The Cardinal Divide

by Stephen Legault

“Didn’t see you come in,” grumbled Cole, using a handful of paper napkins to mop the beer from his shirt.

  “You were in your own little world, as usual,” said Dusty, peering over his glasses at Cole. Martin Middlemarch stood behind his friend, looking thoughtful. “Little jumpy tonight, Blackwater?”

  Cole grimaced and nodded and dumped the sodden napkins on the bar while Martin and Dusty ordered beers. “Let me get you a refill, Cole,” said Dusty, taking Cole’s glass from his hand. Stevens was in his mid-forties, but looked much older. He was a short, round man with closely cropped hair that had silvered long ago. He wore a green golf shirt under a shiny leather jacket. He sported tiny rectangular glasses and had a habit of looking over them when he spoke to people, as though the spectacles were meant only for reading.

  “Rough week, Cole?” Martin asked.

  Cole recounted the story of Mary’s last day on the job.

  “You’ll be answering your own phone then for a while,” said Dusty Stevens sympathetically.

  “For a while. Until things pick up,” sighed Blackwater, sipping his pint.

  “What do the prospects look like for that happening?” Middle-march was younger than Stevens by a decade, taller by half a foot, and lighter by fifty pounds. He spoke in a mild, measured tone despite the din of the bar. He had the build of the long-distance runner that he was, and wore his sandy hair neatly parted to one side. He took a satisfying sip of his glass of beer. No pint glasses for Martin Middlemarch: he was here mostly for the company.

  Cole just shook his head. Martin looked at Dusty. “You could always take a J-O-B,” he said, sipping from his glass.

  Cole looked around the room and then at the two men who were standing beside him. He simply shrugged. The three men had known each other for a decade or more, but had become friends only since Cole Blackwater moved to Vancouver three years earlier. When Cole had been working for the Canadian Conservation Association, Dusty and Martin had worked in the Vancouver office of Greenpeace. Dusty’s specialty was the media. He had been employed as a communications officer in the provincial NDP government in the early 1990s, and took the post with Greenpeace after Glen Clark became premier.

  Martin Middlemarch was a campaigner, who had come to Greenpeace by way of the social justice movement. They had recruited Cole and the CCA to help them stop a US nuclear submarine from docking at the Canadian Forces Base at Esquimalt, just outside of Victoria. For Cole and the CCA it was tit-for-tat: Greenpeace would help them with the federal Endangered Species Act.

  Cole had used his contacts with sympathetic Members of Parliament to create a lengthy and acrimonious debate in the House of Commons over Canada’s tacit support of nuclear weapons on the high seas while Greenpeace activists in rubber Zodiac boats got between the submarine and the port. After that, whenever Cole visited Vancouver for work he had been a welcome guest at the Greenpeace office, and the three men drank beer and swapped stories in the pubs and bars along Commercial Drive.

  But around the time that Cole was being ushered out of Ottawa, both Dusty and Martin had been lured away from Greenpeace to work for industry-supported consulting firms. Dusty and Martin couldn’t say no to the opportunity to work inside the corporations, media, and government relations firms they’d been fighting. The pay was too good and the jobs secure, and they were able to justify their moves by saying that they could now change the system from within. Cole Blackwater didn’t buy it.

  “Worse things in the world, Cole,” said Dusty, his eyes fixed on Cole over his glasses. “We can’t all be holy crusaders. Some of us have to roll up our sleeves up and try to work from inside the belly of the beast to change things. We don’t get the spotlight, we don’t get any glory. We just slog away, trying to change things one step at a time.”

  Cole drank deeply from his glass, his shaggy curls dropping in front of his eyes.

  “Did you happen to get a call from Wild Rose?” asked Martin.

  Cole looked up. “Yeah.”

  “Good. What did you think?”

  “Jeremy Moon just left a message.”

  “Did you call him back, Cole?” asked Martin.

  “Not yet.”

  “Not yet,” echoed Dusty Stevens. “It’s a good job, Cole. It starts at like 70K a year.”

