Will Danielle Smith Use Albertans’ Pensions to Bail Out Big Oil?

Is it just me, or are other Albertans unnerved by how soon after Alberta Premier Danielle Smith publicly mused about how hard it is for the United Conservative Party to get its paws on our Canada Pension Plan funds, her energy minister was ruminating about how Alberta’s profitable oil industry is going to need our help to clean up the messes it’s made?

Is there a line connecting those dots?

Last week Smith suggested that, as the Canadian Press put it, “if Ottawa comes back this fall with a lowball estimate on Alberta’s share of the Canada Pension Plan, hard questions will have to be asked about the next steps.”

What next steps? a reasonable person would ask. Albertans have been making it abundantly clear in survey after survey, letter after letter and social media post after social media post that they want the UCP government to keep its hands off the CPP. The premier understands this.

You can read her comment as a threat, I suppose, or as an effort, better late than never, to manage the expectations of the UCP’s MAGA-fied base whose members have been persuaded that Alberta can be turned into an oil industry Valhalla by dipping into the 53 per cent of the CPP fund that Alberta preposterously argues it should be given if it pulls out of the plan.

If Ottawa comes back with a more believable number, Smith complained, “we wouldn’t be able to reduce your premiums, and we wouldn’t be able to increase your benefits.”

She then asked, almost poetically: “Is the juice worth the squeeze?”

Meanwhile, on Sunday, Energy Minister Brian Jean — who really ought to be known as the oil and gas minister, given the UCP’s well-known attitudes about renewable energy — was doing some public musing of his own about how the oil and gas industry, the mighty engine of Canada’s economy, couldn’t really afford to pay its cleanup obligations or its taxes.

Oil and gas companies operating in rural Alberta already owe the province’s towns and villages something in excess of $250 million in unpaid property taxes.

As another Canadian Press story put it, “Jean said industry might need help from public finances to live up to its legal obligations, as well as lower municipal tax burdens and a lighter regulatory approach.”

“We need to find new ways to do liability financing, and we need to change the approach on municipal taxes,” Jean said, adding, just as poetically as Smith, “I don’t like sticks. I like carrots.”

You’d almost think they were using the same cliché-o-metre! Of course, this being Alberta politics, they probably are.

Jean said he supports the principle of polluter pays. But he also thinks the polluter should be paid to pay for its polluting. And guess who’s going to get to pay!

“It’s important to me to make certain industry is responsible for its own messes,” he told the Canadian Press. “To stimulate activities that are necessary to protect Albertans, we might have to do some investment,” he added, immediately contradicting himself.

He’s thinking about how to do that investment.

I think we all know how this is going to end up. The UCP will never ask the oil industry to pay its financial cleanup obligations, which are estimated to be something like $260 billion.

So Jean’s big idea could turn out to be even more expensive than last year’s outrageous RStar scam proposal, the plan to give multibillion-dollar oil and gas corporations a huge royalty holiday as an incentive to clean up messes they’re already legally obligated to pay to clean up. It already had the potential to be the largest daylight robbery in Canadian history!

One way or another, it sure looks like Alberta taxpayers are going to be told they have no choice but to fork over that staggering sum.

But wait; someone is bound to say sooner or later that there’s a painless way we can do this! A way to have our cake and eat it too, if you like.

Cast your mind back to Smith’s plan to turn our pensions into a huge slush fund to “invest” in the oil and gas industry.

Let’s mix some metaphors. Is the juice worth the squeeze? Do you like carrots better than sticks?

Well, just wait a little and the other shoe is bound to drop!