Our Resources, Our Future, Our Decisions

Our Resources, Our Future, Our Decisions

Date:	Sunday, October 21, 2007
Time:	2:00pm - 4:00pm
Location:	Alex Taylor School Gymnasium
Street:	9321 Jasper Avenue
City/Town:	Edmonton, AB

Who should get the royalties - big oil or the people of Alberta? Come and have your say.

Participate in community discussions about the current Royalty Review. Hear from respected panelists and join in the discussion

Panelists Include:
Brian Mason - Leader of Alberta's NDP
Diana Gibson - Parkland Institue
Bill Moore Kilgannon - Public Interest Alberta

Don't Let Big Oil Set Our Royalty Rates make sure Ed hears from you


SEE:

Mason Hits The Bricks

I Am Malcontent

Who Will Decide About Royalties

Headline Says It All

Ohhh Pulllleeeaasse

Alberta Needs A Chavez

Albertans Are Simpletons Says Government

Royalty Is NOT A Tax

Fearless Prediction Confirmed

Morons

More Shills For Big Oil

Stelmach Sells Out

King Ralph Shills For Big Oil

Tags
royalties, oil, profits,
Bill Hunter, Alberta Royalty Review,
Alberta Cabinet, CAPP, Ed Stelmach,
Big Oil,oil royalties, PC, Calgary, Party of Calgary, politics, NEP, Conservatives, Fort McMurray, One Party State,
Alberta, Premier,
Alberta NDP, Brian Mason,

Leaky Ship Of State

Gee now who could have done this? Throne Speech Leaked

Considering how tightly under wraps they had their Income Trust announcement last year, and how tightly controlled all information from the PMO is, including its ability to gag cabinet and back bencher's, who do you think did it.

See:

Harpers Shoe Fetish

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Canada, Tories, Harper, Government,Sandra Buckler,Parliament, Ottawa, Press Gallery, PM,PMO,Throne Speech

Real Oil Workers Rally

In response to the right wing rally by oil company executives in hard hats today at the Legislature the Alberta Federation of Labour will be holding a real oil workers rally in a real oil city.

Thursday, October 18, 2007 at 9pm to 10:30pm

Timberline Room, Sawridge Hotel, Fort McMurray

The Real Oil Workers Forum and Rally

Come sign our petition urging the government to increase royalties and guarantee more value-added production in Alberta. Make your voice heard. Bring copies of the petition back to your jobsites!

Hosted by the Alberta Federation of Labour

Meanwhile the guys from Quattro Energy Services and their Alberta Alliance pals might be in for a surprise at their rally today. Real hard hat oil workers might show up to counter protest.

Don't Let Big Oil Set Our Royalty Rates make sure Ed hears from you



royalties, oil, profits,
Bill Hunter, Alberta Royalty Review,
Alberta Cabinet, CAPP, Ed Stelmach,
Big Oil,oil royalties, PC, Calgary, Party of Calgary, politics, NEP, Conservatives, Fort McMurray, One Party State,

Conservatives Hollow Out Canada

More so called 'unintended consequences' of Harpers Income Trust flip flop and Ralph Klein's Electrical deregulation. And if you believe this was unintended then I have a bridge in Brooklyn I can sell you.

Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing, Asia's richest man, is targeting further growth in Canada's energy sector as a company he controls has snapped up Calgary-based TransAlta Power LP for $629-million and could buy more of the country's beleaguered income trusts. TransAlta Power, one of Canada's larger power trusts, had put itself up for sale in May, claiming that the federal government's decision to tax income trusts like regular companies meant its business model was no longer the best way to serve unitholders. It is majority owned by Calgary-based private power producer TransAlta Corp.

People familiar with the deal said Mr. Li, who already controls approximately 71 per cent of Calgary-based Husky Energy Inc., is using his cash-rich position to take advantage of current uncertainty in the trust sector, with the TransAlta acquisition allowing CKI to become a meaningful Canadian electricity player without yet having to become an operator.

