Alberta voted for transparency.
We got "transparency."

In March 2020 the UCP committed $1.5 billion in direct equity plus a $6 billion loan guarantee to TC Energy. Joe Biden — who served as Vice President under Obama, who twice rejected the project, and who publicly committed during his campaign to cancellation — cancelled the permit on his first day in office. Toews later confirmed total exposure landed "just under $1.3 billion." The province is still pursuing recovery under legacy NAFTA rules.

The $1.3-billion figure announced in February 2020 ballooned silently to $2.1 billion by the August 2020 fiscal update. The Auditor General also identified an unreported $637-million expense connected to 19 contracts the government had publicly stated were divested when 11 were still held.

2020: AIMCo's CEO confirmed approximately $2.1 billion was lost on a strategy called VOLTS — a derivative bet on market volatility. An independent risk analyst told The Tyee the loss was "predictable and preventable."

2019: Bill 22 had simultaneously forced public-sector pensions, including teachers' assets, to use AIMCo as their sole manager — over the explicit objection of the Alberta Teachers' Association.

November 2024: Finance Minister Nate Horner fired the entire AIMCo board, the CEO, and three senior executives in a single day. Two weeks later, former prime minister Stephen Harper was named chair. Three pension plans have been seeking to recover roughly $1.3 billion in losses through arbitration.

January 2025: The Heritage Fund Opportunities Corporation announced. Under questioning, Finance Minister Horner confirmed the new corporation can "invest that seed funding in a different way than AIMCo" — i.e., outside AIMCo's risk and return discipline — into "areas that matter to Albertans" including AI and water infrastructure.

November 2025: Bill 12 introduced — legislation specifically barring public-sector pension plans from suing AIMCo for losses incurred before November 2024.

The CTF identified 14 corporate-welfare announcements in the UCP's first term totalling roughly $5 billion — about $1,125 per Albertan. The largest single component was a $950-million Petrochemical Diversification Program. According to the CTF, the province's own finance department warned internally that the program "lacked economic merit, would blow a further hole in the budget" and "could benefit projects that would have gone ahead regardless of the incentives."

The United Conservative Party ran on being the party that would look out for taxpayers, but now the UCP is helping itself to tax dollars meant to support struggling Albertans. — Franco Terrazzano, Alberta Director, Canadian Taxpayers Federation, 2020

The Auditor General scolded the Centre in 2020 for $1.3 million in sole-sourced contracts without adequate justification. Its public output included a copyright dispute over a logo allegedly copied from a Boston software company, an attack on a Netflix children's animated film, and incorrect public claims about oil & gas's share of GDP. By June 2024 total spending was over $66 million. The Allan Inquiry — itself commissioned by Premier Kenney — concluded the Centre's "credibility is seriously compromised" and "may have been damaged beyond repair."

Commissioner Steve Allan's final report stated, in his own words, that he "found no suggestions of wrongdoing on the part of any individual or organization. No individual or organization, in my view, has done anything illegal." The targeted environmental groups had been, in his characterisation, "exercising their rights of free speech."

According to a confidential briefing note obtained by the Globe and Mail, the contract paid 6.7 times the usual confidential AHS contract price for equivalent product. Of five million bottles ordered, only 1.5 million were ever shipped to Alberta. Of those, fewer than 5,000 bottles ever reached community pharmacies. The remaining stock began expiring in November 2025.

Health policy experts across Canada describe integrated systems — the kind being dismantled — as the global "holy grail" approach. The AHS board has been fired twice in three years. In early 2025 a single deputy minister was appointed to simultaneously hold three jobs: AHS official administrator, interim CEO, and deputy minister of health. The former CEO has alleged she was pressured to approve private surgical contracts of "significantly increased cost."

The Auditor General's November 2025 report documented that the projected savings collapsed to $18–36 million per year after a "calculation error" was found, and that AHS itself determined the privatised contract would deliver "costs equivalent to current expenditures." The Health Minister was briefed on the collapse and directed AHS to proceed regardless. DynaLIFE was insolvent within 90 days; the contract was terminated at a buyout cost of $32 million plus $77 million in sunk costs.

The Regulator's own estimate of total cleanup liability for conventional oil and gas wells is at least $30 billion. It holds approximately $227 million in security against that — less than one cent on every dollar of liability. The federal government provided Alberta with $1 billion in dedicated cleanup funding during the pandemic. Alberta returned $137 million of it unspent in September 2024, while tens of thousands of wells remain inactive across the province. Industry owes rural municipalities approximately $268 million in unpaid local taxes.

The province paid approximately $2 million to PricewaterhouseCoopers to study the question. The study estimated transition costs of approximately $366 million over six years and annual operating costs $130–150 million higher than under the RCMP, before accounting for the loss of the federal government's $170-million annual subsidy. A subsequent independent analysis put the cost at roughly $550 million more annually. Polling found 80 percent of Albertans opposed.

The Pembina Institute identified 118 active renewable projects affected, representing approximately $33 billion in private investment, an estimated 24,000 job-years of construction work, and $263 million in annual municipal taxes and land leases across 27 municipalities. Three-quarters of all renewables built in Canada the year prior had been built in Alberta.

Internal documents obtained under FOI showed the Alberta Electric System Operator's CEO was "not comfortable" with the pause. Premier Smith publicly claimed AESO had requested the pause. The documents proved AESO did not.

Teck CEO Don Lindsay's letter to the federal Minister of Environment and Climate Change cited no blockades, no "public safety concerns," and no federal indecision as the reason for withdrawal. What it did cite, in its own words, was that "global capital markets are changing rapidly and investors and customers are increasingly looking for jurisdictions to have a framework in place that reconciles resource development and climate change. This does not yet exist here today."

The estimated impact: 7,000 construction jobs, 2,500 operating jobs, more than $70 billion in projected government revenue over the project's 40-year lifespan, and a $1.13 billion writedown for Teck itself.