Alberta Minute: Sunshine Lists, Oil Curtailment, and Electricity Markets

Alberta Minute - Your weekly one-minute summary of Alberta politics.

This Week In Alberta:

• Obviously, the House is still on break for Summer, and this week there are no Committee meetings either. The next scheduled Committee meeting is a Special Standing Committee on Members' Services meeting on August 6th.
  
  
• The Standing Committee on Resource Stewardship is reviewing the Public Sector Compensation Transparency Act (Alberta's sunshine list) and is now accepting submissions from the public on this process. Submissions are open until September 9th, and details of how to submit are available here.
  
  
• A deal to handover the government's oil-by-rail contracts to the private sector is reportedly close to being signed. The deal is designed to break the catch-22 the industry is currently caught in where the lack of oil transportation capacity deflates prices necessitating the production curtailment, but, at the same time, the production curtailment makes oil-by-rail a less attractive investment.

Last Week In Alberta:

• The Alberta Government officially cancelled Alberta's switch from our longstanding 'energy-only' electricity market to a 'capacity' electricity market. This is excellent news as the energy-only system has consistently provided Alberta residents and businesses with low power prices. The idea of transitioning away from a free-market system to a capacity market was never anything more than a risky ideological solution in want of a problem.
  
  
• The government also eased Oil production quotas again, raising the cap to 3.76 million barrels per day for September. We still can't believe we have a government-mandated supply limit in a supposed free-market, but at least the government is slowly working towards removing the limit.
  
  
• Finally, this week, Calgary and Edmonton seem determined to copy each other. Both cities are mired in budget messes, both cities have new LRT lines that are running late, are over budget, and have questions about construction, and now Calgary wants a publicly-funded Stadium to match Edmonton's.

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