Danielle Smith advisor who advocated publicly funded well cleanup faces ethics complaint
An investigation request filed today with the ethics commissioner scrutinizes David Yager's political and industry ties as an AER board member and author of the controversial Mature Asset Strategy.
Environmental law firm Ecojustice has asked Alberta’s ethics commissioner to initiate a probe of Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) board member David Yager, who wrote a controversial strategy that advocated public subsidies for industry to clean up the province’s backlog of inactive oil and gas wells.
Ecojustice filed its request this morning on behalf of Two Hills landowner and farmer Dwight Popowich, who for the past 13 years has had an inactive gas well in the middle of an alfalfa field on his property.
The submission argues that Yager’s deep ties to Premier Danielle Smith and the industry he’s tasked with regulating represent a violation of the Conflict of Interest Act.
“It's impossible to represent the interests of a partisan government, an independent regulator, private companies and the public all at the same time,” Ecojustice lawyer Susanna Calabrese told The Orchard.
Yager’s business card identifies him as both an AER board member and “Special Adviser to the Premier, Executive Council.”
On his website, Yager boasts of having encouraged Smith to pursue the Wildrose leadership in 2009 and being the top fundraiser for her leadership bid. He ran for the Wildrose in the 2012 provincial election in the now-defunct Calgary-Hawkwood riding, losing to PC candidate Jason Luan.
He served as the Wildrose president from 2012 to 2014 before taking a position as the party’s VP fundraising until 2016, and then playing an active role in the party’s merger with the PCs the following year to create the UCP
In another section of his webpage, Yager describes himself as a consultant for “clients in various facets of the oilfield services industry,” via his company Yager Management Ltd.
Popowich and Ecojustice want the ethics commissioner to look into whether Yager has made or influenced decisions furthering his private interests, failed to disclose his private interests with the commissioner, and/or violated post-employment restrictions by continuing to work for industry after working for the government.
In May, The Tyee published a story from MacEwan University journalism student Raynesh Ram revealing that Yager has received nearly $500,000 through at least four consecutive sole-source contracts with the provincial government between January 2023 and the present.
Ecojustice and its client further allege that these contracts violated the province’s Procurement and Sole-Sourcing Policy.
Yager’s sole-source contracts include $60,000 to work on an Advisory Council on Alberta’s Energy Future, which solicited input from 163 industry executives and produced a final report was never made public, as well as $70,000 to conduct a review of the AER that concluded it should be more responsive towards industry.
Yager was appointed to the AER board in April 2024, as he was in the midst of a $136,000 sole-source contract to provide “professional services.”
This would have been the development of the Mature Asset Strategy (MAS), which is intended to reduce the number of inactive oil and gas wells across the province.
Premier Smith advocated a proposal to give energy companies financial incentives to clean up inactive wells, which they’re already legally obligated to do, when she was a corporate lobbyist before her 2022 return to politics.
The MAS, a draft of which was leaked to the press in March, proposes a version of this, with the province creating a “special purpose entity” dubbed ClosureCo to purchase inactive wells. Another company, HarvestCo, would produce the remaining resources in those wells to fund their cleanup.
An updated version of the MAS proposes the establishment of a publicly “managed” insurance fund to deal with any potential environmental issues that arise after wells have been reclaimed.
That contract was followed immediately by a $156,000 sole-source contract with the same body for “advisory services,” which expires in March 2026 and likely relates to implementing the MAS.
Both six-figure contracts were approved under the provision “where it can be demonstrated that only one supplier is able to meet the requirements of a procurement.”
“It's very unclear if that's really true in this situation, and whether this was a permitted situation for allowing [consecutive] sole-source contracts,” explained Calabrese.
Popowich, the rural landowner Ecojustice is representing, has a gas well on his property that was drilled in 2008 and hasn’t been active since 2012.
Even though its most recent owner, Sequoia Resources, went bankrupt in 2018, it wasn’t until this year that the well was declared an orphan, making it theoretically eligible for reclamation by the industry-funded Orphan Well Association (OWA).
But Popowich was told that its reclamation won’t occur for at least another decade, given the OWA’s backlog—the product of the AER’s unwillingness to increase the levy charged to producers.
“Whether it's producing or not producing, a well on farmland becomes a problem, especially when it's in the middle of your field,” Popowich told The Orchard.
Oil and gas producers tend not to take good care of their well sites, allowing weeds to spring up, added Popowich, who is the chair of the Polluters Pay Federation and a member of the Coalition for Responsible Energy.
“We often have to call them, or we have to take care of the weeds ourselves, because these guys aren't doing it,” he said, “and that gets into the rest of our crops, and that brings down our crop prices.”
Drilling for gas on farmland is always a risk, with the possibility of scentless, flammable vapours leaking from the well and being spread by the wind. These leaks, which can continue once a well is inactive, are a potent source of methane.
“They are industrial sites, and we're expected to live next to this stuff,” Popowich noted.
Rural landowners, he emphasized, cannot say no when an oil and gas company wants to drill on their land. Although they’re expected to negotiate the terms of the lease, the producer and landowner are on an unequal playing field from the outset.
“This is not a landlord-renter situation. This is expropriation of my rights. You've taken away the use of my land,” said Popowich. “I expect to get it back clean in the future sometime.”
By purchasing inactive wells from companies to facilitate their cleanup, Popowich said Yager’s MAS makes this uneven “playing field even worse.”
Calabrese of Ecojustice said that the “flawed process” through which the MAS was conceived created a “flawed product.” She added:
It's our opinion that the focus throughout the MAS report is really on what's beneficial to the continued economic viability of the fossil fuel industry, not how to accelerate well clean up for the public benefit, or how to support municipalities and landowners who have been greatly affected by the companies that don't pay what they're owed.
Through his ethics complaint, Popowich said he hopes to have it on the legislative record that the MAS was flawed from its conception before UCP MLAs “make a mistake and bring in some laws that make no sense and will do a lot, a lot of damage to Alberta.”
Another terrific piece about the horrors of UCP “governance.”
Figured out why Dave Yager's not sitting with the Alberta Next panel. Just a busy boy!