It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
According to Politico, the speech was a series of mood shifts ranging from gloating to defamatory to blatantly accusing the DOJ of doing its job.
He also called himself the “chief law enforcement officer” of the USA.
Nobody else had noticed that.
The rest of the speech seems to have involved treading on as many DOJ toes as possible. From the language usage, it seems he spends a lot of time catching up on old Bilderberg commentary and Breitbart articles from about 10 years ago.
As an example of democratic, judicial, and legal illiteracy, it was pretty comprehensive. It also looks pretty smug for a guy with his vast library of ongoing statutory and civil legal issues. Does he really think people will let millions of dollars go based on a speech to the DOJ?
He’s misreading his audience badly and perhaps fatally in this case. When he stops being “president,” he’ll notice that. The Countdown to Goodbye Forever Donald is counting down, and he’s not scoring points with anyone anywhere.
People care about their own interests in the future, not about him in the next four years. He’s a lame duck this term, he’s on the way out, and everyone but him knows it.
The negative media comments are never any sort of surprise. The guy reacts so badly to criticism of any kind. The media mainly just reports what’s happening, with a few pitiful exceptions.
Many of the negative headlines are mainly about Musk and DOGE. What’s not to criticize? It’s a miserable attempt at management on any level. Even the White House has monotonously had to contradict Musk’s actions.
Just to update from 1776:
The First Amendment allows criticism and it’s not going anywhere.
There are no laws, as in precisely none, against political opposition.
For a guy totally dependent on the theory of immunity, he just stuck his neck out a long way. There is no such thing as immunity from the law by statute. The Supreme Court gave an opinion, not a ruling. There’s a big difference.
Meanwhile, back in that unfashionable thing called reality and somewhat more importantly:
The world has been saying nothing but an unequivocal “No!” to Trump for two months on an increasingly turgid range of critical subjects. Negotiations don’t deserve the name and have gone nowhere.
America’s future finances aren’t looking at all healthy. Destroying trade didn’t do much for Brexit, and it won’t do America any good.
Opposition to Trump’s every move comes from a very broad bandwidth of parties within America. You’d have to deport the whole population to stop negative commentary.
This constant defensive monologue from Trump isn’t a good look.
“The strong man” is now making himself look very much like “the wrong man.”
Disclaimer The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.
War-torn Syria, 2017: Elizabeth Kucinich, Dennis Kucinich and Tulsi Gabbard meet with Syrian Christian Leaders
While many in Washington claim to defend Christianity and Western values, their policies have led to the systematic annihilation of some of the world’s oldest Christian communities. The same politicians who posture as defenders of faith have not just turned a blind eye to the suffering of Christians in the Middle East, from Palestine’s West Bank and Gaza to Lebanon and Syria, they have chosen instead to fund their murderers.
U.S. tax dollars funneled through the CIA and USAID, have played a pivotal role in arming and enabling extremist factions whose ascendance has resulted in atrocities.
The forces of Syria’s new self-proclaimed “interim president” a Salafist, Sunni Muslim who currently goes by the name Ahmed al-Shara, over this past weekend lined up civilians, both Alawites and Christians, against the wall and executed them. Their crime: Infidelity to Salafism, a strict interpretation of Islamic law.
Elizabeth and I have visited Syria many times. We have traveled through it and experienced a beautiful, secular country where being Syrian was more important than a difference in faith, where communities attending churches, synagogues and mosques lived as one.
Syria has been torn apart over the last decades by external interventionism and ignorance giving rise to extremism and the worst humanitarian disaster of the 21st Century.
Many Syrian Christians historically supported the Assad government and its Ba’athist secular ideology because it guaranteed religious freedom and protected minorities.
Unlike certain Islamist movements, the Assad regime maintained a secular state where Christians could practice their faith without persecution. Christians held positions in the government, military, and business sectors.
The Alawites are a religious minority in Syria, with smaller communities in Lebanon and Turkey. The Assad family which ruled from 1970 to earlier this year is Alawite.
The Alawite practice of Islam incorporates elements of Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, and Christianity. It is distinct from mainstream Islamic sects. Former President Assad promoted secularism consistent with Alawite support for secular governance.
Soul-searing videos have surfaced from the mass murders of recent days: Alawite and Christian Syrians pleading for their lives while being dehumanized, ordered to crawl on all fours and bark like dogs to prepare for “dying like dogs,” in a fusillade of bullets. The killers are seen being cautioned to turn off their phones and not to share such videos so as not to turn world opinion against them.
Public relations are always to be desired to cover up cold-blooded murder and its designs and to protect the West’s fantasy that the new self-declared rulers of Syria are kinder and gentler than the propagandized descriptions of their predecessors.
How did the situation get to this point?
The ongoing humanitarian crisis and severe sectarian violence in Syria are direct outcomes of policies dating back to the “Clean Break” doctrine of 1996, by a D.C. think tank which counseled Benjamin Netanyahu to make a “clean break” from “the previous government’s ‘peace process’.” (their quotes) which it saw as a serious weakness.
The Clean Break doctrine laid the groundwork for aggressive policies toward Syria which emerged through an effort coordinated by the Bush White House as several authors of the Clean Break strategy ascended to federal government policy-making positions.
