THE SOUTH ATHABASCA PLAN

THE SOUTH ATHABASCA PLAN: A PROMISE TO INDUSTRY, A LIE TO THE LAND

WHAT THE GOVERNMENT IS REALLY DOING

Strip away the polite language and glossy maps and the South Athabasca Sub-regional Plan says one thing, clearly and without shame: industry goes first. Water, land, Indigenous rights, and the public balance sheet come later—if at all. This plan is not about “certainty.” It is about removing obstacles, lowering standards, and locking in industrial priority before anyone can meaningfully stop it.

Albertans are being asked to trust the same system that already left us with hundreds of thousands of orphaned and inactive wells, billions in cleanup liabilities, and a regulatory culture that has proven—over and over—that when companies walk away, the public pays. Against that backdrop, promising decades of future restoration while accelerating new disturbance is not optimism. It is recklessness dressed up as policy.

FROM PRECAUTION TO PRE-APPROVAL

Under earlier frameworks, the land at least had a fighting chance. Development was allowed, but it was constrained. Rivers had buffers. Roads were supposed to be limited. Cumulative damage was meant to mean something. The idea—however imperfectly applied—was that the land mattered and that some places should not simply be sacrificed for throughput.

This plan ends that pretense. By carving northern Alberta into “Go Zones” and “White Areas,” the government is declaring vast stretches of Treaty territory pre-approved for industrial use. The question is no longer whether development should happen there. The answer is already yes. The only discussion left is how fast and how much.

That is not planning. That is rezoning the future without consent.

WATER GETS LESS PROTECTION WHERE DAMAGE IS WORST

The plan weakens riparian protections precisely where industrial pressure is highest. Energy activities are exempted from normal setbacks, and those setbacks shrink inside in-situ project areas. In plain language, the more developed an area becomes, the less protection its rivers and wetlands receive.

This is not an accident. It is a design choice. It prioritizes steam, pipelines, and access roads over the basic reality that once water systems are damaged, they do not bounce back on political timelines.

Chief Allan Adam of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation has said this repeatedly in public: “We drink the water. We eat the fish. When the water is poisoned, our people are poisoned.” That is not rhetoric. It is lived reality downstream of decades of “managed” development.

ROADS, CORRIDORS, AND THE MYTH OF REVERSIBILITY

The plan’s promise of “complete flexibility” for access inside in-situ areas should alarm anyone who understands land disturbance. Roads do not politely disappear when projects end. They fragment habitat, invite further development, and make reclamation vastly more expensive and less likely to succeed.

This is the same province that cannot compel timely cleanup of existing wells. The same regulator that allowed assets to be shuffled to weak operators who promptly collapsed. And now we are supposed to believe that an even larger industrial footprint will somehow be restored—eventually—by the very system that failed to clean up what already exists.

That is not credible. It is negligent.

CUMULATIVE DAMAGE IS NO LONGER A WARNING, IT IS A TARGET

Perhaps the most dangerous shift is how cumulative effects are treated. They are no longer a red line. They are a forecast. The plan openly models increased disturbance and pairs it with restoration promises stretching thirty years into the future.

This is the same logic that created the orphan well crisis. Allow the damage now, assume the cleanup later, and hope the companies are still around when the bill comes due. When they are not, the cost quietly lands on the public ledger.

Every Albertan should read this plan with one question in mind: who pays when restoration does not happen? History tells us the answer, and it is not industry.

INDIGENOUS RIGHTS ERASED BY ADMINISTRATIVE DESIGN

Treaties 6, 8, and 10 are not historical artifacts. They are constitutional promises. They guarantee Indigenous peoples the right to continue using the land and water for as long as the land exists. That promise does not survive industrial saturation.

The plan does not openly challenge Treaty rights. It does something more cynical. It reshapes the land so those rights become harder, then impossible, to exercise. Roads cut traplines. Noise drives away wildlife. Water contamination makes fishing unsafe. Cultural sites become inaccessible behind gates and corridors.

Chief Billy Joe Tuccaro of Mikisew Cree First Nation has said publicly that “our people have depended on these lands and waters since time immemorial, and we will continue to defend them.” The government’s response is not to listen, but to redraw maps so that defense becomes procedural instead of meaningful.

CONSULTATION AFTER THE DECISION IS MADE

The plan talks about consultation, but it rigs the outcome. When land is already zoned for development and cumulative damage is already baked into the model, consultation becomes theater. Communities are asked how to live with harm, not whether that harm should occur.

Courts have warned governments about this exact behavior. Consultation must be capable of changing outcomes. This plan ensures it cannot.

Chief Sheldon Sunshine of Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation has been blunt on this point, saying in public statements that “Treaty rights mean nothing if the land and water are destroyed.” The province’s answer is to call destruction “flexibility” and move on.

ORPHAN WELLS: THE ELEPHANT THE PLAN IGNORES

The most dishonest silence in this plan is about cleanup. Alberta already carries a massive, unresolved liability from abandoned and orphaned wells. Regulators allowed it to happen. Governments looked away. Taxpayers are now on the hook.

Expanding development while loosening protections, stretching reclamation timelines, and trusting the same regulatory system that failed before is not economic strategy. It is moral hazard on an industrial scale.

The government wants the public to believe this time will be different. There is no evidence to support that belief.

THE TRUTH THIS PLAN WON’T SAY OUT LOUD

This plan is a declaration of priorities. It tells industry that access will be protected. It tells Indigenous nations that their rights will be “considered” after the fact. It tells Albertans that cleanup is a problem for the future.

It is not balance. It is not reconciliation. It is not responsible stewardship. It is the quiet entrenchment of a system that privatizes profit and socializes risk—again. And when the wells go orphaned, the rivers are damaged, and the restoration targets quietly slip another decade into the future, the same government will ask the same public to trust them one more time. Albertans have seen this movie before. We know how it ends.