I started reading about Alberta’s coal settlements through an angry social media post that mixed real numbers with fury. My instinct was to dismiss it. Then I started checking the numbers myself, and the figures are real. The policy reversals happened exactly as described. What surprised me was how the whole thing had been allowed to unfold, settlement after settlement, almost entirely out of public view, while the people footing the bill found out from press releases issued in Melbourne rather than from their own government in Edmonton.
In 1976, under Progressive Conservative premier Peter Lougheed, Alberta introduced a coal policy that placed environmental protections across the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains. The policy divided the land into categories, and the most sensitive terrain, the headwaters that feed rivers relied on by ranchers, First Nations, and downstream cities, was effectively placed off limits to open-pit coal mining. It wasn’t perfect, but it gave the region expectations, and companies knew where they stood.
That expectation broke in 2020 when the United Conservative Party government, led by Jason Kenney, rescinded the 1976 policy, opening the door to new coal exploration and mining leases. There was no broad public consultation before the change. Coal companies, several of them Australian, moved quickly to stake claims and begin exploratory work, encouraged by a government that had just signalled the eastern slopes were open for business.
Albertan ranchers who depend on clean water for their cattle, environmental groups, Indigenous communities with treaty and traditional ties to the land, and even musicians pushed back hard against a giveaway of mountain terrain to foreign mining interests. The public pressure was strong enough that the government backed down, first temporarily reinstating the old policy in 2021, then confirming that decision in 2022 after a period of public consultation. A handful of so-called advanced projects were still allowed to proceed through regulatory review, but the broader moratorium on new coal development in the protected zones was back in place.
For a government that prides itself on certainty for investors, this was about as uncertain as policy gets. Companies that had bought into the 2020 opening now found themselves locked out again, and they were furious about it.
In 2023, a group of coal companies, most of them Australian-owned, filed lawsuits against the Alberta government seeking billions in damages. The companies argued that the province’s about-face amounted to a de facto expropriation of assets they legitimately acquired under the rules Alberta itself had set in 2020. Among the plaintiffs were Montem Resources, later renamed Evolve Power, Atrum Coal, Valory Resources through its subsidiary Black Eagle Mining, Cabin Ridge Holdings, and later Northback Holdings.
Rather than let these claims play out in open court, Alberta chose to settle. In early 2025, the province lifted its coal exploration moratorium once again, a move Premier Danielle Smith defended publicly as a way to reduce the province’s exposure to the lawsuits. She told a town hall audience in Fort Macleod that doing nothing risked losing the cases outright and paying out the fifteen billion dollars sought. Critics argued the government was managing its own mess quietly rather than defending the policy it claimed to believe in.
The settlements that followed were staggering given how little some of these companies had actually invested. Atrum Coal, whose own court filings showed sunk costs of roughly forty-six million dollars, walked away with a settlement worth about a hundred and forty-three million. Montem Resources, by then rebranded as Evolve Power, had spent roughly fifteen million dollars developing its Crowsnest Pass coal properties since 2014. Its settlement, made public in October 2025, came to ninety-five million dollars, more than six times what the company had put into the ground. Nigel Bankes, a respected resource law specialist at the University of Calgary, has said that the public deserves to know why the Crown agreed to settlements so far beyond the companies’ actual costs.
Combined, the two settlements brought Alberta’s coal payout total to nearly two hundred and forty million dollars, with claims from Cabin Ridge Holdings and Northback Holdings still unresolved.
One of the more uncomfortable details in the Montem settlement is where a slice of the money ended up. Roughly a third of the ninety-five million dollar payout, about thirty-five million dollars, is destined for an investment firm based in Melbourne called Wahl Citadel. This firm never mined a single tonne of coal in Alberta. What it did was finance Montem’s lawsuit against the province, a practice known as litigation funding.
Under the arrangement, Wahl Citadel loaned Montem several million Australian dollars to cover legal costs. Because it succeeded, Wahl Citadel stands to collect roughly six times its original investment, paid entirely out of Alberta taxpayer money. David Luff, a former assistant deputy minister of energy who helped write the original 1976 policy, has called it despicable that a foreign investment firm and its shareholders are profiting so heavily from a dispute the government itself created through its own policy reversals.
Another thread in this story deserves to be named plainly, even if the connection is circumstantial. The law firm Bennett Jones has represented much of the coal industry’s legal work against the Alberta government throughout this saga. Jason Kenney now works as a senior policy adviser at Bennett Jones. To be fair to Kenney, he has stated publicly that his appointment was reviewed and cleared by Alberta’s ethics commissioner, and he has said he will not lobby the provincial government or its agencies on behalf of the firm’s clients. There is no evidence he has personally profited from these settlements. Still, the premier who created the policy chaos now sits inside the same firm representing companies that profited from it.
The coal settlements are the most dramatic example of a broader pattern that has drawn criticism of the Smith government’s fiscal management. Alberta recorded record government revenue in the most recent fiscal year and still posted a substantial budget deficit. Separately, a survey conducted by Rural Municipalities of Alberta found that oil and gas companies owed hundreds of millions of dollars in unpaid municipal property taxes as of the end of 2024, a debt that has continued to grow with limited enforcement pressure from the province. Around the same time, the government committed millions of dollars to a public campaign defending its energy policies, spending that critics argue would have been better directed toward schools, healthcare, or the very municipalities struggling to collect what they are owed.
Taken together, they paint a picture of a government more attentive to the industry, particularly foreign industry, than to the everyday services Albertans rely on. Opposition critics have pointed out that the money spent settling coal lawsuits alone could have gone a long way toward addressing class sizes, staffing shortages, and working conditions during recent labour disputes involving Alberta teachers.
This is actually about whether a government can make sweeping policy decisions, and then quietly settle the financial fallout without being required to explain its reasoning. That is the pattern Albertans are being asked to accept, and it is worth resisting the urge to accept it because the details are complicated.
If there is a lesson here for the rest of Canada, it’s that public land and public money need public accountability attached to them at every stage. Albertans concerned about this can start by paying closer attention to how the Alberta Energy Regulator handles coal applications going forward. They can also press their MLAs directly for a full public accounting of the Cabin Ridge and Northback settlements before those deals are finalized behind closed doors. Additionally, they can support the independent journalists and legal scholars who have done the hard work of tracking these numbers down.
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