I got into business advocacy back in 1997,” said Danielle Smith, on a YouTube podcast for the Alberta Enterprise Group (AEG) on June 24, 2021. Smith was then the president of AEG, a business lobby group that bills itself as “Alberta’s top business organization.” At the time (and until shortly before she became premier of Alberta) she also had a side gig as a podcaster on locals.com—where she famously said “the only answer for Ukraine is neutrality” in response to the Russian invasion—but this was not that podcast; there was no Gadsden flag (a libertarian symbol favoured by American right-wing populists) on the shelf behind her. For Smith’s AEG podcast the background was a blank wall and the lobby group’s poster.
“For those of you who don’t remember my history,” she said to the AEG audience by way of an intro to her talk that day with oil and gas lobbyist Kris Kinnear, “I was recruited by the Western Stock Growers’ Association. They called themselves the ‘free market environmentalists of Alberta’ and they wanted to set up a property rights advocacy group. What I particularly appreciated about their approach was that when they recruited the board they recruited people from the energy sector; in fact, our chair was an oilman.”
In 2021 both Smith and Kinnear, then-director of Sustaining Alberta’s Energy Network (SAEN), were actively lobbying the provincial government about RStar, a proposed program in which oil and gas companies would get royalty breaks on production from new wells if they spent money cleaning up their old ones. The two lobbyists hoped the RStar program would see $20-billion in “incentives” given out by the Alberta government to clean up old wells, stimulate new drilling and repair the “broken down” relationship between rural landowners and junior oil and gas companies. “It’s a program near and dear to my heart,” said Smith.
Some 20 months later, at an Alberta government budget committee meeting in Edmonton on March 15, 2023, premier Danielle Smith was questioned about Kinnear by opposition leader Rachel Notley. Kinnear was now “special project manager” in the premier’s office, appointed shortly after Smith won the UCP leadership (with Kinnear’s help as a “campaign coordinator”). Notley wanted to know exactly what he was doing, given that he expensed claims for meeting with the energy minister and was still listed as the director of SAEN. Smith said Kinnear was no longer a director of SAEN and the listing was an oversight. There was no conflict of interest, she said. “The person in question is a yak farmer. He’s a landowner. And he was doing survey work as an independent individual who was very concerned about the level of liability that was occurring on land.”
Which is not quite how Kinnear described himself to Smith on June 24, 2021. “We’ve spent a lot of time together,” said Smith to Kinnear on the AEG video. “I think people should understand a little about who you are.” Kinnear did say he “grew up on a farm east of Olds” and today owns “a little farm” and that “old well sites” are on both properties, but apart from that he talked about his career in the oilpatch and how he got into politics and lobbying. Having started as a young labourer on a pipeline, he moved into land reclamation and then oilfield services. He got the idea for RStar, he said, when he saw that “my friends that own small oil and gas companies couldn’t get funding.” This was before the 2019 provincial election, he said, and the downturn inspired him to get politically active. “I work in Calgary, so I went around to all the ‘battle zones’ and I got to know [the UCP] campaign managers,” said Kinnear. “I started helping all these campaigning MLAs,” he said. “It kind of took off. We rallied hundreds [of volunteers] and helped 15 [UCP MLAs get elected in Calgary].”
Smith made notes as he talked, then steered the conversation to RStar. “We’re talking about how this benefits the junior and mid-sized companies,” she said, “but it seems to me that this should also benefit the large companies. Do you see it that way?”
“It helps Alberta,” said Kinnear. “A royalty credit helps everybody that can use it.” Such a credit would mean environmental liabilities in Alberta could be bought and sold. “I think the benefit for the larger companies is if they want to get out of Alberta, they don’t have to hand over liability deposits to the regulator and pay their way out,” he said. Or bigger companies “may be looking for [smaller] companies that have lots of liabilities that they know they can clean up and harvest to improve drilling programs in the future. Maybe they’ll get into that. I don’t know.”
“That’s the amazing thing,” said Smith. “This is why I always prefer a free enterprise, market-based entrepreneurial solution, to a central-planning, regulatory-driven, rules-based, government-bureaucrat-led solution, because we just don’t know what we don’t know about what this might unlock if the program gets implemented.”