CKI has some $1.1-billion of cash still to spend. Potential acquisition targets in Canada could include power generation trust subsidies owned by other infrastructure companies, such as Enbridge Inc., which will likely be sold or restructured as traditional common stock companies by 2011.

Mr. Li's increasing interest follows recent acquisitions in Canada's energy sector by another unlikely overseas player, Abu Dhabi National Energy Co., known as Taqa, which has targeted $7.5-billion on acquisitions in Alberta in just six months.

TansAlta Power pushed for deregulation and played the Income Trust game. It also has the right to sell power south of the border in a blended mix with American electrical utilities. One of the only Canadian utilities to have such an arrangement. Thus it's generation of electricity is for sale to the highest bidder.

Jim Dinning the man who would be Ralph was on the board of TransAlta. While 'private' it was created under the Social Credit government and its board has always been open to the parking of former government cabinet ministers.

Today the Transalta board is a whose who of Canadian and American business interests. It and Enbridge both have influential former U.S. ambassadors to Canada on their boards.

Enbridge is another private energy company that was also a Trust when Flaherty announced his Halloween Surprise last year.

Interprovincial Pipe Line (IPL), which became Enbridge Pipelines in 1998, was incorporated in 1949, shortly after Canada's first major oil discovery at Leduc, Alberta. The original pipeline was constructed to transport oil from Western Canada to refineries in the east.

Although Interprovincial had long been publicly traded, for most of its life the company was primarily owned by a handful of producers who shipped their products on the system. Then in 1983, Hiram Walker Resources took a major position in Interprovincial, through a share swap. That led to a string of events that included the acquisition of Home Oil in 1986, the creation of Interhome Energy, and control by Olympia & York. In 1992, Olympia & York sold its majority interest into the general marketplace, and Interprovincial became a widely held company. That was really the beginning of the Enbridge of today.

But Enbridge now is also owner and operator of Canada's largest natural gas distribution system, and is building a new gas distribution system for the province of New Brunswick. Enbridge participates in gas transmission through the Alliance and Vector gas pipelines. It is involved in the gas midstream business, liquids feeder pipelines, electrical power distribution, retail energy services, energy marketing, fuel cells, and has a growing involvement internationally with investments such as the OCENSA crude oil pipeline in Colombia.

Ah yes Colombia, home of death squads for trade unionists, and now has been given Harpers favorite nation trading status.

Bush: Free Trade Benefits US Workers

Some in Congress have expressed concern over violence in Colombia, particularly attacks on trade unionists. President Uribe takes these concerns seriously, and he has responded decisively. He's established an independent prosecutors unit to investigate and punish homicides against labor unionists. He's allowed the International Labor Organization to station a permanent representative in Bogota. He's worked to offer young Colombians better alternatives to a life of violence and drugs -- including the new jobs and economic opportunities that would come from a trade agreement with the United States.

Colombia's record is not perfect, but the country is clearly headed in the right direction -- and is asking for our help. Both houses of the Colombian legislature have expressed overwhelming support for the trade agreement with the United States. And now they're waiting to see if we will uphold our end of the deal. If Congress were to reject this committed ally, we would damage America's credibility in the region, and make other countries less willing to cooperate in the future. As Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada put it, "If the United States turns its back on its friends in Colombia, this will set back our cause far more than any Latin American dictator could hope to achieve." By its bold actions, Colombia has proved itself worthy of America's support -- and I urge Congress to pass this vital agreement as soon as possible

.

Like TransAlta, Enbridge's board has former members of the Alberta Government, including the former CEO of Telus, as well as those with connections to the U.S. Government and with Dubai and other middle eastern investors looking to expand into the energy and utility markets in Canada.

There’s a new way of pegging an energy company a takeover target: TAQA-over.
As everybody knows, or will, once it finishes spending billions in the Canadian oil patch, TAQA is an acronym for Abu Dhabi National Energy Co., which is buying PrimeWest Energy Trust for $5-billion, and still has some $13-billion left to spend.

RBC analyst Fai Lee is calling Enbridge Income Fund a TAQA-over candidate. Without actually connecting the dots between the Abu Dhabi outfit and Enbridge, he calls the fund a potential takeover candidate for a private or strategic investor, given its attractive asset portfolio.