The “Clean Break” approach was further advanced by Hillary Clinton, who, as Secretary of State, together with CIA Director David Petraeus, proposed arming Syrian rebels.
The White House rejected the plan, but, somehow, the momentum generated to overthrow Assad was propelled by the CIA, President Obama’s 2012 presidential directive, which explicitly called for the overthrow of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, merely authorized what was underway without his permission.
It was not the last time the CIA found a way to subvert Obama in Syria. On September 12, 2016, a ceasefire agreement was negotiated by the US Secretary of State, John Kerry and the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, aimed at the two major powers cooperating to limit extremist groups.
According to a source familiar with the arrangements, Robert Malley, Obama’s special Middle East envoy, was planning to fly to Lebanon and then to travel to Damascus to meet with Assad, to capitalize on the Kerry-Lavrov ceasefire and open the possibility of a new direction in U.S.-Syrian relations.
The very next day a US airstrike killed over 100 Syrian soldiers. Malley’s trip was cancelled and the ceasefire ended within hours.
The plan to oust Assad went into high gear. Obama was played by Hillary Clinton and the CIA in Syria, just as he was played by them in Libya.
Judicial Watch obtained documents which proved the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) was aware that the strategy of supporting opposition forces – largely comprised of Salafist and extremist factions, including Al-Qaeda affiliates – would lead directly to the establishment of a “Salafist principality” in eastern Syria, with a strict interpretation of Sunni Islam.
The DIA explicitly stated this outcome was precisely “what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime.”
The Clean Break, Benjamin Netanyahu, the CIA, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Defense Intelligence Agency are all responsible for the disintegration in Syria which has resulted in extreme sectarian violence. Most of those who are being killed today were then just children, in a country where communities attending mosques, churches and synagogues existed side by side.
U.S. tax dollars, funneled through the CIA and USAID, have played a pivotal role in arming and enabling extremist factions whose ascendance resulted in the atrocities.
In Syria, America’s Middle East machinations scaled tragic heights. Under the Obama administration, the CIA launched “Timber Sycamore” in 2012, a covert operation that funneled billions of dollars in weapons and training to so-called “moderate” connected to Al-Queda, Al-Nusra and ISIS. A good deal of weapons paid for by U.S. taxpayers and intended to be used against Syria, ended up in the for sale on the black market.
The American people were told a fairy tale that we were supporting freedom fighters against a dictator. What we actually accomplished was funding the terrorists who now murder Christians, massacre Alawite villages, and impose radical Islamic rule in areas they seize.
It was a reckless intervention, driven by a geopolitical obsession with weakening Iran and Russia. It has not only destroyed Syria but it has also created a breeding ground for global terrorism.
The vaunted Timber Sycamore escapade was said to be eliminated by the first Trump Administration, yet the intent of Timber Sycamore, ousting Assad, continued under the Biden Administration. For those students of dendrology, the sycamore is a tree characterized by weak limbs and large leaves which decay slowly upon falling to earth.
As I reflect on America’s disastrous policies in Syria, I am left with a haunting question: Why would the United States pursue strategies that have led to the slaughter of Christians and Alawites, the destruction of ancient communities, and the triumph of extremism?
For years, as a Member of the House of Representatives, I stood on the floor of Congress and sounded the alarm about reckless regime-change policies. I opposed the neoconservative “Clean Break” strategy.
I spoke out against the Iraq War in 2002, knowing it would unleash sectarian violence and provide a breeding ground for jihadist groups. I rejected the illegal U.S. intervention in Libya in 2011, warning that removing Gaddafi would turn Libya into a failed state and open the door to Islamic extremists.
Each time, I was ignored, dismissed, or even vilified by those Washington insiders eager to remake the world in their own image, (and to cash in while doing so) without regard to the human cost.
I demanded transparency.
I demanded accountability.
I called for a congressional investigation into the CIA’s role in arming extremist groups.
I was met with official silence and media-induced public ridicule.
In 2013, I opposed Obama’s plan to bomb Syria, warning that U.S. military intervention would do nothing but strengthen jihadists. When I traveled to Syria in 2017 with Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, I spoke directly with Christian leaders, civilians, and government officials who told us what the American media refused to report: The U.S. was not helping the Syrian people – it was destroying them.
I came back determined to expose the truth, to tell the American people that our tax dollars were funding a war that targeted innocent people, people whose families had lived in the region for centuries.
Most in mainstream media, every loyal to war narratives, dismissed the findings. The bipartisan political establishment stayed the course, ensuring that weapons and resources continued to flow into the hands of extremists.
Now, in the aftermath of Assad’s fall, the worst-case scenario has come to pass. Cities that once housed some of the world’s oldest Christian communities lie in ruins, their people slaughtered or driven into exile. Christians and Alawites are labeled heretics by the very groups America helped empower.
And I ask again: Why?
Why would America champion policies that lead to the killing of Christians, the destruction of churches, the massacre of Alawites and the rise of radical jihadists? Why did our leaders knowingly aid those who murdered the very people America claimed to want to protect?
The answer lies in a corrupt, immoral foreign policy dictated not by ethics, human rights, or even national security, but by the interests of the military-industrial complex and strategists who view human lives as pawns in a geopolitical chess game.
