The Town of Hanna has a lot of questions about Alberta Government plans to speed up the closure of the Sheerness coal mine and power generating station southeast of the town.![]()
Mayor Chris Warwick told 99.5 Drum FM they have set up a task force to look into the economic impact of closing the two operations years ahead of schedule.
"The one nice thing about this is it got us thinking about it, being prepared and being proactive on it instead of reactive," said Warwick. "We've been trying to see if we can get some kind of dollars from the government to do a study and we're just kind of waiting back to hear that."
"If everything shuts down, we're losing 440 employees, that's potentially 440 residents," he noted. "That's more than ten per cent of our population, so the impact is huge."
The government has pledged to use part of the proceeds from an expected carbon tax to help retrain people losing their jobs, but Warwick isn't certain the people in charge know just how big a job it's going to be.
"We're not looking for a payout, we don't want them to just give us a bunch of money and say sorry," he explained. "We'd rather see them help us try to attract some other kind of business or manufacturing that would help fill that void."
As reported earlier on 99.5 Drum FM, the NDP government wants to phase out almost all coal fired power generation in Alberta, including Sheerness, by 2030 and replace it with renewable electricity like wind or solar, or natural gas fired plants.