J. LORNE BRAITHWAITE

(Age 65) Malahide, County Dublin, Ireland

Mr. Braithwaite joined the Board in 1989 and is a member of the Corporate Social Responsibility Committee and the Human Resources & Compensation Committee.

Mr. Braithwaite was President and Chief Executive Officer of Cambridge Shopping Centres Limited (developer and manager of retail shopping malls in Canada) from 1978 to 2001. As of January 2006, Mr.Braithwaite joined the largest shopping mall company in the Middle East, as the Chairman of MAF Shopping Centres, LLC, Dubai, United Arab Emirates. He is a Director of Enbridge Gas Distribution Inc. (public utilities company that is an indirect, wholly-owned subsidiary of the Corporation), Jannock Properties Limited (public real estate company), Bata Shoe Corporation (private international shoe retailing company) and Canada Post Pension Plan Investment Advisory Committee. Mr. Braithwaite is also a Trustee of Enbridge Commercial Trust (trust and a subsidiary of Enbridge Income Fund which is managed by a subsidiary of the Corporation).

Mr. Braithwaite owns 33,751 Enbridge Shares and 7,637 Deferred Stock Units.

Like many of Alberta's energy companies there are overlaps between the board members.

Enbridge CEO Patrick Daniel also sits as the director on Encana, Conservative bag man Gwyn Morgans old company, which was another energy company that was about to become a trust when Flaherty made his ill fated announcement, and sits on Enerflex an oil field services and supply company.

Just as there are overlaps between Enbridge Trust board members and Telus.

The hollowing out of Canadian business is not a aberration, it is not accidental, it is the result of Canada's energy businesses situated in Alberta being open for business. The boards are made up of movers and shakers from the U.S. and Canada energy businesses, who are willing to sell off portions of their companies to foreign investors, by using the Income Trusts, which are unregulated.

Like energy deregulation, it was never about creating value for Albertans or Canadians but about creating value for foreign and American investors at our expense.

And since these guys are the movers and shakers in Alberta's energy sector they are also the same guys crying the blues about royalty increases. Not because it would hurt their bottom line but that it might not make their companies so attractive to foreign investment buy outs. But of course that too is a lot of Chicken Little nonsense as this recent buy out of TransAlta shows.

Alberta and Canada are open for business, come buy us out.

With globalization, however, hollowing out has become a political issue for most industrialized nations. The difference this time is that no single nation is the principal acquisitor, nor is any one country the sitting duck. The hunter and the hunted have become interchangeable. Companies in China, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Sweden and Switzerland are on the prowl. And the prey may be in Germany, Italy, Britain, Australia, the U.S. and, yes, even Canada.

In the first eight months of this year, foreigners gobbled up Canadian companies worth an astounding $90 billion. Canadian companies such as Inco, Dofasco and Alcan that formed part of the industrial backbone of the Canadian economy are Canadian no more.

This "hollowing out" of corporate Canada worries many Canadians, including top business leaders. For example, Caldwell Securities, a major investment firm, has run full-page newspaper ads on "The Sellout of Corporate Canada." It called the loss of head offices and industrial leadership "one of the great corporate tragedies of our time."

Despite these warnings, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has left no doubt that he considers the sellout to be of little importance.

After months of rising pressure to do something about the supposed threat that foreigners will buy up too many Canadian companies, the federal government this week responded in almost exactly the right way: with a policy of tough-talking inaction.

Canada is not drifting towards protectionism despite a government promise to look into the country's foreign investment rules, according to Jim Flaherty, finance minister.

"We cannot turn our backs on what's happening in global trade nor would we want to," Mr Flaherty told the Financial Times. "You are not going to see a protectionist Canada."

Four out of five of Canada's leading CEOs think Ottawa should impose new restrictions on takeovers by foreign state-owned firms and seven out of 10 favour reviewing acquisitions by outsiders for national security concerns.

These survey results of Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE) members are being released today as part of an effort by the 150-CEO group to address public fears about a "hollowing out" of Corporate Canada's head offices.

