Smith Presses on with Big Handouts to Oil and Gas Companies

It’s not a bad thing for Alberta’s NDP Opposition to hammer the Danielle Smith government’s scandalous RStar scheme, as they did this week. But it’s frustrating to have to wonder where they were on the issue during last spring’s election campaign. 

RStar, which has the potential to be the largest daylight robbery in Canadian history, is a 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.

The idea of tossing the polluter-pay principle out the window to prop up the fossil fuel industry is so outrageous that even small-c conservative Albertans could have been swayed to “lend their votes” to the NDP if only the NDP had tried a bit harder.

But it was one of the topics Smith didn’t really want to talk about until after the election, and for some reason the NDP barely mentioned it.

Officially, it’s been renamed the “Liability Management Incentive Program,” a term clearly intended to put potential critics to sleep.

But it’s the same old scam that Smith tried to persuade United Conservative Party 1.0, led by then-premier Jason Kenney, to adopt back when she was a registered lobbyist for the boondoggle. 

The idea was so bad, though, that even Kenney’s energy minister, Sonya Savage, told Smith to pump something other than oil.

Now that the lobbyist is the leader of UCP 2.0 and premier, she’s instructed her energy minister, the hapless perennial quitter Brian Jean, to develop “a strategy to effectively incentivize reclamation of inactive legacy oil and natural gas sites, and to enable future drilling while respecting the principle of polluter pay.”

That mention of the polluter-pay principle got into Jean’s ministerial mandate letter by the way, because there has been such public and expert hostility to this terrible idea, another contender for the worst UCP policy ever. 

But attacking the dirty RStar deal was mostly left by the NDP to extreme Green Marxists like the financial research staff of the Bank of Nova Scotia. A Scotiabank report even argued that RStar “goes against the core capitalist principle that private companies should take full responsibility for the liabilities they willingly accept.”

Well, at least Jean’s mandate letter apparently incentivized the NDP to finally return to this issue and put out a news release accurately pointing out the letter contains coded language for “Danielle Smith’s RStar giveaway to negligent polluters.” 

“In this mandate, ‘inactive sites’ means environmental liabilities held by active and solvent companies and ‘incentivize’ means taxpayers will now be paying off the environmental liabilities of private industry, liabilities that they are legally responsible for,” said the NDP news release, which was sent to media Monday but appears not to have been posted anywhere yet. 

In the release, NDP environment critic Jody Calahoo Stonehouse complained that “instead of enforcing the law and fully upholding the polluter-pay principle, Albertans will pick up the tab, yet again.”

This is all true, but at this point the exercise seems performative and, now that the horse is gone, rather like slamming the proverbial barn door shut.

A few other interesting topics are touched upon by Jean’s mandate letter, including helping the nuclear industry stay afloat by giving it money to cook up plans for so-called “small modular reactors,” a topic we’ll return to in the near future, and giving Kenney’s notorious “Energy War Room,” legally known as the Canadian Energy Centre, a new role that sounds exactly the same as its old role. 

In other words, in both cases, more tax money down the rathole. 

The NDP news release also said more “coded language” is found in Finance Minister Nate Horner’s mandate letter telling him to get cracking on pulling Alberta out of the Canada Pension Plan, and to explore setting up an Alberta Revenue Agency. 

The latter scheme, the NDP complained, quoting former UCP finance minister Travis Toews, “will mean hiring 5,000 public tax collectors” and will “cost Albertans more than $500 million annually.”

But the Smith government won’t be doing that to provide some accountants with good public sector unionized jobs — a point in the idea’s favour, if you ask me. It’s “a dog whistle to Alberta separatism, which has been endorsed by Smith’s executive director Rob Anderson,” the NDP says.

Well, it’s hard to argue with that either. But with the Smith-led UCP entrenched in power for another four years at least, it’s also going to be very hard to do anything about it.