This tragic situation in Syria is but one example of in the catalogue of chaos which is U.S. foreign policy; Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Lebanon in the 1980s, Afghanistan in the 1980s-90s, to Iraq post-2003 are notable examples of similar perfidy, though these debacles are by no means exclusive.
U.S. foreign policy all too often reveals calculations to excite and exploit sectarian, religious, or ethnic divisions to achieve vainglorious geopolitical goals which blowback in disintegration and defeat.
Like a coterie of Snidley Whiplashes “Curses, foiled again!” our policy geniuses ignore the devastation they have wrought and proceed headlong into plotting the next disasters: future prolonged civil wars, systemic persecution, massive human suffering, refugee crises, and enduring political instability.
The deliberate exacerbation of sectarian tensions has repeatedly left behind weakened states, emboldened extremist groups, and countless innocent victims. It perpetuates human suffering on a vast scale. It has severely damaged America’s global reputation. It has fostered extremism, instability, and ongoing conflict.
I have spent my career fighting against these wars of aggression. I have cautioned that regime-change operations never lead to peace, only to greater suffering.
Now, with the fall of the Assad government to extremists, the nightmare that I and others warned about has become reality. The Syrian war, fueled by U.S. intervention and covert operations, has led to the very outcome that interventionists claimed they were trying to prevent—a bloodbath.
The neocons, interventionists, and war profiteers have achieved their aims, their machinations whitewashed by a reckless and complicit mainstream media whose ignorant naïveté or willful deception has paved the way for these atrocities. Another government toppled, another nation in ruins, and another generation of innocent people paying the price for metastatic arrogance.
Americans believe in religious freedom. Our government does not practice that abroad.
Americans believe in human dignity. Our government pulverizes it in other countries, with our tax dollars.
Americans want peace. But we will never have peace until we confront the reality that our own government has been spending trillions of our precious tax dollars in furtherance of stirring conflict and igniting wars, to the benefit of a few and to the manifest detriment of the rest of us.
I did all I could while in office. Now I pray for those suffering under the yoke of oppression we have caused, and pray for America to change course.
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US and EU Supported al-Qaeda in Syria
But no longer do
by Eric Zuesse / March 15th, 2025
The key decision was when Barack Obama finally decided in December 2012 to arm al-Qaeda in Syria so as to bring down Syria’s Government. That culminated a U.S. policy since 1949, which was aimed against Russia and against Palestinians.
It is an established fact that U.S. President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Chuck Hagel, and the rest of Obama’s Administration, were seeking to replace the non-sectarian Assad Government in Syria, by a government that would please the fundamentalist-Sunni, or “Salafist,” Saud family, who own Saudi Arabia. Throughout the U.S.-and-allied media, the only problem in Syria was Bashar al-Assad, who led that country, and therefore regime-change was supposed to be the solution for Syria, though the only Syrians who supported overthrowing Assad were a small minority, jihadists led by Syria’s al-Qaeda, and in Syria’s northeast, separatist Kurds also supported overthrowing Assad, because they wanted to create a Kurdistan, which would be the first Kurdish nation. The press throughout the U.S. empire hid from the public the fact that the U.S. was supporting al-Qaeda in Syria. For example, on 13 January 2017, the BBC, one of the U.S. Government’s most reliable propaganda agencies (though not from the U.S. Government), headlined “Obama’s Syria legacy: Measured diplomacy, strategic explosion“, and opened:
How did a man who took office espousing a new era of engagement with the world end up a spectator to this century’s greatest humanitarian catastrophe? …
Despite the pressing moral imperative, Obama remained convinced a military intervention would be a costly failure.
He believed there was no way the US could help win the war [a civil war there, which he himself had helped to produce] and keep the peace without a commitment of tens of thousands of troops. The battlefield was too complex: fragmented into dozens of armed groups and supported by competing regional and international powers.
However, on 12 August 2012, Obama was warned by the Defense Intelligence Agency that “THERE IS THE POSSIBILITY OF ESTABLISHING A DECLARED OR UNDECLARED SALAFIST PRINCIPALITY IN EASTERN SYRIA (HASAKA AND DER ZOR), AND THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT THE SUPPORTING POWERS TO THE OPPOSITION [to Syria’s Government] WANT, IN ORDER TO ISOLATE [actually replace] THE SYRIAN REGIME.” Then in December 2012, Obama settled upon his policy of arming the jihadists in Syria under al-Qaeda’s leadership, and using circuitous ways of getting to the jihadists weapons from around the world, so as to hide America’s involvement as the chief coordinator and funder. The world’s largest Embassy, America’s in Iraq, was running this operation. Each year, the main decisions for this operation were being made not only by Obama but at the annual private Bilderberg conferences, which bring together over a hundred top aristocrats from each NATO country so as to provide the coming year’s guidance to NATO’s Secretary General. Although some of the attendees there were currently holding a public office in their country, many did not but instead were multibillionaires or otherwise top consultants to billionaires; so, the Bilderberg conferences are officially private, not at all public; and, in the United States and its allied countries, there is nothing illegal about major decisions concerning war and peace and other major Governmental policies being determined entirely in secret and off-the-record, in these ‘democracies’. From a policy-standpoint in the collective West — this bastion of ‘democracies’ against ‘tyrannies’ — the U.S.-and-allied countries have developed a very efficient system that essentially no longer needs the public, who are no longer real participants to be informed but have become instead mere subjects to be deceived and pay taxes so as to fund these Governments to do the work that those masters (U.S.-and-allied billionaires) want to be done (even if for ONLY private reasons).