Lobbying and politics have long been intertwined in Canada. As detailed by journalist Natasha Bulowski, lobbyists “are a fixture in the realm of government and policymaking.” In that realm their “main objective is to influence government decisions in the interest of their client—either by lessening the harm those decisions could cause or taking advantage of the opportunity presented by a government decision to maximize its benefit.”
Lobbyists seek to influence government decisions to benefit clients instead of the public. Alberta’s Lobbyist Act, however, aims to temper the risk of government acting to benefit a special interest. In Alberta lobbyists must register their lobbying activities—who they lobby and for what purpose—and Alberta’s lobbyist registry can be searched online free of charge.
Still, lobbying politicians, political staff and civil servants is a job often done by former political staffers and politicians. In Alberta, for instance, Wellington Advocacy (one of the most influential lobbying firms) was co-founded by Nick Koolsbergen, who previously was UCP leader Jason Kenney’s chief of staff and before that the director of issues management for Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Wellington’s “Alberta Government relations team” is currently led by former political staffers including Brad Tennant (former executive director of the UCP) and Leah Ward (a former director of communications for the Alberta NDP caucus).
Another big lobbying firm, New West Public Affairs, is led by Monte Solberg, the former MP for Medicine Hat who was a cabinet minister in Harper’s Conservative government. His son Matt Solberg, a partner in the firm, was director of communications for the UCP. Premier Kenney’s former press secretary, Christine Myatt, also works for New West.
At yet another lobbying firm, Alberta Counsel, former Wildrose MLA Shane Saskiw is the principal lobbyist, and former UCP MLA Richard Gotfried, former Alberta Party leader Barry Morishita and former NDP candidate Taneen Rudyk are all on the “lobby team.”
The list of political partisans who took the off-ramp from politics into lobbying could go on and on. Danielle Smith is among them—she took a lobbying job after politics—but her trajectory is notably different. Unlike the others, she sprang from lobbying straight into politics and not just once but twice. It’s a unique career in which the line between lobbying and politics appears porously understood. After Smith became premier in October 2022 she ran in a by-election in Brooks-Medicine Hat. As revealed by Nate Pike at The Breakdown, Smith’s campaign manager in that by-election was Alexandra Carlile, a lobbyist at Alberta Counsel who at the same time as she was campaign manager for the premier was listed on 40 then-active files directly lobbying Premier Smith’s office. That’s not illegal in Alberta. But as Laurie Adkin, a political scientist at the University of Alberta, said to Bob Weber of the Canadian Press in November 2022, Premier Smith’s lobbying ties raise questions—among them: “Whose premier is she?”
When Smith registered as a lobbyist for the Alberta Enterprise Group in June 2019, it wasn’t her first gig as a lobbyist paid to try to influence government policymaking. Back in October 2006 she left a job as a talk radio host to be director of provincial affairs for the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB), a group that lobbied for “tax fairness, reasonable labour laws and reduction of regulatory paper burden” for small businesses.
In April 2009 she left that lobbying role to run for the leadership of the Wildrose Party. That same month, a Wildrose Party fundraising letter written by David Yager and other “oilfield service and junior oil and gas executives” was sent to members of Alberta’s oil and gas industry. The letter decried then-Progressive Conservative premier Ed Stelmach’s attempt to reform Alberta’s oil and gas royalty framework and said “the ultimate success of our industry is now political. Only when the government of Alberta supports and trusts its most important industry—oil and gas—will Alberta’s future be truly secure.”
Yager, in his words, was the “top fundraiser for Smith’s leadership bid” in 2009, and he today takes credit for teaching Smith about the oilpatch. “I met Danielle Smith 14 years [ago] when we asked her to consider becoming leader of the Wildrose Party,” he wrote on LinkedIn in 2022. “For the next five years we worked together where I taught her as much as she could absorb about the nuts and bolts of how the oil industry works. We went to dozens of meetings together with industry associations and executives, and if she didn’t fully understand afterwards, she and I weren’t done until she did.”
A key message that Yager wants to impart, as he wrote in his 2019 book From Miracle to Menace: Alberta, A Carbon Story, is that, for him, on practically all energy issues, including climate change, “the private sector and free markets are the solution, not the problem.”