"The world is awash in capital despite the current credit squeeze and some of the biggest players wandering around snapping up companies have very deep pockets and happen to be state-owned players," said Thomas d'Aquino, president of the CCCE.

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Li Ka-shing, Alberta, hydro, Utilities, Conservatives, TransAlta Utilities, Jim Dinning, Enbridge, TransAlta, Income Trusts,politics, utilities

Maid To Order

Wonder if this is what the Premier will be wearing for his Ed TV show when he announces that he serves Big Oil rather than the people of Alberta.

Perry Mah/Sun

I guess the election will be soon. Cause you can't buy publicity like this.

EDMONTON - As if we didn't already think politicians were a drag.

An ad campaign featuring a life-size model of Premier Ed Stelmach in a French maid's outfit, along with black nylon stockings and heels, is proving a hit for the San Francisco chain of gift stores.

``Premier Costumes and Halloween Gear' reads the poster, onto which Stelmach's head has been superimposed. The premier's spokesman says Stelmach has been told about it.

Tom Olsen says the premier has a sense of humour and has no plan to ask the store to take the posters down. San Francisco employee Cherish Byron says the posters had been sent out to the chain's stores across Edmonton and they were receiving comments about it all day

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
royalties, oil, profits,
Bill Hunter, Alberta Royalty Review,
Alberta Cabinet, CAPP, Ed Stelmach,
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Post Green Day Blogging

Congratulations to our very own progressive blogger; The Conscious Earth who got mentioned on Blogger Buzz yesterday. His was the only Canadian blog mentioned. And only one of two non-U.S. based blogs mentioned out of thirteen entries. And he got mentioned second.

The latest from Blogger Buzz

Environmental Blog Roundup

October 15, 2007 — permalink

In honor of Blog Action Day, we wanted to highlight some of the many Blogger-powered blogs that are focused on the environment, climate change, and sustainability. Want to see more Blog Action Day participants from around the web? Find them on Blog Search.

• The Conscious Earth - Earth-centered news for the health of air, water, habitat and the fight against global warming.

To bad Maclean's resident Ottawa blogger Kady O'Malley missed this whole amazing day. But I guess navel gazing with her MSM pals in Ottawa was too much of distraction to note over 20,000 bloggers world wide blogging on a sole Global subject for one day.

Yep shoe store stories were so much more important. Even if they had rapidly become stale by the time she got on Don Newman's show.


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Kady O'Malley , green blogs, green blogging day, green, environment,progressive bloggers, green house gas, Macleans, Canada
, green house gas, climate change, global warming

Harpers Shoe Fetish

What is it with autocratic right wingers and their shoe fetishes?

Long kept under wraps, the plan – codenamed the Shoe Store Project – is in the works by the Privy Council Office and the PMO to establish a new government-controlled media briefing centre near Langevin Block.

Mila Mulroney came "close to breaking down," according to Newman, after reading Stevie Cameron's story on the PM's reported Gucci shoe collection.

In 1987, a Globe and Mail investigation revealed that the Mulroneys had borrowed $300,000 from the Tories to renovate 24 Sussex Drive. It was just one of many stories about Mila's love for shopping and her supposedly profligate spending. She earned the unfortunate nickname Imelda (after Imelda Marcos) for her reportedly large collection of shoes.

The world's best-known shoe collector, former Philippine First Lady Imelda Marcos, has opened a museum in which most of the exhibits are her own footwear.

The Marikina City Footwear Museum in Manila contains hundreds of pairs of shoes, many of them found in the presidential palace when Imelda and her husband, President Ferdinand Marcos, fled the Philippines in 1986

The court was also told about how Helmsley would frequently put shoes she had bought herself on the business accounts, wear them, then take them back to the store and demand a refund.

There was that now- famous "birthday party for Barbara Amiel" at New York's La Grenouille, the collection of handbags by Hermes Birkin, or Renaud Pellegrino, including one that cost $42,870 (£21,079), and the 100 pairs of Manolo Blahnik shoes.