On March 11, I headlined “America won in Syria and continues to win there; the massacres are now accelerating.” Because Obama-Biden-Trump got their Syrian al-Qaeda proxy-army to final victory and it is doing there what al-Qaeda does, this is an American-Government success-story that America’s Government DON’T want to brag about nor even to acknowledge publicly. We slaughtered madly in Korea and in Vietnam and in Iraq and in Afghanistan and in Libya, and by using coups and proxy-armies in Ukraine and in so many other countries; but America’s victory in Syria is one that ‘our’ ‘news’-media are NOT reporting, because they don’t want us to know about it.
AIMCo's 11-person board, CEO and three executives were dismissed over the Government of Alberta's frustration with increasingly high costs and over-reliance on third-party money managers
“To suddenly dismiss all these people, I can’t explain it , the current reasons just don’t hold water, they’re just not credible.”
Alberta Finance Minister Nate Horner revealed Thursday the entire leadership of the Alberta Investment Management Corp. was dismissed. The move is unrelated to the proposed Alberta Pension Plan, he said Friday
HE LIES, THEY NEED AIMCO FOR THEIR ALBERTA PENSION SCHEME
. David Bloom/Postmedia file
The mass overhaul of leadership at the Alberta Investment Management Corp. will likely raise new questions about the provincial government’s proposal to implement an Alberta pension plan which, if approved by Albertans and the province, would likely be managed by the Crown investment corporation. Article content
The Alberta government on Thursday dismissed the $169-billion public pension fund’s 11-person board, its CEO and three executives, citing frustration with increasingly high costs and AIMCo’s over-reliance on third-party money managers. On Friday it appointed Ray Gilmour, a longtime government bureaucrat, as interim CEO.
The province’s extraordinary intervention into the arms-length pension fund manager resurrected questions around potential plans to put a provincial pension to a referendum — an idea that has gone dormant after receiving wide disapproval in late 2023. Finance Minister Nate Horner said Friday the upheaval at AIMCo has “nothing to do” with it being the potential manager.
“This move surely does not come across as something that creates a lot of confidence in the Alberta government. If anything, this is just another nail in the coffin if that’s what they’re trying to do — I don’t know. It’s all very strange,” Keith Ambachtsheer, director emeritus of the International Centre for Pension Management at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, said of the potential Alberta Pension Plan. Article content
AIMCo, the sixth-largest pension fund in Canada, is responsible for overseeing the nearly $24 billion Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund and has a mandate to operate independently from the government — though the law defining its mandate allows for greater government involvement than is available to the federal government in relation to the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. The now-dismissed board members were all appointed by the governments of former premier Jason Kenney and current Premier Danielle Smith.
AIMCo has been presented as one of top potential investment managers for a provincial pension plan in the event it was approved via referendum, as outlined in a 2023 report prepared by Lifeworks analyzing the considerations involving a potential provincial pension plan. That report argued Alberta was entitled to 53 per cent of the national retirement plan’s assets, worth about $334 billion, a number that’s been rebuffed by the CPPIB and others.
Keeping assets in the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board — the least-expensive option available — was also considered in the report, however that option presents serious challenges because it would require approval from several provincial governments.
The Lifeworks report suggested amending legislation to assert AIMCo’s operational independence in the event it became responsible for an Alberta Pension Plan’s assets.
“(The Alberta Pension Plan) has completely dropped off the political agenda,” said Duane Bratt, a political science professor at Mount Royal University. “Now it’s going to go right back on the agenda.”
Thursday’s decision will undermine confidence in AIMCo over the short-term and thus its ability to manage an in-province pension plan, Bratt said, but public sentiment could change over the long run if the corporation stabilizes.
“Maybe they think by the time that they put this to a referendum, let’s say in a year’s time, maybe AIMCo’s ship will have righted itself because of the actions that were taken … I don’t know. But AIMCo is connected to the APP,” Bratt said.
Ambachtsheer said he’s perplexed by the overhaul, adding the government has left numerous questions unanswered.
“To suddenly dismiss all these people, I can’t explain it,” he said. “The current reasons just don’t hold water, they’re just not credible.”
Alberta NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi said the mass dismissals “leads to a real drop in public confidence in the work they’re doing.
“This action should mean that any talk of the vastly unpopular Alberta pension plan should be dead now. It should be done, because it’s very clear that the government has admitted that they have no idea how to manage people’s pensions,” Nenshi said in an interview.
Nenshi said the issues at AIMCo, as outlined by the province, do not come as a surprise, but he takes issue with the government’s approach to making changes at the corporation. “We’ve known all this is going on for some time, so how did the government take its eye off the ball so much that they have to take this kind of drastic action instead of managing the process as any normal, sane shareholder would do?”
Money manager’s interim CEO a longtime public servant
AIMCo’s interim CEO, Gilmour, was touted as a dedicated public servant. He has commissioner of corporate services for the City of Medicine Hat and has a background in the banking and financial services industry, according to a profile on the C.D. Howe Institute’s website. (Horner will serve as director and chair of AIMCo for the next month until a new chair is appointed.)
