Vegreville Town Hall Rejects Premier Smith’s Oil Well Cleanup Scheme

Province’s new “Drill and Dash” scheme will weaken reclamation standards and dump $60 billion cleanup costs onto the public

For Release – On October 22, 30 farmers, landowners, and residents from Vegreville and the surrounding area gathered at the Vegreville Social Centre for a Clean Up Your Mess town hall to push back against Premier Smith’s alarming plans to put taxpayers on the hook for oil and gas well cleanup.

Community members sat at round tables and chatted over pizza and heard from farmers directly impacted by derelict and orphaned wells on their lands.

“Farmers and landowners across Alberta like me trusted oil and gas companies to clean up their wells on our lands once they stopped producing. But many energy companies have betrayed Albertans and dumped their cleanup duties on everyone else. In my community we don’t just dump our garbage onto our neighbour’s land and tell them to pay for the cleanup. But that’s what the province and industry are doing now with their Mature Asset Strategy,” said Dwight Popowich, landowner and alfalfa farmer near Two Hills, Alta.

Alberta’s new “drill & dash” scheme, known as the Mature Asset Strategy (MAS), is much worse than R-Star, another program Premier Smith pitched to subsidize cleanup. She shelved it in 2023 because it was so unpopular.

“My love of the land, my family, and our livestock has never been tested more than dealing with the oil and gas industry, and the lack of regulation and enforcement currently happening in this province. Unfortunately a lot of this is not new. If it was, I wouldn’t still be dealing with a problem well 40 years later. Any revenue the government has seen from oil and gas is going to be gone and then some if we don’t stop this Mature Asset Strategy,” said Teresa Patry, landowner from near Vermilion, Alta.

This town hall is part of a series organized by local landowners and the Coalition for Responsible Energy (C4RE), a non-partisan group of landowners, farmers, experts and concerned citizens organizing to stop the province’s plans.

This issue has reached a boiling point since Smith’s Oct. 2 mandate letter to Energy Minister Brian Jean, directing him to implement MAS despite massive opposition from farmers, landowners, advocacy groups, and rural municipalities.

This event follows from an Oct. 14 town hall in Warburg where Energy Minister Brian Jean’s Chief of Staff, Vitor Marciano, presented the government’s plans and more than 100 angry landowners and farmers nearly shouted him out of the room. The Narwhal reported on it: ‘Broken’ trust: senior political staffers met by jeers at meeting with rural Albertans. At that same event, Alberta Surface Rights Federation President Bill Heidecker delivered scathing criticism of the industry and government, declaring that landowners have lost patience with oil and gas companies failing to meet their cleanup obligations.

Phillip Meintzer, co-founder, Coalition for Responsible Energy (C4RE)