A common Alberta mantra is that the province runs on oil and gas. But it wouldn’t get very far without copper either, and the market value of the metal as scrap drives a growing and costly criminal trend. Photo by iStock
Greedy grinches in Forestburg forced the cancellation of a nostalgic shopping excursion by train to a market called Jolly Jingles, the legislature heard this month.
By digging their criminal claws into a train’s copper wiring, thieves denied shoppers a 1950s-era passenger train experience across the central Alberta prairie parkland landscape to the Christmas market in Rosalind.
Jolly Jingles went ahead as planned on Nov. 15. But the trip offered by Battle River Train Excursions back and forth through Heisler did not.
Grinch comparisons aside, thefts of copper and other metals are a serious and costly criminal enterprise. And they’re a trend that the Alberta government continues to try to curtail, said the UCP’s Jacqueline Lovely.
“This type of story has become all too common, not only in my constituency but across Alberta,” said Lovely, who represents the riding of Camrose.
“Thieves will steal copper and other precious metals wherever they can be found, quickly reselling them to unscrupulous buyers who won’t question where they came from.”
Perhaps through an increasingly robust illegal market, a surge in copper theft in Alberta suggests criminals are circumventing a law that came into force five and a half years ago. The Scrap Metal Dealers and Recyclers Identification Act requires that legitimate buyers record sellers’ ID.
It was strengthened through amendments this year to make it constitutional while closing a business-to-business loophole. Businesses selling scrap metal, legit or otherwise, hadn’t had to provide identification before the amendments.
Statistics that fully measure the copper theft problem aren’t available, but a good indicator comes from the communications provider Telus. The company saw a 58 per cent increase in copper theft in 2024 over the previous year in Alberta alone, it said in media reports.
Although valuable, stolen copper itself represents losses typically dwarfed by damages and other impacts. Reportage from across the province explains that the thefts jeopardize infrastructure, and pose threats to the environment and public safety.
Cables are cut and stolen, wires are stripped from lighting and power infrastructure, and generators are stolen or damaged.
Effects ripple through the rest of the economy, through lost revenue, service outages and charges, insurance premium increases, construction delays and costs for cleaning up environmental hazards.
By one published RCMP estimate, losses exceed $10-million per year in Alberta due to copper theft, including property damage. In October 2024, a single break-in at a commercial site in Nisku caused more than $700,000 in property damage.
Testimony from a year ago before the Senate Committee on Transport found that two unnamed companies alone faced damages totalling $8.5-million in Alberta in just over a year, a tally from 866 individual thefts.
In the Forestburg case, thieves stripped copper wiring and conduit from a power generator to the caboose and a passenger car. “Without this power we are unable to provide heat, light and sound in these cars,” a notice from the Friends of the Battle River Railway says.
Thieves took the wiring from a generator motor and stole the starter, meaning the non-profit that runs six or more excursions a year has had to scramble for a long-term fix. Local reporting pegged damages at $30,000.
Concluded Lovely in her member statement: “To the Friends of the Battle River Rail and all other Albertans who have been the victims of theft and other crimes: we hear you. We hear that you’re fed up with the status quo, and we’re doing all that we can to stand up for you and your families because that is the right thing to do.”
Forestburg is a village about 150 kilometres by car northeast of Red Deer, part of a wider agricultural and former coal mining community whose power generating station now fires on natural gas.
The short-line Battle River Railway is a co-operative of farmers and other supporters created to keep rail services there alive through the purchase of a subline. CN had threatened closure of the 84-km stretch between Alliance and Camrose, so the co-op formed to buy the line and started using the rail to move cargo in 2010.
The co-op works with the Friends of Battle River Rail Society to offer the tourism side of the business, which started rolling in 2014 after the purchase of a 1952 Pullman passenger car.
