Intergovernmental Archives - Page 2 of 4

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 ...

Danielle Smith’s cabinet policy committees

9Jul

By Bob AscahNo Comments

Energy, Intergovernmental, Opinion/Research, Politics

Danielle Smith’s cabinet policy committees

Updated 10July 2023 On Thursday 6 July, Premier Danielle Smith announced the formation of her cabinet policy committees. These five committees, in addition to the statutory Treasury Board committee chaired by the Treasury Board President and Finance Minister Nate Horner, reflect the government’s key policy priorities for the next four years. The names of the committees are Alberta First Building Communities Economic Diversification Public Safety and Wellness and Legislative Review Committee. All committees are chaired by non-cabinet members and have a balanced number of backbench MLAs and cabinet ministers. In this brief I examine the significance and role of the committees as well as taking a more in depth look at the published backgrounds of the backbench chairs. “I want to thank the ...

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...

<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 ...

Budget Speech- Annotated and The Economic Consequences of Mr. Toews

9Mar

By Bob AscahNo Comments

Budget, Credit Ratings, Employment, Energy, Fiscal History, Government Finances, Intergovernmental, Opinion/Research

Budget Speech- Annotated and The Economic Consequences of Mr. Toews

Budget Speech delivered on Tuesday 28 February 2023, Legislative Assembly of Alberta Mr. Speaker, I count it a tremendous honour to rise in the House today to present Budget 2023 – the fifth I have presented on behalf of Albertans. In the fall of 2019, I put forward a four-year plan to bring the province back to fiscal responsibility and a balanced budget. In some respects, these past four years have felt like a century – in part, due to the extraordinary global challenges we faced but also because of how far we’ve come. When, as a government, we took office in 2019, Alberta had an economy that was flat-lined, and we were spending $10 billion more than comparable provinces on services, without better outcomes. Our plan to strengthen Alberta’s economic foundation was two-fold: First, to bri...

30Jan

By Bob AscahNo Comments

Energy, Environment, Intergovernmental, Politics

Smith to Trudeau- Olive branch or iron fist in a velvet glove?

Last Thursday, Premier Danielle Smith wrote Prime Minister Trudeau about the “just transition” legislation that the Liberal government will introduce this year. At first blush this letter was seen as an “olive branch”. In Smith’s words:- We can continue with the endless court challenges, legislation to protect jurisdictional rights and inflammatory media coverage over our disagreements, or, as is my strong preference, Alberta and Ottawa can work in partnership on a plan that will signal to all Canadians and investors from around the world that our governments have cooperatively designed a series of incentives and initiatives intended to achieve the following objectives The attempt to dial down the rhetoric may be her government’s response to internal party polling that indicates fights ...

29Sep

By Bob AscahNo Comments

Government Finances, Health, Intergovernmental, Investment, Opinion/Research

The UCP Front-runners- Policy Analysis

In this analysis I compare both the slogans and key phrases of the candidates. Slogans and phrases which are meant to attract members to vote for their preferred candidate and some of the detail of their top policy priorities. I also drill down to examine three policy areas in more detail. At the time of publication Danielle Smith is the presumed frontrunner with Travis Toews second and Brian Jean third. High level slogans compared According to Danielle Smith’s “Alberta First” campaign she will: Free Alberta from Ottawa’s control; Protect the rights and freedoms of Albertans; Unleash our economic potential and restore the Alberta Advantage, and Defeat Rachel Notley and the NDP in the next election Travis Toews promises responsible, stable leadership and promises to unite ...

7Sep

By Bob AscahNo Comments

Energy, Environment, Intergovernmental, Opinion/Research

Who owns the Big Four?

Profits earned by foreign direct investors on their assets in Canada were up $2.8 billion, led by the energy sector. Statistics Canada report on balance of payments. Statistics Canada Report on balance of international payments- 30 August 2022 In a column earlier this year, Gordon Laxer argued that Alberta’s inquiry into foreign influence should also have examined the foreign influence in the Canadian oilpatch. This post examines the ownership of the Big Four oilsands producers using current data from Thomson Reuters’ Refinitiv. In an earlier post first half financial results of these companies was compared against bank profits. As the tables indicate, the top investors are mostly North American with Canadian bank subsidiary iinvestment management firms holding a small portion of the sha...

22May

By Bob AscahNo Comments

Energy, Environment, Intergovernmental, Opinion/Research

Alberta 4- Canada 1: Alberta Court of Appeal on the Impact Assessment Act

On 10 May Alberta's Court of Appeal provided an opinion on reference questions from the Alberta government concerning the validity of the federal Impact Assessment Act or, as Premier Kenney prefers to call it, the "no pipelines law." Background . On 9 September 2019 Alberta's cabinet authorized the Alberta Court of Appeal to consider two questions. These were: Is Part 1 of An Act to enact the Impact Assessment Act and the Canadian Energy Regulator Act, to amend the Navigation Protection Act and to make consequential amendments to other Acts, S.C. 2019, c. 28, unconstitutional in whole or in part, as being beyond the legislative authority of the Parliament of Canada under the Constitution of Canada? Is the Physical Activities Regulations, SOR/2019-285, unconstitutional in whole or in pa...

Presentation to the Southern Alberta Council on Public Affairs

26Apr

By Bob AscahNo Comments

Agencies, Intergovernmental, Opinion/Research, Politics

Presentation to the Southern Alberta Council on Public Affairs

On 31 March I made the following presentation to the Southern Alberta Council on Public Affairs about my Parkland paper Can AIMCo be Fixed? You can view the presentation on Youtube here. The discussion after the presentation was stimulating and wide ranging and highlighted concerns about government politicians interfering with public sector pensions. The Medicine Hat News had a story about the presentation on 13 April 2022. Below are my speaking notes and below that is a PDF of revised slide deck. (One of the numbers in Figure 2 had to be restated.) "Good afternoon everyone! I am speaking to you from Treaty 6 territory, a traditional gathering place for diverse Indigenous peoples including the Cree, Blackfoot, Métis, Nakota Sioux, and many others whose histories,...