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Alberta

Province of Alberta loaning Orphan Well Association 100 Million to create jobs and accelerate clean up

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From The Province of Alberta

Creating jobs, accelerating well cleanup

A government loan to the Orphan Well Association (OWA) will spur the creation of hundreds of green jobs and reduce the number of orphaned wells across Alberta.

As the first step in A Blueprint for Jobs, the province is extending its loan to the OWA by up to $100 million. This loan will bolster the association’s immediate reclamation efforts and generate up to 500 direct and indirect jobs in the oil services sector.

“Today’s investment is part of our Blueprint for Jobs. This taxpayer investment will create good-paying jobs while improving the environment. Actions like this will help to get Alberta back to work.”

Jason Kenney, Premier

“We are getting Albertans back to work while staying true to our province’s reputation as a responsible resource developer. This loan will increase economic activity across our province and is an important step in addressing the pressing issue of oil and gas liabilities – particularly in rural Alberta.”

Sonya Savage, Minister of Energy

“By staying on top of the orphaned well inventory, we’re helping to ensure a sustainable energy industry in Alberta. The Orphan Well Association continues to increase our efficiencies while also increasing the number of sites we are addressing. This loan will help us further these efforts while helping Alberta’s service sector and reducing the impact on affected landowners.”

Lars De Pauw, executive director, Orphan Well Association

Government and the OWA are currently finalizing specific loan terms and conditions, including establishing a repayment schedule. Both parties have agreed that this investment will be completed before April 1, 2021.

The Blueprint for Jobs is a plan to bring jobs and investment back to Alberta and restore the province’s position as the best place in the country to live, work, start a business, and raise a family. The Government of Alberta is focused on creating jobs, growing the economy and getting Alberta back to work.

Quick facts

  • The loan extension will enable the OWA to:
  • decommission approximately 1,000 wells
  • start more than 1,000 environmental site assessments for reclamation
  • The Alberta government previously provided the OWA with a $235 million interest-free loan. The OWA began repaying the loan in 2019, using money received from industry through the annual Orphan Fund Levy.
  • In the coming weeks, government will be introducing a full suite of products, covering the entire lifecycle of wells from start to finish.

About the Orphan Well Association

The Orphan Well Association is an independent non-profit organization that operates under the delegated legal authority of the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER). The mandate of the OWA is to safely decommission orphan oil and gas wells, pipelines and production facilities, and restore the land as close to its original state as possible. Funding for the OWA comes primarily from the upstream oil and gas industry, through annual levies administered by the AER.

Key Terms

Inactive well: A well that has not been used for production, injection, or disposal for a specified amount of time – six months for high-risk wells, or 12 months for medium- and low- risk wells.

Orphan: A well, pipeline, or facility that does not have any legally responsible and/or financially able party to conduct abandonment and reclamation responsibilities.

Abandoned well: A well that is no longer needed to support oil and gas development and is permanently plugged, cut and capped according to Alberta Energy Regulator requirements.

Reclamation: The process of returning the site, as close as possible, to a state that’s equivalent to before it was disturbed. Companies are responsible for reclamation liability for 25 years, after which the liability reverts to the Crown.

After 15 years as a TV reporter with Global and CBC and as news director of RDTV in Red Deer, Duane set out on his own 2008 as a visual storyteller. During this period, he became fascinated with a burgeoning online world and how it could better serve local communities. This fascination led to Todayville, launched in 2016.

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Alberta

Sylvan Lake high school football coach fired for criticizing gender ideology sends legal letter to school board

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From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

The letter on behalf of Alberta high school volunteer football coach Taylor ‘Teej’ Johannesson mentions ‘workplace harassment’ while demanding his job back.

A Sylvan Lake high school football coach who was fired for sharing his views opposing transgender ideology on social media in a video discussing his Christian faith sent a legal demand to his former school board demanding he get his job back.

H.J. Cody High School volunteer coach Taylor “Teej” Johannesson, as reported by LifeSiteNews, earlier this month was fired by his school’s principal because he spoke out against gender-confused youth who “take their hatred of Christians” to another level by committing violent acts against them.

School principal Alex Lambert fired Teej, as he is known, as a result of a TikTok video in which he speaks out against radical gender ideology and the dangers it brings.

