All political roads lead to the energy minister
Alberta’s new energy minister, Ken Hughes, is married with three teenage children, but visiting his office at the Alberta legislature, you’d swear he was a bachelor. The walls are bare except for picture hooks left by the previous tenant, nary a knick-knack sits in the side cabinet, and not a memento graces the mantelpiece.
To complete the minimalist bachelor effect, Hughes should remove all the light fixtures in the room and have a single bulb dangling from a wire. Socks drying on the heating vent wouldn’t be out of place, either.
When I mention this to Hughes, he says the reason for the spartan look is he and his wife, as art aficionados, are taking their time to carefully peruse the provincial archives to find just the right pieces to hang on his wall. It’s an overly earnest explanation that sounds forced. What he should have said, is that he’s only been in the job a month, he has a young family in Calgary with three kids in school and, for crying out loud, he has other things on his mind beyond what pictures should decorate his office.
So, I respond just as earnestly that I think it’s because Hughes doesn’t like Edmonton.
For the briefest moment, there is a flash of incredulity, maybe even panic, on his face as he figures out how to respond. Just as quickly, though, he realizes I’m joking and he erupts in laughter. If nothing else comes from my first meeting with Hughes, I realize he has a keen sense of humour. He’s going to need it. As energy minister, Hughes is in for a tumultuous time. Just about every major issue and challenge facing the province — whether it’s political, social, fiscal or environmental — bumps up against energy. There was a time when being minister of energy was as easy as being minister of revenue, back when we had record oil prices and record royalties pouring into the provincial treasury.
The province no longer has a minister of revenue, and the minister of energy is facing falling oil prices, rock bottom natural gas prices and a polarizing debate over the effect of the oilsands on the national economy. We’ve had well-publicized oil spills the past few weeks and, on Wednesday, three major oilpatch companies announced they’ll begin random drug and alcohol testing of their employees.
In any other province, the most important politician next to the premier is the finance minister. In Alberta, it’s the energy minister. Since almost all political roads in Alberta will eventually lead to Hughes, I’m in his office for a getting-to-know-you interview.
Hughes is no stranger to the media, having been a member of Parliament from 1988 to 1993 and then chair of Alberta Health Services from 2008 to 2012. He’s also no stranger to critical media coverage, having been chair of AHS during Stephen Duckett’s tumultuous presidency, which ended with Duckett being booted by the board over the infamous cookie incident.
I ask him to explain the major challenges facing him and his department and he responds with a long list of things to do, none of them easy.
“I look at this with the perspective of a government that has a four-year runway to do some important stuff that could have decades of influence on Alberta,” says Hughes.
One priority is ensuring the province has an up-to-date electricity grid; another is finding a balance between environment and development, something that he says requires “a combination of science and judgment.”
He is also overseeing the regulatory enhancement project, wherein regulations of projects currently split between the departments of environment and sustainable resources, as well as the Energy Resources Conservation Board, will be reviewed and merged together into a “one-window approval process for industry.”
Each of those issues — power lines, environmental impacts and regulatory streamlining — is already the subject of push back from forces as disparate as the Wildrose Party and Greenpeace.
But the biggest issue facing the government is the one facing the biggest push back: access to marketplace. In other words, new pipelines to ship Alberta bitumen to Asia and the United States, the same pipelines that are motivating protest movements from Vancouver to Washington, D.C.
The issue of getting our bitumen to tidewater or saltwater ports is critical to Alberta, says Hughes.
“If we get to tide water, we get world price, so we’ve got to get to tide water,” says Hughes. “Industry is missing out on somewhere between $15 and $20 billion in revenues per annum today because we’re landlocked and don’t have enough access to global prices.”
If industry is missing out on billions of dollars, so too is the Alberta government in the form of royalties on those profits. And that, ultimately, is Hughes’ biggest challenge as energy minister — increasing the revenue stream to the Alberta treasury.
It is arguably the biggest challenge facing any minister of cabinet.
As Hughes says with a wry understatement and sly smile to wrap up the interview, “We have our work cut out for us.”
It might not be critical to the job, but it probably helps that he has a sense of humour.