Hi everyone, Mark Iype in Edmonton today.
The Alberta government is pausing its public consultations over its plan to walk away from the Canada Pension Plan to create a provincial retirement fund.
Alberta Finance Minister Nate Horner and Jim Dinning, the chair of Alberta’s consultation panel and a former finance minister himself, held a news conference on Friday morning to make the announcement.
“Albertans wanted more precise information on the value of asset transfer,” Horner told reporters. “We’re listening.”
When Premier Danielle Smith released a report in September that said Alberta would be entitled to $334-billion of the national pension plan’s $575-billion in assets should the province withdraw in 2027, the figure was met with a fair bit of skepticism.
The province demanded that the federal government provide its own figure of what Alberta would be owed if it decided to walk away from the CPP, something Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland agreed to last month. Freeland said she will ask the Office of the Chief Actuary to calculate an asset transfer “based on a reasonable interpretation of the provisions” in the CPP legislation.
Meanwhile, the province has been going ahead with telephone town halls over the past few months, a process Smith has said is sometimes superior to in-person meetings for gauging public interest.
“Sometimes it’s not convenient to be able to drop everything and come out for an evening, but it’s [easier] being able to be on a telephone town hall. We think we’ll get more feedback on it,” she said on her call-in radio show in October.
Feedback has been a mixed bag, as the government looks to build a case for an Alberta pension, but it appears enough Albertans doubted the government’s math, resulting in the pause. The Alberta government has thus far spent more than $9-million on advertising and the consultation panel.
Other Canadian premiers, the federal government, the federal Conservative Party of Canada, and the CPP itself have warned of the consequences of the Alberta proposal and the claim that the province deserves 53 per cent of the country’s retirement fund.
On Friday, Dinning said Alberta is “hopeful” that the federal government will provide the chief actuary’s calculations on the asset transfer by the middle of February.
And he acknowledged that the government’s claim to $334-billion of CPP’s assets is a challenge for people to grasp.
“It is a gob-smacking number,” he said. “There isn’t anybody that I know who isn’t surprised by the number.”
The Smith government has said based on consultations, it will decide whether to hold a referendum on whether Alberta would proceed with its own pension system.
This is the weekly Western Canada newsletter written by B.C. Editor Wendy Cox and Alberta Bureau Chief Mark Iype. If you’re reading this on the web, or it was forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for it and all Globe newsletters here.