Country Musician, Corb Lund, has started a petition to stop coal mining on the Eastern Slopes. Photo from Watchdog Management website
Award winning country music artist and Alberta rancher Corb Lund has received approval to move forward with his citizen’s initiative petition aimed at banning new coal mining in the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains, after an earlier application was rejected.
Lund was required to reapply after recent legislative changes introduced stricter conditions for citizen-led petitions.
Lund says the delay allowed organizers to better prepare.
More than 1,000 volunteers have already signed up to canvass. The group now has four months to collect nearly 178,000 signatures, equal to 10 per cent of the votes cast in Alberta’s last general election.
If the signature threshold is met, the issue could be brought before the legislature or sent to a provincewide referendum.
The proposed ban would include the Grassy Mountain coal project north of the Crowsnest Pass. Northback, the company behind the project, says Albertans support responsible resource development and notes the province’s history of supplying global demand.
The province has declined to speculate on the petition’s outcome.
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