Monday, December 23

Environment

16Nov By Bob AscahNo Comments
Economic Data, Energy, Environment, Intergovernmental, Opinion/Research, Politics

Alberta 5, Ottawa 2- Re. Impact Assessment Act (Part 2)

Before turning to the dissenting opinion, it may be instructive to note some of the key points made by the Alberta Court of Appeal (ABCA) in their 10 May 2022 reference decision. The reference opinion may be found at CanLit. ABCA Majority In the majority ABCA opinion, considerable space was devoted to the history, purpose and scope, of the section 92A resource amendment (paras 74-83).  The majority contended Provincial governments should not be faulted for focussing their attention on matters important to their citizens. That includes not only the environment but also the economy. It is a false dichotomy to suggest that the two are mutually exclusive. Without a strong economy, a province’s ability to respond to the needs of its citizens, including meeting the challenges of climate chang...
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The Premier’s Renewables Moratorium Fails Her Constituents in Medicine Hat
3Sep By Bob AscahNo Comments
Employment, Energy, Environment, Intergovernmental, Politics

The Premier’s Renewables Moratorium Fails Her Constituents in Medicine Hat

Updated with related information 4 September 2023. This post is contributed by Dr. Ian Urquhart who is Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the University of Alberta. He is the author of Costly Fix: Power, Politics, and Nature in the Tar Sands published by University of Toronto Press in 2019.   Representing a local constituency – this duty distinguishes the responsibilities of a Canadian premier from their closest American counterparts, state governors. Premier Smith showed little concern for those responsibilities when she slapped an industry-wide seven month moratorium on approving new renewable energy projects. The billions of investment dollars put at risk by the moratorium includes hundreds of millions of dollars in solar for her constituency of Brooks-Medicine Hat.  DP Energy ...
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Ideas, Thoughts, Experiments- Alberta 2023 Conversation with thought leaders Episode 5- Ruben Nelson
21Aug By Bob AscahNo Comments
Energy, Environment, Government Finances, Politics, Society

Ideas, Thoughts, Experiments- Alberta 2023 Conversation with thought leaders Episode 5- Ruben Nelson

In the fifth of the Ideas, Thoughts, Experiments Alberta 2023 series, I talked with Alberta futurist Ruben Nelson the day after the 29 May provincial election results. In this wide-ranging discussion, Dr. Nelson speaks eloquently about the problems faced by our modern industrial-technological society and the notion of societies being “future takers.” And being a future taker means that you need to seriously understand the situation you're in and with a good deal of humility come to terms with the forces that are shaping your future whether you like it or not. And it seems to me that Alberta, in those term, Alberta is not a humble place (emphasis added). Role of Culture According to Nelson, Alberta is culturally very different than other provinces because Europeans did not arrive in any l...
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7Aug By Bob AscahNo Comments
Education, Environment, Health

Mandate letters- Education, Environment and Health

Accountability Mandate letters are incredibly valuable instruments giving interested members of the public and policy analysts a more informed view of what cabinet ministers and their senior officials are expected to do. The degree of transparency and accountability that goes with it give the Premier (and the public) a ready way to assess performance of ministers and their departments.  Whether the policy initiatives cited in these letters correspond to what the public thought they were going to get is, of course, another matter.  For instance, the Alberta Revenue Agency and the resurrection of the Alberta Pension Plan and Health Spending Accounts were non-issues during the campaign for the UCP at least. In this post, I explore the mandates for the ministries of Education, Environment and...
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The Big Two mandates….
2Aug By Bob AscahNo Comments
ATB, Budget, Credit Ratings, Energy, Environment, Fiscal History, Government Finances, Loan Losses, Politics

The Big Two mandates….

Over the past three weeks, Premier Smith has been busy issuing “mandate letters” to her cabinet colleagues.  These mandate letters are ministers’ marching orders and are an excellent guide of future legislative and regulatory initiatives by the newly minted Smith government. Given the importance of five ministries which represent the most important conduits of public spending (Health and Education) and strategic public policy and intergovernmental relations (Energy and Minerals, Environment and Protected Areas, and Treasury Board and Finance), this post, and a succeeding post, looks at the central elements of Smith’s agenda.  This post looks examines what I call the Big Two Mandates- Energy and Treasury Board and Finance. Energy and Minerals Smith’s letter to Jean, begins, excluding the b...
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The Conversation-Will Danielle Smith stay moderate or move back to the right — and towards Alberta separatism?
15Jun By Bob AscahNo Comments
Credit Ratings, Environment, Health, Intergovernmental, Opinion/Research

The Conversation-Will Danielle Smith stay moderate or move back to the right — and towards Alberta separatism?

This article was published on 15 June 2023 in The Conversation. Reproduced with permission from The Conversation.    With a fresh and workable majority, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is facing the choice of conforming to her moderate election stance or pushing the strategies of various quasi-separatist groups like Take Back Alberta and Project Confederation. If she opts to move from the centre to the far right again, controversies involving the federal government, government workers and environmentalists will ensue. As a political scientist, former Alberta public servant, financial institution executive and university administrator and researcher, I have been watching politics in Alberta for more than 40 years. At the present time, political pundits are contemplating how Smith, with a fre...
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Oil and Gas royalties, unpaid municipal taxes, and unaddressed reclamation
17Apr By Bob AscahNo Comments
Agencies, Budget, Energy, Environment, Opinion/Research

Oil and Gas royalties, unpaid municipal taxes, and unaddressed reclamation

In June 2022, Alberta’s then Energy Minister Sonya Savage, a former executive with the Canadian Energy Pipelines Association, warned the federal government not to consider a tax on windfall profits of the energy industry.  When asked about the oil industry’s record cash flows and remediation liabilities, Savage stated:  “The current spike in oil prices isn’t enough reason to require the industry to spend more on cleaning up the tens of thousands of abandoned oil and gas wells in the province.” In reflecting on this statement, it suggests that expanded spending by Alberta’ producers on remediation expenses might imply royalty payments to Alberta might fall. In short, the province may have a short-term financial interest in not losing revenue when reclamation spending increases. This cont...
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28Mar By Bob AscahNo Comments
Budget, Energy, Environment, Government Finances, Health, Opinion/Research, Politics

Solutions-based policy development and Some Modest Recommendations

There are major issues confronting Alberta- a massive understatement if there ever was!   As a student, practitioner, and teacher of public policy for over 40 years, the following ideas are in a germination phase and readers are encouraged to comment and add their suggestions on the central germ of this idea. A solutions-based approach to government policy-making offers a means of identifying a small number of “problems” which require immediate attention and on which there is a consensus on the need for action. This approach starts with Problem identification. The government’s prerogative, but our current government arguably sees things much differently than a majority of Albertans- (e.g. the visceral hate of the federal government as represented by Mr. Trudeau.) In this blogpost, I set o...
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<strong>OSFI’s new guidelines: A step toward making banks and insurers more conscious of their climate impacts</strong>
22Mar By Bob AscahNo Comments
Banks, Energy, Environment, Intergovernmental

OSFI’s new guidelines: A step toward making banks and insurers more conscious of their climate impacts

  This article of mine was published yesterday in The Conversation.  Reproduced with permission from The Conversation. After an extensive consultation process, the organization that supervises banks and large insurance companies in Canada — the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI) — has released guidelines for financial institutions to address climate change. This is timely, considering banks and insurers are massive funders of the fossil fuel industry. The release of the guidelines, called the B-15, comes more than a year after a January 2022 pilot study by Canada’s central bank and OSFI on how resilient financial institutions would be under new climate policies. The study found that the creditworthiness of oilsands producers is expected to fall over the next few ...
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