  Cole shrugged again.

  “I know, I know. It’s not about the money. It’s about changing the world. Well, there are more ways than one to change the world, sonny boy. You think it’s easy sitting in a room full of corporate suits and telling them that they are doing things wrong, and trying to convince them that what’s good for the earth is good for business too?”

  Cole looked around the bar, appraising recent entrants.

  “Look,” Stevens said, peering over his glasses. “If real change is going to happen in this world, someone is going to have to show these corporations how to do things differently. And who do you think they are going to listen to? You? Out there waving your arms in the air and shouting your fucking head off? Do you think they’re going to listen to the VW-driving hippies protesting the WTO and the World Bank and the IMF? Jesus, Cole. They aren’t going to listen to those people.”

  Martin cleared his throat. “Cole, it’s like this: you and your clients are out in the public focusing in on these businesses that Dusty and I work for. So what do they do? Well, they do what every good cowboy would do. They circle their wagons, hunker down, and shoot back. But eventually somebody has to show these people how to drive those wagons through a little opening that you and your folks leave for them so that they can save face, and save some of the natural world that we three all believe in.”

  “Take Wild Rose for example,” said Dusty, ordering another round from the boy behind the bar. “You should call them. We all know Jeremy. He’s good people. They’ve got a bunch of new clients, mostly mining and coal bed methane, and they’re looking for someone who knows the biz. You could help them. You could hold their feet to the fire. Make sure they do things right. Help them talk to the locals. Make sure they consult with Aboriginal communities. That’s right up your alley, Cole. “

  “Cole, there’s more than one way to save the world.”

  Cole was watching a young woman stand up and brush something from her jeans. He shook his head.

  “What, Cole. Not pure enough for you?”

  Cole looked at Dusty and smiled.

  “We can’t all be white knights, Cole,” he said again.

  Cole sluiced the beer in his glass and focused on the golden suds. “I really think you guys believe this bullshit you’re spouting,” he finally said with only a trace of a smile. “I do. But I think those corporations that you’re working for are just using you to show them how to drive their wagons through whatever hole they can find. Oh, there’s lots of talk about sustainability, and giving back to communities and all, but at the end of the day, little is changing in a real, meaningful way. And the reason is that guys like you two aren’t able to push hard enough from the inside, and guys like me can’t get any traction to push from the outside as long as the companies can point to guys like you and say, look, we’ve got respected environmentalists on staff showing us the way.”

  Dusty Stevens opened his mouth to talk but Cole silenced him with a grimace.

  “Save it, Dusty,” he said. “I’ll call Jeremy, but I’m telling you right now, I’d rather work for the little Aboriginal band or the community of ranchers that the coal bed methane or mining company is going to screw over than try to make sure Wild Rose uses the world ‘sustainability’ enough times in the Environmental Assessment.”

  The three men stood awkwardly a moment. Then Martin said earnestly, “We’ve got to try, Cole.”

  “I know,” said Cole. “God, don’t I know it? And I don’t blame you guys, really. Maybe I’m just jealous.”

  “Look, Cole,” said Stevens, “we do what we can. Hell, if it wasn’t Marty and me doing this, some bastard who comes straight out of the Forest Products Association would be doing i
t.”

  “Is that what you tell yourself so you can sleep at night?” asked Cole.

  “No, that’s the way it is,” said Stevens.

  “What about Sarah?” asked Middlemarch more seriously. “You’ve got to think of her.”

  Cole Blackwater sighed and his shoulders slouched noticeably. “There is that,” he admitted.

  “Look on the bright side,” said Martin, draining his glass and setting it on the bar. “There is no shortage of work in this biz, only a shortage of work as a holy crusader. Sooner or later even the great Cole Blackwater will have to cozy up to a corporate client.”

  “Or the fucking Liberal government,” grinned Stevens.

  That set the three of them laughing. Finally, his face still pressed into a grin, Blackwater said, “I’ve no illusions, boys. My white knight days are long passed. But today marks the beginning of a new era, though which era I’m not quite certain.”

