‘Self-regulated’ is a rigged game for AER

By Lethbridge Herald on March 7, 2025.

Editor,

Because of possibility that the Alberta Energy Regulator may allow a foreign company to open a mine on the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains, home of headwaters that flow across Canada to the Hudson Bay.

And because of a self-regulatory process in Alberta, which allows such industrial-mining activities to police themselves and to self-regulate, under the authority of the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) …it must be noted that the AER is not an impartial government authority, but is an industry-funded, and industry-chosen body purporting to be an unbiased protector of the public. The below was found in a web search for the term “Alberta energy regulator funding”:

“The AER operates at arm’s length from the Government of Alberta,”

The public deserves to be informed of the duplicity involved in letting the public believe that the AER (or the Alberta Government itself) is protecting the public interest in this matter.

From the AER website: “We regulate the safe, responsible, and efficient development of Alberta’s energy and minerals resources.”

As of 2013, the Government of Alberta announced that the AER would be funded entirely by industry.

The AER is more accurately described as a “self-regulatory” agency, which allows some industries the private privilege of being able to “police” themselves under the honouur system.

Such “self-regulation” also serves to insulate and protect the government from involvement and backlash for harms and damages to the public, the environment, or the government itself. Any and all complaints get funnelled to an industry-trade-body which is loyal to it’s paymasters, the industry itself, and not necessarily the public interest.

Self-regulation thus allows it’s industry participants to get away with harms or damages to the public, while being able to “adjudicate” those harms through their own, self-chosen, self-funded “referees”.

It is a cleverly rigged game, intentionally created to serve and benefit the interests of its members, while not giving a fair or balanced level of interest in the negative outcomes to the public.

I thank the Lethbridge Herald for it’s impartial and informative reporting on this and other topics.

Larry Elford

Lethbridge

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Fedup Conservative

1 day ago

If the Alberta Energy Regulator was so concerned about the well-being of the people why was Klein allowed to let the oil industry to abandon their out of production oil wells on our farmland rendering them worthless when I was involved with it for 8 years under Lougheed and Getty they made the industry pay for the cleanup and now they don’t.
Larry is absolutely right. It’s just one more way for these Reformers to screw the public and benefit the rich oil industry just like Smith and her pals have been trying to do with our healthcare. Allow Private-For-Profit Clinic to open and pay them extra money for their services and convince the ignorant fools that it’s coming out the government coffers when it’s been added to the provincial taxes and will come out of their pockets. It likely explains why our Provincial Debt recently increased by $8 billion to $85 billion.