The oilsands loom large over the coming provincial election. “Boom management,” as Keith Brownsey of Mount Royal College calls it, will be the central underlying issue throughout the election, with Alberta’s social and environmental problems all linked in some way to the oilsands. Chaldeans Mensah, who teaches political science at Grant MacEwan College, goes one step further: he says the party that can demonstrate they have the right plan and the strength to enforce it will win votes.

Detailed plans are certainly what environmental and social activists are looking for. Even before Monday, when premier Ed Stelmach announced a March 3 date for the election, various interest groups had already mobilized, asking detailed questions and demanding more than platitudes from political hopefuls.

“The tar sands and rampant growth are exacerbating things,” says Bill Moore-Kilgannon, executive director of Public Interest Alberta. “But the real root of the problem is that a lot of core public issues haven’t had political priority.”

With 25 days and counting until voters go to the polls, SEE offers a quick and dirty summary of the campaign issues — and how the oilsands relates to all of them. As the Sierra Club’s Lindsay Telfer notes, “The cumulative effects of development — that’s about the environment and our society.”

OIL ROYALTIES

Watch out for some wild spin on the issue of how much our oil is really worth. As the auditor general has reported, billions in oil revenue have already slipped through Albertans’ fingers. Alberta has some of the lowest royalty rates in the world. Check out the numerous comparisons with other counties before looking at anything the various political parties are offering.

DEMOCRACY

After 37 years with the same ruling party, there’s no getting away from a debate on the health of Alberta’s democracy. The lacklustre government responses to the royalty report and Bill 46 brought the issue into the mainstream. “My experience around the province is that people really are getting it and understand that it is a systemic issue,” Moore-Kilgannon says. “There is more to democracy than just voting every five years. They want to be engaged between elections.”

AFFORDABLE HOUSING

Who would have thought thousands of people pouring into the province would cause such a housing crisis? Well, gee whiz, folks: the market just didn’t react like it’s supposed to. While homelessness and shelter spaces are certainly the highest priority in this broad issue, the price of housing is so out of control that even the middle class is struggling.

CITIES

Besides bearing the social costs of the oil boom, such as increased homelessness, Calgary and Edmonton have the added burden of building new roads and public facilities for increasing populations at a time when constuction prices have reached stratospheric levels. Infrastructure debt has its own kind of interest rates. 

CHILD CARE

The Alberta Association of Services for Children and Families recently released figures showing that their organizations have an average staff turnover rate of 38 per cent per year. Wages just can’t keep up with inflation. “As the province grows, these agencies are really struggling,” says Moore-Kilgannon. “It’s not like Tim Hortons, where people just have to wait a little bit longer if there isn’t enough staff. It means shutting down the program.”

HEALTH-CARE

Stelmach has pledged to eliminate health-care premiums, and all other parties are on board. (After all, oilsands made us rich, haven’t they? The province can’t be both rolling in oil money and unable to maintain the health system.) That’s not the only flashpoint on this hot issue. “There is still the threat of privatization lurking in the wings,” says Friends of Medicare executive director Suzanne Marshall. On the fringes, the “Third Way” is gaining ground, with private clinics and corporate takeovers of publicly operated retirement homes.

EDUCATION

A coalition of Alberta universities, colleges and technical institutes will soon launch their Imagine Alberta campaign, which urges political parties to diversify Alberta’s economy and get the province out of the boom-and-bust cycle by committing to a long-term investment in education.

ENVIRONMENT

More than 55 groups have called for a moratorium on oilsands development. Telfer, head of the Sierra Club’s prairie chapter, sees the environment as the big-picture issue. “What we are rolling out in our election campaigns is going to be quite focused on the pace of development,” she says. “That’s what really gets at it, because we are talking across departments here.” She points out that the people of Fort Chipewyan are seeing more and more diseased animals in their community as a consequence of oilsands development.

CLIMATE CHANGE

The oil sands may have made us rich, but they certainly haven’t made us green. According to the Pembina Institute, oil sands crude production generates three times more greenhouse gas emissions than the production of conventional oil. Alberta’s carbon emissions are somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 megatonnes, and how to reduce that amount will play huge in this election, even among those who so recently denied global warming even existed. 

WATER

As acclaimed University of Alberta researcher David Schindler warns, the deadly combination of global warming, historic drought patterns, increased use by industry (most notably oil and gas) and growing population means Alberta is facing water shortages. When the candidates come knocking, see if that issue is even on their radar.