Once Upon an Oldman: Special Interest Politics and the Oldman River Dam

Description

329 pages
Contains Photos, Maps, Bibliography, Index
$85.00
ISBN 0-7748-0712-1
DDC 333.7'097123'4

Author

Publisher

Year

1999

Contributor

Reviewed by Ken Woollard

Kenneth Woollard is a crew supervisor with Transalta Utilities and an
avid outdoor recreationist.

Review

The decision taken by the Alberta government in the 1980s to provide
irrigation water to the perennially thirsty farmlands of southern
Alberta by damming the Oldman River may have controlled the river
physically, but it opened the figurative penstocks to a flood of
conflict, court challenges, and at one point an Oka-like standoff
between an RCMP tactical squad and armed Native opponents of the dam.

In this dense, well-researched, and thoroughly readable book, Jack
Glenn examines how this highly controversial project came about. Though
early chapters deal with the history, geology, biology, and archaeology
of the Oldman River valley, the book’s focus is on the decisionmaking
process—the interplay between the parties involved (governments,
supporters, opponents, and the media) and the motives behind their
actions. Though the author’s sympathy with the environmentalists (now
a pejorative term in his view) and the native Peigans is explicitly
dealt with in the preface, Once Upon an Oldman is not a polemic, but
rather a reasonably objective analysis of all the players; his account
of who they were and, most important, what they said and did is
supported by excellent and easily located endnotes arranged by chapter
and page number.

For Glenn, the Oldman River Dam is a metaphor for modern Canada, a
distillation of the major clashes of the last two decades (federal
versus provincial, Native versus white, urban versus rural,
environmental preservation versus environmental exploitation), all of
which were played out in the media as well as behind closed doors. His
book offers an excellent insight into the manner in which such
large-scale projects come about and is sobering in its demonstration of
how obscure and sometimes frivolous the motives behind vast decisions
can be.

Citation

Glenn, Jack., “Once Upon an Oldman: Special Interest Politics and the Oldman River Dam,” Canadian Book Review Annual Online, accessed November 22, 2024, https://cbra.library.utoronto.ca/items/show/2016.