Don’t cry for Alberta’s elusive billionaire

When news surfaced last week that Murray Edwards, one of Calgary’s highest-profile billionaires, no longer claimed Calgary as his place of residence but had apparently set up house and home in London, England, it quickly became a hot political issue.

In a short news item in Postmedia’s Calgary Herald, two anonymous sources said Edwards had decamped to England because the taxes in Canada for people in the upper end of the income bracket were too high.

Recent provincial and federal tax hikes for the biggest earners have increased total income tax by nine percentage points to 48 per cent.

Edwards himself was not quoted and has not responded to requests for interviews since the story broke. So we don’t actually know why he moved.

But that didn’t stop a flurry of columnists and talk radio types from blaming the NDP government for forcing wealthy people and their money to leave Alberta for less onerous tax regimes.

Edwards is chairman of Canadian Natural Resources Limited (CNRL), one of the biggest oilsands players. He is also the controlling shareholder of Imperial Metals, a B.C. mining company, and chairman of Magellan Aerospace, a Mississauga-based company that supplies complex components to the aerospace and aviation industry. And he is principal owner of the Calgary Flames. Forbes Magazine pegs his financial worth at $1.53 billion, down from $2.69 billion in 2015.

Edwards doesn’t court the media. But CNRL was the first company to publicly take on Rachel Notley’s new NDP government.

Less than a month after the election, the company announced it was cancelling an open house for investors because NDP promises had created too much uncertainty about taxes, royalties and climate change policies.

A few weeks later, CNRL blamed the NDP’s corporate tax hike of two percentage points on the company’s second quarter loss of $405 million even though the deep dive in oil prices seemed the more likely culprit.

But then Edwards became somewhat of a big catch for the NDP because he appeared on stage in November with several other oilpatch notables when Notley announced her climate change policies.

Before the announcement, Edwards and three other industry CEOs had been conducting secret negotiations with environmental NGOs so they could come to some agreement about climate change policies.

Environmental groups agreed to soften their opposition to oil export pipelines. The industry representatives agreed to a carbon tax and a cap on oilsands emissions.

But other oilpatch heavyweights were outraged by the deal and the fact they had been left out of the negotiations.

That Edwards was key to negotiations with environmental NGOs seems more than a little ironic given the environmental record of two of the corporations he leads.

Only the year before, a four-square-kilometre tailings pond full of toxic waste at an Imperial Metals copper and gold mining site in central B.C. spilled all of its contents into nearby lakes and rivers, causing a local emergency.

The mining company had already been warned by government inspectors that the pond was getting too full for the dam walls to hold it.

Two weeks ago, after a long investigation, the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) found that for several years, CNRL had used “excessive” steaming to melt underground bitumen so it could be brought to the surface.

The pressure caused fractures to rock formations and seepage of 1.2 million litres of oily water, which contaminated 20.7 acres of land and killed birds and other animals at CNRL’s Primrose East operation, located 250 kilometres northeast of Edmonton.

The AER has since introduced more stringent steaming regulations which will cut into CNRL’s rate of bitumen production.

The hockey front hasn’t exactly been encouraging for Edwards either.

The Flames are sitting on the bottom rungs of the league ladder. Last summer when Edwards and the rest of the team’s owners put forward a plan for a new arena that would cost almost $1 billion and require a good deal of taxpayers’ money, support among Calgarians was lukewarm at best.

Perhaps it’s just easier for Edwards to melt into London’s swarm of billionaires than face all the complications of living in Calgary these days.