Is it coincidence that Alberta Minister of Environment Rob Renner announced the members of the province’s environmental monitoring panel on the same day the Joint Review Panel gave the (conditional) thumbs up to TOTAL’s Joslyn North Mine Project?

I doubt it. The public relations handlers in the government’s Public Affairs Bureau are too sharp for that. Renner and his communications army had to know that, in the wake of unanimous criticism of Alberta’s management of the oil sands to date, there will be vocal opposition to Joslyn’s approval. Renner wanted to soften the blow by announcing the names of the saviours tapped to revamp Alberta’s lacklustre environmental monitoring program in the oil sands region.

I doubt, however, that the list is going to restore the public’s faith in the Alberta government’s commitment to developing a “world-class” monitoring program that can accurately and transparently quantify the environmental and human impacts of the oil sands. Neither of the panel’s co-chairs are scientists, and one of them – Hal Kvisle – is a career oil executive and former head of TransCanada Corp, which is trying to construct a controversial, $7 billion pipeline to the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Now, it’s not that corporate leaders can’t set aside their personal biases and profession agendas and get things done. After all, Robert Page, TransAlta's Vice President of Sustainable Development, has a long history of chairing panels and committees that have made strong, science-based recommendations on controversial issues. Page chaired the Banff-Bow Valley Study Task Force in the early 1990s, which came up with dozens of recommendations to improve the management of a beleaguered Banff National Park. More recently, he headed the National Roundtable on the Environment and Economy, which just recommended that the Harper government stop dragging its feet and implement a national cap-and-trade system that sets a price on carbon. Clearly he’s not afraid of telling it like it is.

I’m not so sure about Kvisle, however, in part because of an interview he gave The Globe and Mail just before he left TransCanada. Parroting the same rhetoric that Dr. David Schindler’s research has since debunked, Kvisle (somewhat patronizingly) said, “If you really know the situation in northeast Alberta, you’d appreciate hydrocarbons have been leaking into the Athabasca River as long as the oil sands have been there, and as long as the river has been cutting through them.” Then he suggested that the boreal forest that environmentalists “have so much praise for" is actually "quite an insignificant forest in that part of the world.”

Insignificant? Hmmm.

There are scientists on the panel, of course, and good ones, but there seems to be an unnecessary number of oil industry hacks. Why, for instance, does the obstructionist Canadian Association of Petroleum Producer’s need a representative on a committee tasked with setting up a system that will monitor its members’ impacts? Especially when neither the environmental community—a rep from the Pembina Institute would have been a good choice—nor First Nations were given a seat.

The panel may well develop an excellent plan for a world-class monitoring system, but once again the optics aren’t great for the Alberta government, which has always favoured allowing industry to regulate itself. What, I wonder, are they so afraid of?