Is Stephen Harper, the man who holds Pierre Poilievre’s puppet strings, actually going to help Danielle Smith try to wreck the Canada Pension Plan (CPP)?
Even considering how much trouble the Trudeau Liberals appear to be in nowadays, that seems like a weird flex for the former Conservative prime minister who surely would like to see Poilievre safely ensconced in the Prime Minister’s Office with as massive a majority in the House of Commons as possible.
Still, how else are we to interpret the certainty with which Postmedia is now reporting that Harper will indeed soon be named chair of the board of the Alberta Investment Management Corp. to help Smith implement his 23-year-old fever dream of owning the Libs by pulling Alberta out of the Canada Pension Plan and establishing its own provincial pension?
After all, Postmedia may not break many Alberta stories nowadays, but it acts as part of the United Conservative Party (UCP)’s propaganda ecosystem, so we can assume the statements about Harper’s future in Calgary Herald political commentator Don Braid’s column yesterday come with the imprimatur of the Premier’s Office.
Braid’s column seems to confirm BNN Bloomberg’s scoop Tuesday, in the wake of Alberta Finance Minister Nat Horner’s unexpected Nov. 7 announcement he was sacking the Crown corporation’s CEO and its entire board for reasons that didn’t make much sense, and adds some spin helpful to the UCP.
Mr. Braid even dropped a hint about what the Smith Government’s strategy might be for getting older Alberta voters, who fear and hate the idea of an Alberta pension plan, to come around: “Before a referendum, the big incentive would be a promise of lifetime monthly payments higher than the CPP.”
Since the point of the plan appears to be to pump Alberta pensioners’ retirement savings into the sunsetting fossil fuel industry, that promise might be harder to keep than it is to file a political column on deadline, but with a scheme like this you only have to fool the voters once.
Over time, the change would almost certainly be exposed as bad news for folks from this province who don’t have a nice Parliamentary pension as generous as Harper’s.
Everyone one of us over 30 who lives here in Wild Rose Country knows someone who says they’re seriously considering fleeing the province if that’s what it takes to remain in the CPP, which has a history of being better managed than AIMCo’s holdings. Harper’s presence on the AIMCo board won’t change that.
An Alberta pull-out from the CPP Investment Fund would also be ugly news for all those other Canadians who will have to pay more for less – even if Premier Smith’s United Conservative Party (UCP) doesn’t manage to get its paws on 53 per cent of the national fund, as Alberta preposterously claims it would be owed.
Any day now we should have the chief actuary of Canada’s estimate of what could really be expected by Alberta.
The chances of Alberta getting 53 per cent of the fund, of course, are zero, with or without Harper pitching in to this fundamentally unpatriotic effort. But even with a smaller payout, any Conservative politician who went along with this could expect to be reviled in the rest of Canada outside Quebec, which has had its own pension plan from the get-go. All the more so if Alberta pensioners managed to collect a little more for a spell.
Be that as it may, such an effort wouldn’t be completely off brand for Harper. He was one of the authors – perhaps the principal author – of the notorious Firewall Letter, the 2001 Alberta sovereignty-association screed that called for the province to quit the CPP, create a provincial pension plan, and adopt other measures that would amount to a half-step out of Confederation.
The Conservative premier of the day, Ralph Klein, sensibly tossed it into the recycler. Alas, now it’s being recycled anyway, and not as a clean sheet of typing paper.
Moreover, when he was prime minister, readers will recall that Harper was no friend of pensioners, trying in 2012 to raise the age of eligibility for Old Age Security and the Guaranteed Income Supplement to 67 from 65.
As a CUPE researcher pointed out in the leadup to the 2015 federal election, this would have been “the biggest cut ever made to Canada’s modest public pension system,” potentially pushing hundreds of thousands of Canadian seniors into poverty.
Remember as well that the 2011 Harper Conservatives promised in their election platform not to cut pensions, but reversed course less than a year later with a ready-made plan. This certainly suggests a hidden agenda item that was there all along.
Soon after coming to power, thankfully, the Trudeau Liberals reversed the Harper pension cuts before they took effect, but it’s something for Albertans to think about if they’re wondering how confident they can be about Alberta-managed pension funds, with or without Stephen Harper setting AIMCo’s strategic direction.
But – who knows? – maybe Harper will throw his Ottawa protégé over the side if that’s what it takes to realize his Firewall fantasy and further undermine the principle of keeping Canadian seniors out of poverty.
AIMCo board member compensation
If you’re wondering what AIMCo’s board members are paid, there are some interesting figures on pages 83 and 84 of the Crown corporation’s 2022 annual report. Annual base retainers of $20,000 ($50,000 for the chair) and per-meeting payments of $1,000 may not sound like much in this era of multi-million-dollar C-Suite salaries, but one imagines that if Harper joins the board the UCP will find a way to ensure he is paid considerably more. Meanwhile, the multi-million-dollar executive salaries are listed on page 78.
Don’t expect them to shrink under the UCP’s more congenial replacement regime, coming soon after a new CEO is named, notwithstanding Horner’s complaints about costs at AIMCo.
Former Alberta NDP chief of staff lands in Saskatchewan
Readers will be interested to note that Jeremy Nolais, the Alberta NDP’s chief of staff from 2019 until the party leadership changed and on leave as former justice minister Kathleen Ganley’s leadership campaign manager last spring, has landed on his feet in Saskatchewan.
Nolais has taken up duties as chief of staff to Opposition Leader Carla Beck and the Saskatchewan NDP Caucus.
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