When winning looks like losing

Prentice cruises to victory in contest to become Alberta’s next premier, but takes over a party, government demoralized by scandal

Gary Park

For Petroleum News

Jim Prentice is the new premier of Alberta, Canada’s dominant oil and natural gas province, after riding a landslide to victory on Sept. 6 in a three-way contest to become leader of the governing Progressive Conservative Party.

Now he has less than two years to dig his administration out of the bog that he has inherited if the party is to win the next provincial election in spring 2016 and extend its 43-year term in office, the longest unbroken run in government at the provincial level in Canadian history.

To all intents, the 58-year-old lawyer should be feeling comfortable, if not complacent.

He brings some impressive credentials to the job, having served in three portfolios - industry, environment and Indian affairs - under Prime Minister Stephen Harper before stepping down in 2010 to become vice chairman of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.

Instead, Prentice is forced to spend most of his time talking about making a clean break from recent scandals and mismanagement that Alberta has experienced under Conservative rule, culminating in the forced resignation this year of Alison Redford as premier.

‘Restoring trust’

“Over time (our) government has lost its way. Watching from afar, I was as disappointed and frustrated as anyone.

“I wasn’t at the table when those decisions were made, but I’m at the table now,” Prentice said, taking advantage of his last opportunity to pin the blame for extravagant expense claims by lawmakers on others.

“I can tell you this: I will restore a commitment to fiscal prudence and ethical conduct in Alberta.”

Although Prentice will be sworn in as premier sometime between Sept. 15 and 22 when he will also name his cabinet, he can’t take a seat in the legislature until he wins a by-election in an electorate that has yet to be chosen.

That could be a far greater challenge than gaining the Conservative leadership, given his party’s low standing in the polls, far behind the Wildrose Party.

He not only has to contend with three opposition parties - the Liberals and New Democrats as well as Wildrose - he has to revive enthusiasm among Conservatives, only 23,386 of whom cast ballots in the leadership vote (with 78 percent going to Prentice), compared with 97,000 in the 2006 campaign that elected Ed Stelmach and 59,000 in 2011 when Redford won.

More troubling than those numbers was a recent poll that showed 55 percent of Albertans didn’t know who they preferred to see leading the Conservative party, or didn’t care.

Overcoming bad feelings

On the fiscal front, he is faced with big-spending programs that will accumulate billions of dollars in debt, wiping out billion in royalties from oil and natural gas.

However, his experience as a federal cabinet minister jells with one of his key strategic objectives: opening up markets for Alberta’s crude bitumen, a goal that puts him at odds with a formidable array of opponents to pipelines such as Keystone XL, Energy East, Northern Gateway and the Trans Mountain expansion.

One of his few promises for the petroleum industry was to end massive government investments in carbon capture and storage projects, which he said is not the “panacea” for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Instead, Prentice said he will shift the emphasis to phasing out coal-fired power plants that produce more of Alberta’s GHGs than the oil sands, improving the performance of the transportation sector and encouraging the use of more efficient appliances.

He will also retain a C$15-per-metric-ton fee on emissions intensities for the largest industrial facilities, but not increase the penalty unless it is done in tandem with other North American jurisdictions.