Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said her government plans to name new board members for the provincial pension fund manager as early as this week — one step in a series of reforms to boost what she called “middling returns.”
Smith said her administration “had to act” on complaints that costs and management fees had become too high at Alberta Investment Management Corp., Edmonton, the firm that manages C$169 billion ($120 billion) in pension fund money and other government accounts in the Canadian province.
Finance Minister Nate Horner surprised people on Nov. 7 by firing the entire AIMCo board and Chief Executive Officer Evan Siddall, saying they had allowed expenses to soar to levels that weren’t acceptable. The firm’s operating costs were just shy of C$1.1 billion in the fiscal year ended March 31 — up 45% in three years.
“AIMCo should be focused on getting the very best returns for pensioners, but doing so in a way that is conservative,” Smith said in an interview Nov. 15.
The leader of the oil-rich Canadian province cited the wealth fund manager of another hydrocarbon mother-lode, Norway, as a model: Norges Bank Investment Management oversees about $1.74 trillion, with a similar number of employees as AIMCo.
Siddall had been CEO for a little more than three years. AIMCo’s investment team outperformed its single-year benchmark in 2021 and 2022, but underperformed in 2023.
The government has considered hiring former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper to lead AIMCo’s new board, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. Horner is temporarily the AIMCo chairman, and there’s an interim CEO in place.
Smith and Horner are seeking a different approach at the money manager as Alberta embarks on a plan to massively increase the Heritage fund, which invests a portion of the province’s oil and gas royalty for future generations.
“We do think that there is an approach that we can take with our Heritage Savings Trust Fund that would allow for it to grow to C$250 billion or more by 2050,” the premier said. It was less than C$25 billion as of June 30.
To get there, Smith said, AIMCo may need to manage the Heritage fund differently than the pension money it handles on behalf of teachers, judges and other provincial government employees.
“We’ll very likely see AIMCo take a hybrid approach — managing the pension assets versus the Heritage Savings Trust Fund,” she said, without being specific.
“But there’s a process we have to go through. We’ve got to put a chairman in place, assess a new board, get a new management team in place, and then we’ll have more to say about what our plans are for the Heritage fund.”