Ever since leaving the environment portfolio, Rona Ambrose has unleashed her sense of humour and some fierce shoes -- that night she wore Kenneth Cole leopard print footwear with a blood-red heel.

Oh by the way the PMO now says they have closed the shoe store.



SEE:

The Cone of Silence Over Kyoto

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Canada, Tories, Harper, Government,Barbara Amiel,Mulroney,Marcos,Helmsley,shoes, shoe store,shoe fetish,Rona Ambrose,Sandra Buckler,Parliament, Ottawa, Press Gallery, PM,PMO,
reporters, press,

Unions=Competitiveness

Yep I know it appears counterintuitive but it' s true. Labour and Capital go together like a horse and carriage. Labour produces capital and so a merger like this is the very anti-thesis of the term One Big Union.

In order to be competitive Mr. Anti-Union has made a satanic pact with Mr. Union.

In this case its the grandest merger of them all, between Frank Stronach's Magna and Buzz Hargrove's CAW.

In the global economy corporations and unions are swept up by merger and acquisitions mania. However usually it was corporate mergers or union mergers, now we have a union-corporate merger in order to compete in the global market.

After all that is why they are called 'business' unions. They sell workers labour to the boss.

Auto parts entrepreneur Frank Stronach and Canadian Auto Workers leader Buzz Hargrove have signed a deal allowing the union to organize at Magna International, citing the need to work together in non-traditional ways.

Hargrove said that the two sides have been working for years on developing non -adversarial relationship to help deal with challenges from offshore manufacturers.

Stronach, who founded the company and grew it into Canada's largest auto parts manufacturer, says society needs "checks and balances" and unions help balance the profit motives of companies.

Buzz has now really joined the Liberal family. Literally. After all they both hate Harper.

Canadian Auto Workers leader Buzz Hargrove says he's at least partly to blame for it taking so long to unionize the workers at Magna International . "It's probably more my fault than it is Frank Stronach's," Hargrove said today at a signing ceremony with Stronach, Magna's founder, at the auto parts manufacturer's headquarters in Aurora, Ont.

Frank Stronach, the founder and chairman of the auto parts maker Magna International, urged his 18,000 hourly employees in Canada on Monday to join the Canadian Auto Workers.

Mr. Stronach’s endorsement followed two years of talks that concluded Monday with a formal agreement on how the union would organize the company’s employees. Under its terms, the C.A.W., Canada’s most prominent union, agreed that Magna’s workers would not strike and the company, in turn, waived its right to lock out employees.

The unusual agreement developed from an unsolicited approach Mr. Stronach made to the union’s president, Basil E. Hargrove, in October 2005.

At the expense of the workers he represents.

Magna's union deal: no strikes

Gee that's what Sam Gompers father of business unionism said too;

The worst crime against working people is a company which fails to operate at a profit

The more thoroughly the workers are organized and federated the better they are prepared to enter into a contest, and the more surely will conflicts be averted. Paradoxical as it may appear, it is nevertheless true, that militant trade unionism is essential to industrial peace.

What we have endeavored to secure in industrial relations is industrial peace.

Hey Buzz whatever happened to; "workers control of the means of production?"

Guess Sam Gindin will have to quit ghost writing his socialist articles in the Monthly Review.

Magna, union in `template' pact
CAW secures representation at auto-parts giant in return for suspending workers' right to strike

Magna International Inc. and the Canadian Auto Workers have reached an unprecedented deal that will make union organizing easier at the company's plants here but eliminate the right to strike for several years.

Under the deal, the Aurora-based auto-parts powerhouse will allow workers to decide on union representation at each plant by voting on tentative contracts, instead of experiencing the divisiveness of organizing drives and lingering acrimony.

The deal follows an initiative by Magna chair Frank Stronach more than 1 1/2 years ago to develop a "Framework for Fairness" so the company could improve productivity, innovation and labour relations in North America amid growing competition offshore.

It will give the CAW a major opportunity to gain thousands more members in a sector where its traditional membership and clout have plunged over the past two decades, at slumping General Motors, Ford and Chrysler.