Gilmour has served in executive councils under ex-premiers Rachel Notley and Kenney, and currently under Smith, spanning several ministries including finance, intergovernmental relations, infrastructure and municipal affairs.
Horner’s office declined an interview request on Friday. Meanwhile, Alberta’s lieutenant governor also approved on Thursday the incorporation of a provincial corporation “for the purpose of managing and investing all or a portion of Crown assets.”
This move is not related to the government’s decision to axe AIMCo’s board and CEO, Justin Brattinga, press secretary for Horner, wrote in an email to Postmedia. “The corporation is a preliminary step in our work to grow the Heritage Savings Trust Fund, and as Minister Horner said we will have more to say on that before the end of the year,” Brattinga wrote. “The establishment of the corporation is not related to the actions taken in regards to AIMCo.” Article content
Teachers’ Retirement Fund says pensions ‘remain secure’
The Alberta Teachers’ Retirement Fund on Friday told members in a statement that “their pensions remain secure” and that nothing at AIMCo to date has concerned it about the status of its investments — though it has raised issued with regards to costs at AIMCo with the investment manager and the province.
“We look forward to working with Treasury Board and Finance and being part of determining the appropriate path forward,” it wrote The Alberta Federation of Labour said Albertans “deserve answers” on the government’s decision.
“Precipitous actions like this do not inspire confidence that the UCP can be trusted with the retirement savings of hundreds of thousands of Albertans, or that they can be trusted to successfully and safely run an Alberta-only alternative to the CPP,” wrote Gil McGowan, AFL president and former Alberta NDP leadership hopeful.
In Ottawa, federal NDP MP Heather McPherson called the move “another step to pull Alberta out of the Canada Pension Plan” while federal Minister of Labour and Seniors Steve MacKinnon called the province’s moves “harebrained schemes coming out of Alberta” and said the CPP has a “sterling” reputation.
— With files from Matthew Black
UCP Fires Board and Top Executives Managing Public Pensions
Shock announcement raises questions about what Danielle Smith plans for workers’ retirement savings.
Finance Minister Nate Horner will replace the AIMCo board until a new slate of directors can be found. Photo by Jeff McIntosh, the Canadian Press.
With its surprise decision to cashier the entire board and the top executive of the supposedly independent Alberta Investment Management Corp., we see once again that the United Conservative Party government is determined to control everything, everywhere, all at once.
And if you’re an Albertan, that includes your retirement savings in the Canada Pension Plan Investment Fund.
Indeed, we can be certain this shocking announcement has something to do with that scheme, because chronic underperformance by AIMCo, as the provincial Crown investment corporation is commonly known, has been a frequent target of critics of the UCP’s planned pension grab.
Under the headline “Restoring confidence in AIMCo,” the government said in a terse and unexpected news release Thursday that “after years of AIMCo consistently failing to meet its mandated benchmark returns, the minister of finance will be making changes to restore confidence in Alberta’s investment agency.”
The release complained about a 96-per-cent increase in management fees at AIMCo between 2019 and 2023 and a 29-per-cent increase in the number of employees while the Crown corporation managed a smaller percentage of funds internally — although the news release made no effort to explain exactly what that last point meant.
“Alberta’s government has decided to reset the investment corporation’s focus,” the news release said mildly. “All board appointments have been rescinded and a new board will be established after a permanent chair is named.” That, according to the release, is supposed to take place within 30 days.
“In the interim, president of treasury board and Minister of Finance Nate Horner has been appointed the sole director and chair for AIMCo, effective immediately” — which is not really reassuring for a supposedly arm’s length company managing $169 billion in pension investments.
Notwithstanding the 30-day promise, a cabinet order set Horner’s term as chair of the AIMCo Board to run until the end of September 2025.
Accusing the UCP of wanting to control everything, everywhere, all at once was a clever tribute to the 2022 comedy-drama movie of the same name first used by NDP justice critic Irfan Sabir last spring to describe the UCP fiddling with its own fixed election date law to give itself a little extra time in office.
“Danielle Smith said during the election that Albertans were her bosses,” added Rachel Notley, who was leader of the Opposition at the time, “but it is clear now that she intends to be the boss of everyone.”
Those lines could certainly be applied with similar effect to Thursday’s bombshell.
A comprehensive article in the Globe and Mail revealed that in addition to the 10 board members referred to but not named in the news release, CEO Evan Siddall and three other unnamed executives had been canned.
Siddall, who was appointed CEO on July 1, 2021, with a mandate to turn the company around after its big trading losses during the pandemic, had been the long-time president and CEO of the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. Judging from his Wikipedia biography he seems to have attended meetings of the World Economic Forum and the Bilderberg Group, which must have made certain MAGA-minded members of the UCP caucus feel as if they had ants in their pants.
Or maybe it was Siddall’s decision to let Alberta’s teachers have a limited role in the management of their pension fund, which had been grabbed by the UCP in 2019 and handed over to AIMCo amid great controversy. Indeed, some of those additional pension employees the government was complaining about likely came from the management arm of the teachers’ pension fund.
Whatever happened, NDP finance critic Court Ellingson told the Globe that Siddall and some of his colleagues showed up at a public meeting of the standing committee on the Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund on Wednesday and there was no hint anything was afoot.
