front organization for the Alberta Building Trades Council, which has been joined by the Alberta Federation of Labour. Can the P3s of the loony left - the Parkland Institute, the Pembina Institute and Public Interest Alberta - be far behind?

The message accuses Stelmach of pretending "everything is fine," but blasts the PCs for not producing a "realistic" plan.

"Premier Stelmach - No Plan No Way," the attack ad slams.

And while the talk is all about health care, housing and energy prices, the underlying theme is it's payback time for Employment Minister Iris Evans and her belligerent bureaucrats - whom the unions see as being behind the draconian get-back-to-work-or-go-to-jail court orders that ended the Hard Hat Flu walkouts last September, the first labour disruptions in the oilsands in a quarter century.

AFL president Gil McGowan described Evans's court orders as the "straw that broke the camel's back."

I smell an election coming.