Magna operates 61 manufacturing plants with 20,700 workers in Canada, mostly in southern Ontario.

The union currently represents only about 1,000 workers at three Magna plants.

One reason the CAW never broke into Magna, despite numerous attempts, is that employees were happy with Magna's deferred profit-sharing plan, recreation areas, and daycare facilities, Mr. Lilley said.

For more than a year however, Mr. Stronach has been talking about letting both the Canadian Auto Workers and the United Auto Workers unions in as a way to put aside old management-labour divisions in the North American auto industry and ensure its survival. The hope is that the newfound co-operation could foster a new work model -- and keep auto parts and automaking jobs that might otherwise move to other continents. As Dan Luria, an analyst at the Michigan Manufacturing Technology Center put it, Mr. Stronach "wants to be able to say he remade labour relations in North America."

Unions such as the CAW have become more pragmatic by promoting productivity and other business goals at the same time Magna has warmed up to organized labour, one analyst said yesterday.

It's the final nail in the coffin of the labour movements failed anti-NAFTA campaign.

This merger between the CAW and Magna gives new meaning to North American Union and deep integration.

In practical life we find not only competition, monopoly and the antagonism between them, but also the synthesis of the two, which is not a formula, but a movement. Monopoly produces competition, competition produces monopoly. Monopolists are made from competition; competitors become monopolists. If the monopolists restrict their mutual competition by means of partial associations, competition increases among the workers; and the more the mass of the proletarians grows as against the monopolists of one nation, the more desperate competition becomes between the monopolists of different nations. The synthesis is of such a character that monopoly can only maintain itself by continually entering into the struggle of competition.
Karl Marx
The Poverty of Philosophy
Chapter Two: The Metaphysics of Political Economy

See:

Unions the State and Capital

Chrysler Made In Canada?

Buzz the Protectionist

Steel Merger

Union M&A

Mittal Plays Monopoly

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Liberals, unionization,
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Sticken It To The Stickman

A 28-year-old newcomer has humbled one of Edmonton's best-known politicians

Tonight I joined Daveberta and the Don Iveson campaign for Ward 5 Councilor at the Black Dog on Whyte. What a party. The gang that ran his campaign are all young, university students. They cajoled him to run, they knocked on doors they ran his campaign and in doing so they trounced an incumbent; Mike Nickel the Stickman.

The Stickmen, were anonymous (wink, wink, nudge ,nudge, everyone in the media knew who they were) sleazy political backstabber's. Led by Nickel and a couple of other rich business pals, they attacked and slandered former Mayor Jan Reimer (Edmonton's first woman Mayor who was also an NDP mayor) with anonymous billboard campaigns that managed to get her defeated, narrowly, by their pal Conservative tire salesman and city booster Bill Smith.

Nickel aspired to be Mayor, but settled with being City Councillor last election. His claim to fame as a councilor has been as the mouthpiece for his pals in the Canadian Taxpayers Federation on city council and his biggest cheerleader is Kerry Diotte at the Edmonton Sun.

Wanna build a bigger better art gallery? Forget about such a waste of money says Nickel fix the potholes, forgetting that potholes will have to be fixed again in two years. NYC has potholes too, but nobody cares cause they go there to see the Guggenheim, MOMA, the Empire State building, edifices of culture and architecture. No one comes back from NYC and says wow their streets are paved.

City councilors gave themselves a pay raise. Nickel and his CTF pals and Diotte launched a very public campaign to have council reconsider the raises. Wow using the Sun and all their pull in the city they got a few thousand signatures. Mike gets some press and the issue dies. Oh yes and Mike accepts his raise.

Substance was never Nickel's big suit. Political opportunism, partisan politics, and cheap shot sound bites attacking his fellow councilors to get in the news are what he was all about.

And he lost tonight. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

He lost because his was the politics of protest, right wing protest. Offer no alternatives, no solutions, just bitch and complain, and say look at me.

Don Iveson and his crew of youthful activists ran a campaign of substance and one based on creating a sustainable city. They should be congratulated. No slimy anonymous billboard attacks by them. No slagging their opponents. No grandstanding. Just good old door knocking, leafleting, and getting signs on fences and lawns.