Ellingson said in a statement sent to media Thursday afternoon that firing the entire board and the CEO is too drastic a measure for this just to be about AIMCo salaries “when this government passed legislation to remove the caps on salaries for board members.”
“The premier herself appointed some of these AIMCo directors,” he said. “The finance minister himself said this spring that AIMCo was doing a good job.”
He also argued that even in a temporary role, having a partisan politician at the helm of a supposedly arm’s length agency investing 375,000 Albertans’ retirement savings is troubling.
It certainly seems to have unsettled some in investment circles. The Globe quoted the director emeritus of the International Centre for Pension Management at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, Keith Ambachtsheer, saying the move “should be construed as a government takeover of [an] asset pool that belongs to the people of Alberta.”
Will Danielle Smith Use Albertans’ Pensions to Bail Out Big Oil?read more
Ellingson argued “AIMCo’s poor returns are a clear reflection of the UCP’s incompetence.”
“We have raised concerns about their poor returns for years, and we’ve noted AIMCo’s returns have been below that of the Canada Pension Plan,” he said. “Until now, the UCP even proposed using AIMCo to manage the proposed Alberta Pension Plan. Any such APP scheme should now be completely off the table.”
Count on it, though, the opposite is true. If this indicates anything, it’s that the UCP still covets the CPP’s investment funds and saw AIMCo’s returns as an impediment to that ambition. Nor does the party value independent minds in positions of oversight.
Interestingly, another Order in Council published Thursday “approves the incorporation of a provincial corporation for the purpose of managing and investing all or a portion of Crown assets.”
David J. Climenhaga is an award-winning journalist, author, post-secondary teacher, poet and trade union communicator. He blogs at AlbertaPolitics.ca. Follow him on X @djclimenhaga.
Alberta Finance Minister Nate Horner became the one-man board of Alberta Investment Management Corp. this week, and promptly fired its chief executive. (Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press)
When Alberta's public pension manager lost $2.1 billion in a risky bet on market volatility in 2020, little of the scorn or blame fell at the feet of then-premier Jason Kenney or his government.
Why? The investment decisions at the Alberta Investment Management Corporation (AIMCo) are independent of the government. Cabinet's lone role is to appoint directors to the fund manager's board and let the experts invest, trade and (ideally) grow the funds.
The teachers group whose pension funds the Kenney government transferred to AIMCo's control was understandably frustrated their savings' destiny was tied to the downs and ups of the wealth giant in that moment, but the teachers' union wasn't lobbing rhetorical grenades at the premier for the loss itself.
That distance between the politicians and the pension investors shrank substantially this week, when Finance Minister Nate Horner took the unprecedented step to remove the entire independent board of AIMCo, name himself the temporary one-man board and fire CEO Evan Siddall.
All future rhetorical grenades (and bouquets) can be addressed to the finance minister and Premier Danielle Smith.
Ready, AIMCo, fired
Horner has pledged to appoint a new board within a month, but in the meantime he appointed as interim CEO Ray Gilmour, a veteran senior provincial bureaucrat who lacks experience in the world of big-fund management, but did work in Alberta banks more than two decades ago.
The Smith government pitched the move as "restoring confidence in AIMCo" after underperforming financial results and rising costs. Sebastien Betermier, a leading analyst of pension funds, doesn't see this as confidence-building in the agency's ability to make the sophisticated, long-term investment decisions they need to.
"To me it goes the exact opposite way," Betermier, the executive director of the International Centre for Pension Management, told CBC News. "That goes against the whole independence, the ability of the funds to work at an arm's length from government."
When the province created AIMCo in 2007, the then-Tory government specifically barred MLAs from serving on the fund manager's board, to ensure independence. A cabinet order this week temporarily undid that rule.
Betermier, a finance professor at McGill University, said this seemingly abrupt turmoil could also give pause to other major investors or firms AIMCo partners with on large-scale investments. The fund currently co-owns Yorkdale Mall in Toronto with a major property developer (itself owned by an Ontario pension manager), and has been building thousands of U.K. rental apartments in a joint venture with a British firm.
The two-million-square-foot Yorkdale mall in Toronto, one of Canada's largest, is co-owned by AIMCo as part of the fund's diversified portfolio of assets. (Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press)
"When you see moves like this, where the government can come in any day and dismiss the whole board, that sends shivers in your ability to implement such projects going forward," Betermier said.
Horner expressed some disappointment in recent failures by AIMCo to meet growth benchmarks, but said cost growth was the main reason behind the move. In announcing the board's sacking, his office noted that over the last four years, AIMCo has hiked its staff expenses by 71 per cent and its employee numbers by 29 per cent.
"We want them to be a low-cost provider," Horner told reporters.
Unmentioned in that news release is that, thanks in part to the shift of teachers' pension funds to AIMCo's portfolio, the agency's total managed assets rose over that stretch to $166 billion from $115 billion, a 44 per cent increase. (Instead, the release noted that more funds are being managed by external groups than previously.)
Does an investment firm guarantee itself better returns by slashing its workforce and hiring lower-paid executives?
Short-term frustration with costs can overlook the time it takes to develop an international investment strategy over a longer term, Betermier said.
