Editor:
Albertans, hang onto your hats. Or should that be your pensions?
Just over a week ago, Nate Horner, the provincial finance minister, seemingly abruptly fired the CEO, 11-member board and three executives of AIMCo. AIMCo is a Crown corporation that manages several public funds and pensions as well as the Heritage Savings Trust Fund.
AIMCo did blow more than $2 billion on a risky investment strategy four years ago and changed CEO’s since, but otherwise has kept a low profile. The firings were apparently prompted by an overreliance on third party money managers and rising outgoing costs. Horner said, “it seemed like it needed a reset and that’s what we did today.”
Although Premier Danielle Smith has promised some, if not all, new board members will be announced this week, a supposedly at-arms-length pension fund is temporarily under Horner as interim board chair and a former senior official – Ray Gilmour – who worked directly under the premier as interim CEO.
Keith Ambachtsheer, former director of the International Centre of Pension Management, said “the current reasons just don’t hold water” and later had concerns that the government could be trying to have greater control over these funds and that they could direct that money to meet political objectives.
Stephen Harper is speculated to be appointed as the new chair. He was one of the original signatories of the Firewall Letter that urged Albertans to dump the CPP and create an APP. To do this now would require the federal government to fork over more than 50 per cent of the CPP, an amount that Smith believes Alberta would be entitled to.
So, why so much, so fast? Don Braid, in his column in the Calgary Herald, suggests Smith has a problem: Pierre Poilievre.
If elected next year, he would definitely be an ally, just not to gut the CPP and “he could hardly endorse the Free Alberta Strategy.”
Worried? Yes, we should be. She is staging political takeovers of at arms length organizations.
Marilyn Foxford,
Canmore
