The Alberta government must produce thousands of documents on its attempts to encourage coal mining in the Rocky Mountains after a judge threw out a bid to block their release.

In denying the government’s request for a judicial review into an order to provide the documents, Justice Kent Teskey warned the province that courts take a dim view of delay being used to neuter public attempts to understand how important decisions are made.

“The requesting parties have been practically denied access to the information they are entitled to at law and this court will not abet this conduct through the availability of judicial review,” he wrote in a judgment released Friday.

“If public bodies are unwilling or unable to comply with their timely obligations under (freedom of information law), they should expect that courts may apply a high level of scrutiny on the availability of judicial review.”

The judgment relates to an attempt by a group of southern Alberta ranchers to understand why the United Conservative Party government chose in 2020 to rescind a decades-old policy that had blocked open-pit coal development from the beloved landscapes of the southern foothills and Rockies.