  The bartender set up a new round of ale for Dusty and Cole, with Martin opting for a soda water, explaining that he had a race on Sunday. The three men hoisted their glasses.

  “To the good fight,” said Martin. “May there always be one!”

  “For the sake of my mortgage, let there always be lost souls to wage them,” agreed Dusty Stevens.

  Cole Blackwater drank deeply from his pint, but said nothing. He was thinking about the slip of paper stuck in his pocket with the phone number of one lost soul he needed to telephone.

  It was just after ten o’clock when Cole stepped out of the elevator and slouched to his office door. He found his keys and tried in vain to poke them in the lock. Finally the keys found their mark, the tumblers turned, and he pushed the door open, stumbled, and groped for the light.

  He flopped onto Mary’s chair, his head spinning. From his littered pocket he extracted the phone number and focused, then snatched the receiver from its cradle and punched in the numbers.

  It rang. Rang again. Rang again. He was preparing his message in his head when a female voice answered: “Hello.”

  “I’m looking for Peggy McSorlie,” said Cole.

  “This is she.”

  “It’s Cole Blackwater calling, Peggy.”

  Her voice was just as Cole Blackwater remembered it. They had met face to face only once, on a lobbying trip she had made to Ottawa, but they had talked dozens of times on the telephone. He knew her phone voice far better than he knew her in person. In a big country you developed that sort of relationship – the conference call friendship, he called it.

  “Hi, Cole, thanks for calling. I’ve just got the boys home from basketball. They’re having a snack. I can chat now.”

  “I’m sorry to call so late,” he said.

  “It’s fine. Like I said, it’s good timing. He heard her shuffling something, likely groceries or bags of sweaty teenage laundry.

  “What was it that you thought I might be able to help with?”

  “Where to start?”

  “The Reader’s Digest version is fine for now,” he said.

  “Well, it’s the same old thing, really.” Peggy McSorlie spoke in an even-toned voice that Blackwater figured she must have perfected for dealing with mining executives, Parks officials, and the media. “You remember a few years ago, even before the whole Jasper thing that you and I worked on together, there were plans for an open-pit mine south of the town of Oracle, along the eastern boundary of Jasper?”

  “I remember it,” answered Blackwater. “Some sort of coal operation on the north side of Cardinal Divide.”

  “That’s right, metallurgical coal, the stuff they use to make steel. Well, that mine didn’t play out. The market was in the sewer, and the company who owned the operation couldn’t get their act together and wrote a rotten environmental assessment. They forgot really to make any mention of the mine’s impact on any of the wildlife in the area.”

  “Convenient,” said Blackwater.

  “Yup, convenient. They likely thought that the assessment would just sail through with a rubber stamp from the province. You know, the good old boys in Edmonton would make some sounds about protecting wildlife and sustaining the local economy and the mine would be off to the races. But it didn’t happen like that.”

  “It got bumped to the feds, as I recall.”

  “Right. I wasn’t doing this sort of thing then. I was still doing contract work for Jasper. But some concerned locals made the argument that the mine would impact the National Park. The folks at Parks Canada agreed and that got the Federal Environmental Assessment Office involved. The EcoDefence Fund threatened to sue the federal government, saying that because the mine would come within a few kilometres of Jasper and would destroy fish habitat and impact endangered species, that both Environment Canada and Fisheries and Oceans had obligations to protect.”

  “Did they win the suit?”

  “It never went to court. But the feds did get involved, and the whole thing went to a hearing, and that’s where the coal company’s assessment basically fell apart. It wasn’t even so much that they were planning on dumping mine waste in streams full of bull trout and harlequin ducks, but that their economic arguments were pretty weak. Full of holes, really.”

  “Ducks, eh?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Harlequin ducks?”

  “Yeah, there are nesting sites on the streams they want to use as a dumping ground for waste rock.”

  “Who found the nesting sites?”