For Smith, that lesson fit “with what I truly believe.” After her political failure in 2015 (floor-crossing to the PCs, losing her seat), her second career arc—again from media to lobbyist to party leader—revealed a heightened enthusiasm for the oil and gas industry. As Smith wrote in a 2021 paper praising “our entrepreneurs and wealth creators” and the “titans of business” for the School of Public Policy at the University of Calgary: “Energy provides the foundation for our success, and it is the perfect example of how Alberta entrepreneurs take a challenge and find a solution…. There is no problem that is too big for our business leaders to solve.”
From 2019 to early 2022 Smith lobbied the Alberta government on behalf of “business leaders” at AEG—advocating for nearly 100 companies, including oil giant Canadian Natural Resources, the Canadian Association of Energy Contractors, and firms in construction, finance, health services and law. According to records at the Alberta Lobbyist Registry, Smith met with multiple ministries to encourage “opposition to labelling plastics as toxic” and “opposition to [the] federal Impact Assessment Act.” She lobbied the Premier’s Office to “create a ‘concierge’ service for large projects.” Along with persistent lobbying about “reducing COVID restrictions to help business,” Smith met with health minister Tyler Shandro to discuss “a new accountability model for delivering healthcare that would split the roles of purchaser, provider and performance oversight.” This last point, seemingly arcane, was articulated by Smith in a later interview with Jordan Peterson in November 2022, when she said that the “split the roles” model is the way “to apply our free enterprise values […] to how you deliver healthcare, how you deliver seniors care, how you deliver advanced education, how you deliver K–12 education.”
Notably, she also lobbied the Kenney government to implement RStar—to incentivize oil and gas companies to clean up old wells they are already legally obligated to clean up. Then-energy-minister Sonya Savage rejected the idea in June 2021, saying, “The proposal does not align with the province’s royalty regime or our approach to liability management and upholding the polluter-pays principle.” But Smith lobbied for RStar again, writing in a letter to Savage that “the revenue situation has become dark for the junior oil and gas sector.” The “solution” to companies going “broke” and leaving orphaned wells, she wrote, “is to create a pathway for junior oil and gas companies to clean up existing wellsite liabilities, improve corporate health, improve profitability and become compliant with all their financial obligations. We believe the RStar program can address all these issues.”
Lobbyists seek to influence government to benefit clients instead of the public.
“I’m sure you will all agree that our keynote speaker does not need much of an introduction,” says Mark Scholz, president and CEO of the Canadian Association of Energy Contractors (CAOEC), at the podium in the Grand Ballroom in the Westin Hotel in downtown Calgary a few minutes after noon on November 24, 2023. It’s the CAOEC’s annual State of the Industry event. Fifty tables are in the room. Nine seats are at each table, with every seat taken and people standing at the back by the doors. The CAOEC represents 95 drilling and service rig companies, “small- and medium-sized enterprises” and larger. Many are event sponsors, their names prominent on table card numbers. Akita Drilling at table 33. Halliburton at 40. Platinum sponsor Pathways Alliance at table 39. Alberta energy minister Brian Jean and minister of environment and protected areas Rebecca Schulz sit at table 21, next to the stage with the glass podium where premier Smith—a former lobbyist for the CAOEC—is about to speak. The crowd is hushed, all eyes on the stage.
Since she became premier, Smith has aggressively pursued an agenda in line with the policy direction for which she lobbied. Just 10 days after being sworn in, Smith again championed RStar, telling the Western Standard that it “will be a way we can clean up some of our legacy well sites.” In February 2023 her government announced it would begin an engagement process with the public on a $100-million pilot project for RStar, now renamed the Liability Management Incentive Program. But the public critique was harsh—including a Scotiabank report that said the proposed program “goes against the core capitalist principle that private companies should take full responsibility for the liabilities they willingly accept”—and the pilot wasn’t implemented. Neither did the UCP campaign on it in the 2023 election. But right after that election, won by the UCP, Smith’s mandate letter to energy minister Brian Jean directed him to develop “a strategy to effectively incentivize reclamation of inactive legacy oil and natural gas sites, and to enable future drilling.”
