'That’s big government and how does big government reconcile with open for business?' Sandip Lalli said

Alberta’s “fair deal” panel is drawing criticism from a business organization and from a politician who studied similar ideas the last time the province’s anger was running high.

The province’s Premier Jason Kenney announced the panel at an event this past weekend. The panel, which includes members of the legislature, former Reform party leader Preston Manning, academics and business people, will host public meetings and examine whether Alberta should take steps towards collecting its own taxes, set up its own pension plan or create a provincial police force instead of contracting with the RCMP.

Distroscale

The panel has a $650,000 budget and is set to report by March next year on the proposals.

The head of the Calgary Chamber of Commerce is not convinced it’s what the provincial economy needs.

“This is definitely politics over policy right now and I think the best thing for business is always certainty and having a fair deal panel creates a level of uncertainty,” said Sandip Lalli.

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She said any of these measures would cost the province money to set up and create a regulatory burden on businesses going forward.

“That’s big government and how does big government reconcile with open for business,” she said. “If these things get set up that’s the opposite of making it easy.”

Lalli said the government should be focusing on a competitive carbon tax plan that would see the province export carbon-reducing technology.

“We need to go further with how do we as a country, get to a place where we are working on reducing GHG emissions globally, as opposed to just reducing our emissions.”

She said the minority government could last longer than many people think and it does no good for Alberta to be in constant conflict.

“We need to think about it as a four-year government, so courting tension for four years doesn’t help Alberta and it doesn’t help Canada,” she said.

This is definitely politics over policy

The province has studied these proposals once before. In 2003, then premier Ralph Klein created a “Committee on strengthening Alberta’s role in confederation,” when the long-gun registry, Kyoto protocol and the Canadian Wheat Board were top of mind concerns.

Former Progressive Conservative MLA Doug Griffiths was on the committee and said none of the ideas hold up to scrutiny.

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“Pretty much all of it was non-starters, I realized that a lot of the rhetoric that comes with it comes from anger,” he said. “That is the first time that I learned that your anger is a liar.”

The committee came at the start of Griffiths 13-year-run as an MLA. He said he had long thought the province was getting an unfair deal and should adopt all of the ideas, but close study showed they’re all flawed.

Photo by Larry Wong/Postmedia

An Alberta pension plan, for example, would struggle to match the 10 per cent rate of return the CAPP plan has seen Griffiths said. He said an Alberta plan would also be pushed to invest in provincial industries instead of creating a more diversified portfolio.

“Then when you have a downturn in the economy, you have a downturn in your pension plan.”

He said the government should be working to improve relations with other provinces and not create further areas for division.

“We don’t need anger. We don’t need fear. We need solutions,” he said.

Harrison Fleming, Kenney’s deputy press secretary, said the panel is only looking at the ideas.

“The panel has been tasked with examining proposals and garnering feedback,” he said in an email. “That said, the single biggest chill on investment in Alberta are the harmful policies emanating from Ottawa.”

Staff in Justin Trudeau’s office declined comment on the panel, saying only that the prime minister looked forward to meeting all of the premiers at the earliest opportunity.