  Peggy McSorlie laughed. “Me, of course. On my days off, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “But listen, Cole, the ducks weren’t the point. That proposal wasn’t worth the paper it was written on. And I might add that it was written on a lot of paper. The thing was a thousand pages long! I could hardly lift it – a thousand pages of bull crap. Shameful. Written by a former Park Superintendent turned environmental consultant, no less. It was a disgrace. He should have known better. Or if he did, he chose to look the other way.

  Lot of that going around, thought Cole Blackwater.

  “Anyway, the review board sent the company back to the drawing board. They didn’t say no – ”

  “They never do in Alberta.”

  “No, they never do, but it was enough to delay the project, and the company ended up selling out.”

  “Not the end of the story,” said Cole.

  “Nope. Not end of story. A big Toronto-based company bought up the whole operation a year ago, including the two mines that currently operate in the region and the rights to coal, maybe even coal bed methane in the area. It’s hard to say with coal bed methane. Anyway, this all happened in the last year. Now they’ve brought in a new hotshot area manager named Mike Barnes and he’s making the rounds saying the company is going to bring forward a new proposal for a mine. They’re dancing in the street in Oracle.”

  Cole was silent. When it came to conservation, those on the side of nature had to win every time. Those on the side of reckless exploitation needed to win only once.

  “What’s different this time?” asked Cole.

  “Well, we’re not sure yet. We suspect two things. First, they likely read the report by the Environmental Assessment Agency and plugged up some of the holes in their report. And second, we understand that they might be taking a new tack this time around.”

  “What tack would that be?”

  “Breaking the project up into little pieces and doing mini-assessments on each piece so it doesn’t trigger a full environmental review panel hearing, where they’re sure to lose.”

  “That’s illegal.”

  “Maybe so, but lots of folks get away with it. They just say that they’re building an exploratory road, or digging a test pit, or some such baloney. Before you know it you’ve got a full-scale operation on your hands.”

  “So, what do you need me for?”

  “We need you to help us stop it. We need you to help us work up a strategy to kill this thing dead so it stays dead. Once and for all.”

>   “What’s the timing on this?

  “Not much time, as usual.”

  “As usual,” he muttered.

  “Barnes came by the house last week and told me they plan on bringing forward a preliminary proposal for the community to comment on in about a month. Then, based on the feedback from the locals, they’ll redraft the environmental assessment and submit it to the province by the end of June.”

  “Less than two months from now.”

  “Don’t I know it!”

  “Not much time. Who’s doing the assessment?”

  “I can’t remember the name, isn’t that funny?” she laughed. “It’s someone I’ve never heard of before. From Calgary. Wild Rose or some flower name like that.”

  Cole sighed. “I know them. I think they’re new, but they have some good people working with them.” Cole mentally crossed Wild Rose Consulting off his list of two options to put food on the table this month.

  “Cole, that’s why we need you.”

  “Right,” he said, sounding cynical.

  “No, really, Cole. Look, I know this is sort of, well, beneath you right now. I’m sure you’ve got all sorts of jobs for the big groups, but this is important.”

  Cole Blackwater was silent. He felt like laughing, sitting in Mary’s empty chair, or maybe weeping. “Well,” he finally said, “you’re right to think you’re not going to win this by challenging the environmental assessment, though that’ll be part of the strategy we might use to delay things. We’ll likely have to put together a strategy that takes this to the public and makes them think about those ducks, buried under all that overburden.”

  Peggy laughed. “Sounds like you’re interested. I heard you say we twice.”

  Cole silently cursed his eagerness. Desperate to earn enough money to pay the rent on his office and his home, and to take care of Sarah. And his eagerness to put the screws to the jokers who wanted to cut a slice out of some of the greatest country in Canada. It weakened his negotiation power. But then he thought of something his old friend Sid Marty once wrote: “Hunger makes the hunter.”

  Finally he said, “Yeah, I’m interested. It would mean having to drop a few things here in Vancouver to take the job.”