Of the country's major public-sector pension managers known as the Maple 8 — including the Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board and the independent investment arms of the British Columbia and Quebec governments — it's the youngest, only launching in 2008.
It's lately been playing catch-up to its peers to establish more international offices, including New York this year, its first Asian office in Singapore last year, and a recent plan by Siddall to more than double its presence in London.
"It's a project where you can generate a lot of value for pensioners, but you need to give it time," said Betermier. "One of the big risk factors is precisely government interference, when you come right in the middle of an initiative and you undo it."
Evan Siddall led AIMCo for three years before being terminated. The former investment banking executive and head of the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation arrived at AIMCo after major investment losses tarnished the agency's reputation. (Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press)
Horner isn't alone in his frustration with the costs. Deb Gerow, president of the Alberta Retired Teachers Association, said expenses and management fees "have been a concern for us," compared to the educator retirement fund's smaller previous operations.
But is the wholesale sacking of a board the solution to a minister's balance-sheet frustrations?
"It struck me as a rather extreme reaction given the problems the government identified," said Bob Baldwin, a veteran pension consultant who has chaired the C.D. Howe Institute's pension policy council.
It makes him wonder what other considerations were behind the Smith government's takeover of AIMCo leadership.
Horner and his office have said this decision has nothing to do with the UCP's consideration of removing Alberta from the Canadian Pension Plan (and possibly putting AIMCo in charge of an Alberta pension mega-fund). Nor, they say, does this have anything to do with the premier's ambition, reiterated at last weekend's UCP convention, to balloon the $23-billion Heritage Savings Trust Fund into a $250-billion fund by mid-century.
There is certainly a desire by Horner and the premier to change the focus and approach of the Crown corporation that currently stewards Alberta's long-term savings account and the retirement funds of thousands of residents. It's not clear how they want that approach to change, aside from producing wealth management on a leaner budget.
And what happens to AIMCo's investments in the coming years will depend on the quality of the leaders Smith's cabinet selects to run the agency, who will undoubtedly be more aligned with the desired directions of Horner and the premier than a group appointed over several years by both UCP and NDP premiers.
Success will be attributed to this government's actions. So will future losses and failures.
It's the same way that the Smith government has tied Alberta Health Services' outcomes to their own decisions, by ousting the entire board in 2022 and then redesigning the entire system's structure.
They dismantled and remade it, and will politically own whatever comes next.
AIMCo expansion, Alberta's investment
focus were sources of tension before purge,
sources say
Pension veterans say there was more going on behind the scenes than scrutiny of costs
A longtime pension executive described the blanket dismissals as a “shock.”
Alberta Investment Management Corp. chief executive Evan Siddall in Calgary, Alta., 2022. Alberta has relieved Siddall of his duties. Photo by Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press files
The decision by Alberta Investment Management Corp. (AIMCo) to launch operations abroad as it chased higher returns and the extent to which the investment manager should invest in Alberta were sources of tension with the provincial government in the months leading up to Alberta’s stunning decision this week to remove AIMCo’s entire board of directors and chief executive, according to several people familiar with what transpired.
In a news release Thursday, the Alberta government said the “reset” at AIMCo was driven by rising costs at the Crown corporation, including third-party management fees and salaries and benefits that were not matched by a corresponding return on investment.
But three pension veterans familiar with events said there was more going on behind the scenes than scrutiny of costs.
One of them described the stated rationale of costs as “smoke and mirrors” for a deeper agenda to reshape AIMCo.
“Cost-cutting is not a big issue here,” said the source, who asked not be identified because of sensitivities around recent events. “This is a deeply political situation.”
This is a deeply political situation
Another of the sources, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity, pointed to efforts to expand investment capabilities by hiring expensive investment managers and opening offices in New York and Singapore this year and last as a point of tension.
But others said that was just one piece of the puzzle, and suggested the government is focused on driving investments in Alberta.
The shakeup at AIMCo comes as Alberta Premier Danielle Smith prepares to unveil her government’s plan to boost the size of the AIMCo-managed Heritage Savings Trust Fund, which, according to its website, “produces income to support government programs In February, Smith said she envisioned the fund, which was established in 1976 to collect a portion of Alberta’s non-renewable resource revenue to invest in projects that would improve life in Alberta and diversify the Alberta economy, to grow much larger by 2050 than the nearly $24 billion value it had June 30.
The Alberta government also announced plans last year to pull out of the Canada Pension Plan, and take its share of the giant fund with it, but that effort appears to have moved to the back burner.
“We’ll be releasing our plan to grow the Heritage Savings Trust Fund to $250 billion by the end of the year, with a focus solely on getting the best returns for Albertans,” Justin Brattinga, senior press secretary at Alberta’s Ministry of Treasury Board and Finance, said Friday.
Asked whether the government had concerns about AIMCo’s direction and wanted more investments, operations and jobs in Alberta, Brattinga did not directly address the question.
“AIMCo’s mandate is to be a low-cost investor,” he said. “Our concern was with the rapid and unacceptable increases to their operating costs without a corresponding increase in returns for their clients.”
On Friday, the Alberta government announced that its most senior public servant, deputy minister of executive council Ray Gilmour, would be interim CEO, put in place to “stabilize operations and ensure smooth operations during the transition period.”