Also in February 2023, Smith gave a $60,000 contract to David Yager to chair an advisory panel of five long-time industry insiders to create a long-term vision for Alberta’s energy future. Public consultation wasn’t part of the panel’s envisioning process, and Yager delivered their report a mere four months later, on June 30. Clues as to what might be in the report could lie within Yager’s extensive writings as a columnist for Energy Now, where on June 3, 2023, he wrote about the impacts of climate change policy debates on the oil and gas industry. “If we’re going to be allowed to stay in this business, then it must be decarbonized. But taking the ‘carbon’ out of hydrocarbons is much easier to say than do,” he wrote. “Chanting ‘polluter must pay’ solves nothing.” Citing technical challenges, stockholder demands for profits, and taxes from multiple levels of government, he wrote, “the oil and gas industry needs more money, not less.”
“We won’t allow the federal government to take action to shut in our production.”
To say this was in the report, however, would be speculation, as the report was classified as advice to the premier, making it inaccessible to a freedom of information request. Global’s Saif Kaisar, who attended a press conference with Smith just after Yager’s report was delivered, did confirm that the report includes a section on the RStar proposal. As the report was being written, Yager was president and CEO of Winterhawk Well Abandonment, a company that rents oil and gas well reclamation tools. Reporters asked Smith if this was a conflict of interest. Smith said no. “Look,” she said, “he put together a panel of over 150 CEOs. Of course I’m going to take advice from CEOs. Who else am I going to take advice from?” After this press conference, Smith gave Yager a second sole-source contract, this time for $70,000, to review the Alberta Energy Regulator.
In early August 2023 the UCP government imposed a seven-month moratorium on approvals of renewable energy projects larger than 1 megawatt. Such projects have attracted close to $5-billion in investment into the province since 2019. In 2022 more than 75 per cent of all the new wind and solar energy capacity built in Canada that year was in Alberta. Renewable energy accounted for nearly 13 per cent of the electricity generated in the province in 2022, up from 7 per cent in 2018.
“She’s putting at risk billions of dollars of investment in her province,” said federal environment minister Steven Guilbeault on CBC’s As It Happens. It was one of the few times the federal minister publicly criticized Premier Smith. Mostly the attacks went the other way.
While both the provincial and federal governments have a stated goal of achieving net-zero emissions by 2050, they differ on how to get there. The federal Liberals prefer a planned, legislated approach, committing Canada, by law, to net-zero by 2050, with a short-term target of reducing emissions in Canada by 40–45 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030. In contrast, as she said when she was a lobbyist, Smith prefers a “free enterprise, market-based entrepreneurial solution” to the problem of how to decarbonize the economy. For Smith, that transition “doesn’t mean transitioning away from oil and gas. It’s about transitioning away from emissions” through fledgling technologies such as carbon capture and storage, small modular nuclear reactors and the emerging hydrogen economy. “It’s incremental changes of incremental technology that add up to a major reduction in emissions,” she told the Pembina Institute’s Alberta Climate Summit in October 2023. “But none of that can happen in six months, or by 2030. A lot of that might be 2035, might be 2040, might be 2045. That’s why we need to have the long time frame horizon.”
In the meantime, for Smith, impediments to market innovation must be resisted. The UCP government joined litigation before the Supreme Court contesting the federal plastics ban and the federal Impact Assessment Act, rulings that in both cases went against the feds (but arguably only insofar as to say that for both pieces of legislation the federal government needed to tighten up the wording). Among other “pushing back against Ottawa” moves, the UCP invoked the Sovereignty Act against the federal government’s draft clean electricity regulations that call for a net-zero electricity grid by 2035 and threatened to invoke it again in 2024 against the Liberals’ proposed cap on greenhouse gas emissions from the oil and gas sector. As Smith told the National Post, “We’re just simply not going to allow the federal government to take any action that will shut in our production.”
“Premier Smith has been travelling across the country and standing up for Alberta’s interests, especially when it comes to the province’s energy industry,” says Mark Scholz, at the podium for the CAOEC’s State of the Industry event. “They say every generation produces a leader who sets a new direction for its people, a leader who inspires through an ambitious vision anchored to steadfast values and unwavering principles,” says the CEO, to the assembled oil and gas well drilling and service rig executives. “And I’m happy to report that that generational leader is with us here today. Ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased to introduce the premier of Alberta, the honourable Danielle Smith.” The crowd welcomes their premier with loud applause.
Tadzio Richards is Associate Editor at Alberta Views. His story on Alberta’s 2023 election campaign ran in September 2023.
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