The long-awaited South Saskatchewan Regional Plan (SSRP) was released on July 25 after five years in the making. The SSRP is the second in a set of seven planned regional government frameworks on how Albertans will use and protect their environmental resources for the next 50 years. Though land-use planning has been divided into seven geographic regions based around major river basins — the Upper and Lower Athabasca Upper and Lower Peace North and South Saskatchewan River and Red Deer — each regional plan will be a massive overarching framework. Those involved in creating the plans say it’s virtually impossible to make all stakeholders happy.
The SSRP encompasses all the land between Alberta’s east west and south borders and roughly as far north as Crossfield. That area contains more than 12 per cent of the province’s land and nearly half the population.
Environment and Sustainable Resource Development spokesperson Neal Watson says the government’s goal in developing the SSRP was to hear from as many stakeholders and members of the public as possible in order to make as many of them happy with the plan as possible.
“The development of the plan [included] three rounds of consultations with Albertans…. The regional plan on a high level is very much about that balance…. It is about considering the balance between that growth that is economic development economic activity that we want but very much considering that in balance with the aspiration and the needs for communities and the essential need to consider the impact on the environment” says Watson.
Lisa Fox director of strategic policy and program development at Sustainability Resources was one of 20 people selected by the government to sit on an independent SSRP advisory council. She says the challenge in creating the land-use policy for southern Alberta was making compromises between wilderness conservation and development demands.
“I think we did our best. I think the government did its best. There was an awful lot of learning that went on. The unfortunate part I think came when we started to look at the map and where you have to draw a line in the sand” she says explaining every hectare of land in the region has an economic value to at least one group. Deciding to restrict access to any group or set land aside for conservation purposes when other stakeholders argue for the right to develop it was never easy.
“When you start to balance those key pieces up it becomes a value trade-off and value trade-offs are often informed by politics” says Fox. “The word ‘conservation’ was rejected by a lot of folks around the table because it implied no development and so what ended up being by consensus of the group was that rather than just drawing lines around these areas and saying ‘you can’t go into them’ you’re saying ‘these are areas that are defined as special areas and we’re going to put restrictions on how we go into them.”
Fellow council member John Squarek who is also the president of Tanager Energy agrees getting stakeholders to understand each other’s perspective was tricky but is satisfied with the result.
“In any plan like this where the government is overseeing what you’re doing they try to lead you in their direction and so we have to be mindful of that. It’s never easy when you have 20 people from all different backgrounds with all different ideas and values and things that they want to see in the plan it took some time to get everybody to understand everybody’s position” he adds
The word ‘conservation’ was rejected by a lot of folks around the table because it implied no development – Lisa Fox
The SSRP has created new conservation areas and expanded pre-existing ones. Notably it opted to protect 34000 hectares of natural grassland in the new Pekisko Heritage Rangeland. It also named part of the Castle-Crown region near Picher Creek a Wildland Provincial Park which means recreation activities like hunting will still be permitted.
Advocates for the Castle area have been fighting for formal conservation since the early 1990s but many express mixed feelings about the new park as the government drew its border around only half the 100000-hectare area submitted for protection. The SSRP also allows industry that already has leases to extract oil gas or minerals in the park to continue operations.
“We were hoping with the plan the government would kind of — it would be a good opportunity for them to hold the line on some development in areas and that’s not really the case” says Alberta Wildlife Association conservation specialist Brittany Verbeek. “New oil and gas leases are still continuing conversion from grassland to agricultural land is still able to continue so those things are really too bad because this plan has taken five years to come out anyways and to wait further is just another example of putting conservation on hold while development continues.”