That followed Thursday afternoon’s bombshell announcement that the government had rescinded all board directorships at AIMCo. Nate Horner, Treasury Board President and Finance Minister, said he had also relieved AIMCo CEO Evan Siddall of his duties.
Horner has been installed as chair and sole director for the next 30 days until a replacement can be found.
One source said they believed the government has found some support for its approach in a client group still reeling from a loss of trust following AIMCo’s stunning $2.1 billion loss in 2020 on a volatility trading strategy, when the COVID-19 pandemic was declared.
The Alberta Teachers’ Retirement Fund, one of the investment manager’s 30 or so clients, told members that the issue of costs had been raised with both the government and AIMCo prior to this week’s purge.
“Nothing that has happened with regard to the changes at AIMCo thus far has caused us concern about the status of our investments,” the ATRF said in a note to members posted on its website Thursday. “At the same time, we have in the past raised issues regarding costs at AIMCo with both the Government of Alberta and with AIMCo.”
The retirement fund for Alberta’s teachers was forced through legislation to turn management of its funds over to AIMCO in 2019. It was a contentious start for the relationship. Unable to reach an agreement on terms of the new arrangement, the outcome was imposed through a government order
Despite the assertions of the teachers’ retirement fund and the government, industry sources say AIMCo’s costs are in line with industry standards, and that returns slightly below benchmarks reflected the risk profile of the investment managers clients rather than performance issues relative to peers.
AIMCo posted an overall return of 6.9 per cent in 2023, despite challenges in its real estate portfolio. The asset manager, which invests on behalf of pension, endowment, insurance and government clients in Alberta, ended the year with $160.6 billion in assets under management. The return, though positive, fell below AIMCo’s benchmark return of 8.7 per cent. A longtime pension executive described the blanket dismissals as a “shock.”
Jim Leech, who ran the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board for six years, said Friday he doesn’t believe the wholesale clear-out of the boardroom and the dismissal of senior executives including the CEO can be solely about “a few basis points of performance or costs.”
The Alberta government’s sudden decision to dismiss the entire board and CEO of the Alberta Investment Management Corp. (AIMCo) comes at a time when a number of the pension fund’s clients are “unhappy,” according to a business columnist with The Globe and Mail.
“I’m not actually completely surprised by this,” Andrew Willis told BNN Bloomberg’s Amber Kanwar in an interview Friday morning.
“AIMCo has been controversial for a couple of years and their performance hasn’t been that great… there is an underlying reason for this rather abrupt action from the government and it’s to do with the ability to keep these clients happy – there is a lot of unhappy clients at AIMCo.”
Willis said that what makes AIMCo unique as a fund is its structure as a crown corporation that manages capital for more than a dozen different groups in Alberta.
“That includes the heritage fund, but it also includes a number of different public sector pension plans,” he explained.
“The university professors in Alberta, for example, AIMCo runs their money, and over the last few years, those professors have been complaining about performance and they’ve been withdrawing their funds from AIMCo and giving them to other outside managers.”
In a statement on Thursday, the province’s Finance Minister Nate Horner said the decision to fire the fund’s board came down to management fees that were too high and a consistent failure to meet benchmark returns.
The Canadian Press reported on Thursday that Horner told reporters following the announcement that he had been watching AIMCo’s performance closely for some time and determined that necessary changes to the fund weren’t going to happen without a “major reset.”
Willis said that despite the government’s suggestion that the fund has been underperforming, their recent returns, though not outstanding, have been on par with most other large Canadian pension plans.
“There wasn’t a complete outlier in performance, they weren’t ahead of anybody else… but they certainly weren’t laggers,” he said.
AIMCo had encountered some setbacks in recent years related to volatility during the pandemic, Willis noted, but he said the fund’s management, led by chief executive officer Evan Siddall, had created a “credible turnaround plan” to resolve those issues.
“Their costs have been rising, they’re staffing up, they want to do more global investing, they want to get into more alternatives – that takes people, so that’s why the headcount was rising, and that’s one of the things that’s upset the government,” he said. Ray Gilmour named interim CEO
Horner will act as AIMCo’s sole director and chair for the time being until a new chair is appointed, which the Alberta government says will happen within 30 days. The province has also appointed an interim CEO: Deputy Minister of Executive Council Ray Gilmour.
Willis said that Gilmour has “no investment management experience,” but is “clearly a trusted pair of hands” within the Alberta government.
He added that aside from who will ultimately run the fund, the biggest question AIMCo faces going forward relates to its mandate.
“Danielle Smith, the premier of Alberta has made it clear she wants to see more investment in Alberta from public money. She made the bid to get Alberta’s share of the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) managed in Alberta too,” Willis said.
“So, Danielle Smith I think looks at AIMCo as a bit of a cookie jar. The mandate that I think they might go to is something like what you’ve got in Quebec with the (Caisse de dépôt et placement), where there’s a mandate to primarily invest in Alberta, and I think that would be really dangerous.”
Alberta is Canada’s largest oil and gas producer, and while the province has made inroads in diversifying its economy in recent years, Willis said “there’s only one big industry, and it’s fossil fuels.”
“So, if you’re overweighting towards that industry, that’s a dangerous thing for Alberta pensioners,” he said.
