BNN Bloomberg is a reasonably sober business news organization, so when it reports that Alberta’s United Conservative Party (UCP) wants to make Stephen Harper chair of the Alberta Investment Management Corp. (AIMCo) board, you have to take it seriously.
This is true even if inserting a controversial former prime minister with deep ties to the fossil fuel industry and partisan links to the UCP into a leadership position at a Crown-owned company responsible for managing provincial retirement savings is just about the worst financial management idea you’ve ever heard.
It’s another example of how, with the UCP in power, just when you think things couldn’t get any weirder, they get weirder!
The Bloomberg report, which appeared around 1 p.m. yesterday in Alberta, came five days after Alberta Finance Minister Nate Horner sacked the company’s CEO, Evan Siddall, and its entire board of directors, claiming it had to be done to “restore confidence in Alberta’s investment agency.”
Well, it’s true, AIMCo, as the company is popularly known, has had serious performance issues that have been particularly troubling since it was known to be the UCP’s planned vessel for the Canada Pension Plan investment funds Premier Danielle Smith and her advisors desperately want to grab to establish an Alberta pension that could then be used to prop up the fossil fuel industry, which is rapidly approaching its best-before date.
But just about all of political Alberta, and most of the investment industry as well, were scratching their heads at the seemingly inexplicable timing of the move, when just days before everything had appeared to be copacetic at the Crown-owned company as far as the government was concerned.
Bloomberg’s startling revelation suggests an explanation.
There are three bylines on the Bloomberg story, so we can assume that at least three reporters have been making calls trying to pin down for the record what they’d heard from what the story refers to as “people familiar with the matter.”
If this is so – I’m just speculating here, although in an informed way – when the government realized the Harper story was about to break, it may have felt it had better get rid of the board and the CEO before they started throwing roadblocks in the way of a potentially catastrophically bad business decision.
It also sounds to me as if Bloomberg decided to proceed without a named source when Horner’s sudden firing spree provoked a brouhaha in the investment industry about his interference in what was claimed to be an arm’s length investor of pension funds, insulated from political interference.
Anyway, according to Bloomberg, “Harper’s name has been circulating as a potential chair for Alberta Investment Management Corp. for a number of months.” That would certainly be on brand for the UCP, which for obvious reasons holds Harper in high regard.
There would be a certain irony if the former PM were to be given the chair of the AIMCo board, since he was one of the six signatories of the notorious Firewall Letter, the 2001 Alberta sovereignty-association manifesto that called for the province to quit the CPP, create a provincial pension plan, and adopt several other measures that would amount to a half-step out of Confederation.
Of course, this was before Harper had glimpsed the full potential of grabbing the brass ring that had the key to the Prime Minister’s Office on it. Naturally, nothing was heard of Harper’s past separatist inclinations during the gloomy years from 2006 to 2015 when he occupied the PMO.
Since then, Harper has been busy running the Munich-based Neoliberal Internationale, officially known nowadays as the International Democracy Union, and finding clients for Harper & Associates, a consulting firm that trades heavily on his political connections. As the Bloomberg report put it, with energy industry companies among its clients, H&A “touts access to Harper’s global network and his experience as a former Group of Seven leader.”
As for Siddall, he has updated his LinkedIn resume to note he is in a state of “career transition.” For the time being, at least, he says he will be tying up loose ends and smelling wildflowers. It is to be hoped, although not expected, that those loose ends don’t involve a non-disclosure agreement.
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