Nickel ran on his laurels, which folks in Ward 5 found lacking. He was all about the politics of Me, and not the politics of community. Which is why he is crying in his beer tonight while those of us at the Black Dog are toasting a victory.

Hey guys and gals congrats. Ya stuck it to the stick man.



SEE:

Municipal Elections

Tags
Edmonton, Alberta, Don Iveson,Mike Nickel,stickmen,Civic election, Redmonton, Ward Five,

Grizzly Death

Thanks to efforts of environmentalists and Bill Bonko the Liberal MLA, who acted on my suggestion that environmentalists buy Grizzly Hunt lottery licenses and not use them to protest the hunt, the annual Alberta sport hunt (massacre) of Grizzlies was ended. But Grizzlies are still endangered. There are now only 345-500 of them left in the province.

Unfortunately the department in charge of declaring them an endangered species is run by the Great white-hunter reactionary Ted Morton.

Alberta wants kids to get hunting

Declaration of protected spaces is not on his agenda either as he promotes sustainable resource development, which means more intrusion and encroachment into Grizzly habitat for industrial development.

Alberta suspended the annual spring grizzly hunt for three years in 2006 when initial numbers suggested the population was well below the 1,000 bears that had previously been estimated.

But grizzlies are still dying from what biologists term "human-caused mortality." They say that must be addressed soon if grizzlies are to survive.

"We've suspended the hunt, but hunting really isn't the issue," says mountain park carnivore expert Mike Gibeau.

Most grizzlies are shot in self-defence, or are mistaken for black bears. Some are killed legally by aboriginal hunters, others are shot by poachers or thrill-killers.

Some die in highway or railway accidents. Some are destroyed when they become nuisance bears and pose a threat to public safety by barging into people's yards to feast on everything from garbage and grain to apples and pet food.

The national parks aren't safe havens for grizzlies, either. More than 50 have died in Banff, Yoho, Kootenay and Jasper since 1990, mostly in highway and railway accidents or because they posed a threat.

Many Albertans believe that if Alberta loses its grizzlies, it loses the wilderness. The grizzly is seen as an icon of the wild, but more importantly, it is an umbrella species. If its space is protected, other plants and animals will have space to thrive as well.

Officially, grizzlies are considered "a species that may be at risk."

But the Alberta Endangered Species Conservation Committee recommended in 2002 that grizzlies should be designated a "threatened" species under the provincial Wildlife Act. That was based on estimates that there were only 1,000 grizzly bears left in Alberta.

The government has yet to move on that recommendation despite recent surveys that now suggest the number could be less than half that.

Alberta Sustainable Resource Development established a 15-member Grizzly Bear Recovery Team to study the issue and draft a strategy to ensure grizzlies aren't wiped out, as they have been in neighbouring Saskatchewan and jurisdictions further east.

The team presented its report and recommendations in 2005. Sustainable Resource Development Minister Ted Morton is expected to announce his department's response to the plan in the near future. Critics say implementing the plan is long overdue.

Grizzlies live in a narrow band along the province's western boundary, primarily between Highway 16 and Highway 3.

Recent DNA testing has produced estimates that there are about 180 bears in that area, outside the mountain parks, and about 160 bears inside the parks, for a total of about 340 grizzlies. Counts of bears south of Highway 3 and north of Highway 16 haven't been completed, but those areas are not expected to yield high numbers.

"We've been far too casual about the shootings and the deaths of bears," laments Jim Pissot of Defenders of Wildlife Canada. "Now that we're aware that there are far fewer than 500, the onus is on the minister to take immediate steps to protect habitat and bears."

Bear biologists say roads are the biggest factor in grizzly deaths. Most human-caused deaths occur within 500 metres of a road.

As a Republican from California I am sure Mr. Morton would appreciate the Alberta revision of the American second amendment;


























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Ted Morton, Alberta, Grizzly, hunting, Bears endangered species, Minister of Sustainable Resources,

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