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The Country Music Star Taking On the Alberta Government
Corb Lund is almost royalty in Alberta. He’s a country music star who comes from a family with four generations of ranching in the province. And he’s stepping into the political spotlight.
Key points- Alberta country music singer Cord Lund is at the helm of a petition to challenge coal mining in the Crowsnest Pass area
- Grassy Mountain coal mine project was once cancelled due to environmental impact concerns
- Mining company Northback is revisiting the project with a revised proposal
This winter, Lund filed a Citizen Initiative Petition with Elections Alberta that, with enough signatories, will force a referendum question on coal mines on the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains. Lund is opposed to mining in this region. The Alberta government is not.
“I think it’s crooked as hell,” says Lund. “There’s no upside to it.”
It was the Grassy Mountain project that inspired Lund to act. Grassy Mountain is a long-disputed plan to build a steelmaking coal mine in the Crowsnest Pass, near the town of Blairmore, on the site of a mine that closed decades ago.
Northback, the company behind the mine proposal, and its supporters have cast the project as an economic lifeline for the region; critics claim it will destroy a sensitive area at the headwaters of the Oldman River and harm fish habitat, grasslands, and water, including the drinking water for the 200,000 people who live downstream in Lethbridge and surrounding areas.
Lund and his team call their campaign “Water Not Coal,” and they argue that Alberta shouldn’t be toying with mines in the region. Fifty years ago, then premier Peter Lougheed’s government felt the same and banned coal mining on the eastern slopes. In the spring of 2020, Jason Kenney’s United Conservative Party (UCP) government rescinded that policy, and then, facing public backlash, reinstated it a year later.
Around the same time, a joint review panel put together by the Alberta Energy Regulator and the federal government found that the environmental risk of the Grassy Mountain project outweighed its economic benefit, and the federal government rejected the plan. The Australian company Benga Mining was lead on Grassy Mountain, and in 2023, changed its name to Northback and later changed the proposal. Last spring, the Alberta regulator approved a new application from Northback for a “Coal Exploration Program” on the site.
The fight goes on, the outcome unclear. A new version of the project is currently undergoing an environmental impact assessment by Northback under the direction of the Alberta Energy Regulator. This one is smaller, uses newer technology, and will address some of the environmental concerns flagged by the federal government the first time around.
As far as Lund is concerned, the debate over coal mining should have ended decades ago. He spent the past six years protesting coal mines. In 2021, he rewrote his song “This Is My Prairie,” re-recorded it with Paul Brandt and other Alberta music stars, and watched it go viral as an anti-coal anthem. But it wasn’t enough to make the problem go away for good.
So, he’s upping the ante and using the government’s own legislation to challenge the province on coal mines. It took two tries to get the petition for a citizen initiative under way—after his first application was approved by Elections Alberta, it was effectively cancelled when the UCP government changed the rules. Lund pressed on and filed the paperwork again.
Grassy Mountain “was supposed to be dead, and then here we are, fighting the same [battle]. That’s one of the most annoying things about this: How many times do Albertans have to say no to the same mine?” he says.
Lund’s background is as Albertan as it gets. His roots in the province go back to 1902, when his great-grandfather founded the homestead that became the family ranch. “I’ve ridden every inch of the place many, many times with my grandpa, and there’s a creek that runs through it,” says Lund, who now lives in Lethbridge. “Every day, my grandpa would comment on that creek . . . whether it was higher than last week or lower, and whether it was clear or cloudy.”
In 1989, Lund started a punk-metal band in Edmonton called the Smalls. A decade-and-a-half later, he turned to country music with a new band, the Hurtin’ Albertans. Since then, he has won a Juno and eleven Canadian Country Music Awards. He writes songs that speak to the land and Albertans’ complicated relationship with the resource sector—the swagger and heartbreak associated with the energy industry, and the boom-and-bust cycles of the province. His songs have lines like too much oil money, not enough booze.
Country music has extra potency in Alberta, where its roots go back further than the province itself and are closely tied to ranching culture, says Gillian Turnbull, director of writing and publishing at University of King’s College and author of Sonic Booms: Making Music in an Oil Town, a history of Calgary’s roots music scene.
In the late 1800s, Americans began to migrate north, bringing cattle to the Canadian prairies, she says. These cowboys sung songs on cattle drives. At night, they’d sing to keep noises at bay and stop cattle from running away. Many of those singing cowboys went on to establish ranches in Alberta and Saskatchewan.
Their repertoire was collected by folklorists in the early twentieth century and brought back to life by singers who were performing in movies and on radio, says Turnbull. In Alberta, that tradition blossomed over decades into a thriving country and roots music scene. It gave rise to stars like Ian Tyson, k.d. lang, Brett Kissel, Paul Brandt, and Terri Clark. Today, Alberta is home to a buzzing live country music scene, with Calgary and Edmonton playing host annually to two of the largest folk music festivals in the country. Lund will headline Calgary’s folk festival in July.
In the past, Lund maintained his popularity, in part, by skillfully avoiding coming across as too political. It’s a dangerous thing for a country music singer to take one side of a hot political issue. Just ask the band formerly known as the Dixie Chicks, who never quite recovered in popularity after speaking out against then United States president George Bush in 2003. A large contingent of Lund’s audience are the same Americans who ditched the Chicks, as they are now called. “He always said that he was quite worried about alienating different factions of his audience and so presented himself as quite neutral for that reason,” she says.
Even now, he walks the line carefully. “I’m not partisan. I don’t like any of the parties at all. My belief system is à la carte,” he says. It’s a version of a quote that he’s been delivering in interviews for a decade.
On social media, he’s accused of becoming “a woke bastard” and “a pathetic liberal bitch.” He’s been told that he’s only interested in protecting colonial ranchers’ rights and that he should get out of the province. That he doesn’t care about jobs. His friend and fellow musician Brandt, who’d openly supported Lund on coal mines back in 2021, is now silent on the issue. (Brandt is going through his own political semi-awakening and public blowback, having shared an Instagram photo of himself, featuring the lyric Yeah, I’ve got independence in my veins from his 2004 song “Alberta Bound.” In interviews, Brandt has been ambiguous about his views on Alberta separation.)
Premier Danielle Smith couldn’t resist a jab at Lund: “Maybe he’ll write a song about me,” she said.
Maybe he will, but it ain’t gonna happen anytime soon. Lund doesn’t have time to write songs or practise music or spend time on his ranch right now, he says. He’s too busy with politics. He’s losing income because of his advocacy. “This is not good for my career,” he says.
But he is willing to stake his reputation on coal mines. He sees himself as the steward of the land for future generations, and a coal mine would change the land irrevocably. “If you have a generational place that you’re going to give to your kids or that you inherited from the third or fourth generation, it’s very much a custodianship.”
The post The Country Music Star Taking On the Alberta Government first appeared on The Walrus.
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