In a recent update involving his case, local media with knowledge of Johannesson’s issues with the principal at H.J. Cody High School in Sylvan Lake, Alberta, confirmed a legal demand letter was sent to the school.

The letter reads, “From his perspective, this opposition is consistent with the Alberta government’s position and legislation prohibiting prescribing prescription hormones to minors and providing care to them that involves transition surgeries.”

In the letter, the school board’s “workplace harassment” procedure is mentioned, stating, “Any act of workplace harassment or workplace violence shall be considered unacceptable conduct whether that conduct occurs at work, on Division grounds, or at division-sponsored activities.”

The legal demand letter, which was sent to school officials last week, reads, “Given that Mr. Johannesson’s expression in the TikTok Video was not connected to his volunteer work, the principal and the division have no authority to regulate his speech and punish him by the Termination decision, which is ultra vires (“beyond the powers.)”

Johannesson has said, in speaking with local media, that his being back at work at the school as a volunteer coach has meaning: “It’s about trying to create some change within the school system.”

He noted how, for “too long,” a certain “political view, one ideology, has taken hold in the school system.”

Johannesson has contacted Alberta’s Chief of Staff for the Minister of Education about his firing and was told that there is a board meeting taking place over the demand letter.

According to Teej, Lambert used his TikTok video as an excuse to get rid of someone in the school with conservative political views and who is against her goal to place “safe space stickers” all over the school.

Teej has been in trouble before with the school administration. About three years ago, he was called in to see school officials for posting on Twitter a biological fact that “Boys have a penis. Girls have a vagina.”

Alberta’s Conservative government under Premier Danielle Smith has in place a new policy protecting female athletes from gender-confused men that has taken effect across the province.

As LifeSiteNews previously reported, the Government of Alberta is currently fighting a court order that is blocking the province’s newly passed ban on transgender surgeries and drugs for children.

Alberta also plans to ban books with sexually explicit as well as pornographic material, many of which contain LGBT and even pedophilic content, from all school libraries.

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Alberta

Parents group blasts Alberta government for weakening sexually explicit school book ban

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From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

The revised rules no longer place restrictions on written descriptions of sexual content.

Some parental rights advocates have taken issue with the Conservative government of Alberta’s recent updates to a ban on sexually explicit as well as pornographic material from all school libraries, saying the new rules water down the old ones as they now allow for descriptions of extreme and graphic sexual acts in written form.

As reported by LifeSiteNews last week, Alberta Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides of the ruling United Conservative Party (UCP) released revised rules outlining the province’s ban on sexually explicit content in school libraries.

The original ban included all forms of sexually explicit as well as pornographic material. However, after a large public school board alleged the ban applied to classic books, the government changed the rules, removing a clause for written sexual content that has some parental rights groups up in arms.

Tanya Gaw, founder of the conservative-leaning Action4Canada, noted to media that while she is happy with Premier Danielle Smith for the original book ban, she has deep concerns with the revised rules.

“We are very concerned about the decision that no longer places restrictions on written descriptions of those acts, which is problematic,” she said in an interview with The Epoch Times.

Gaw noted how kids from kindergarten to grade 12 should “never” be “exposed to graphic written details of sex acts: incest, molestation, masturbation, sexual assaults, and profane vulgar language.”

According to John Hilton-O’Brien, who serves as the executive director of Parents for Choice in Education, the new rule changes regarding written depictions “still shifts the burden onto parents to clean up what should never have been purchased in the first place.”

He did say, however, that the new “Ministerial Order finally makes catalogs public, and what we see there is troubling.”

Alberta’s revised rules state that all school library books must not contain “explicit visual depictions of a sexual act.” To make it clear, the standards in detail go over the types of images that are banned due to their explicit pornographic nature.

As reported by LifeSiteNews in May, Smith’s UCP government went ahead with plans to ban books with sexually explicit as well as pornographic material, many of which contain LGBT and even pedophilic content, from all school libraries.

The ban was to take effect on October 1.

The UCP’s crackdown on sexual content in school libraries comes after several severely sexually explicit graphic novels were found in school libraries in Calgary and Edmonton.

The pro-LGBT books in question at multiple school locations are Gender Queer, a graphic novel by Maia Kobabe; Flamer, a graphic novel by Mike Curato; Blankets, a graphic novel by Craig Thompson; and Fun Home, a graphic novel by Alison Bechdel.

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