Former conservative justice minister Jonathan Denis just refuses to step out of the spotlight: now Denis has been accused of a conflict of interest by a former conservative operative involved in Kenney’s ‘kamikaze candidate’ scandal.
Image via the Government of Alberta's Flickr account.
The allegation comes from Cam Davies, the former co-campaign manager of Jeff Callaway’s campaign.
During the Office of the Elections Commissioner (OEC)’s investigation Davies retained a lawyer, Dale Fedorchuk, who worked at the same law firm as Denis. Davies says Fedorchuk gave privileged information to his law partner, Denis, in order to help another client under investigation by the OEC, Callaway.
Davies’ version of events is wild. According to him, Fedorchuk tried to set him up: the whole time he was paying Fedorchuk to defend him, he was actually conspiring with Denis to make Davies the scapegoat in order to protect Callaway.
It’s a hell of a streak for Denis, who was just over a week ago found guilty of contempt of court for trying to intimidate a witness, and is also facing allegations from an alleged former minion who claims Denis hired him to get at the personal phone records of a journalist Denis didn’t like.
UCP handout to insurance companies took almost $400 million out of Albertans’ pockets
Back in 2019, waving around claims by the auto insurers that their industry was about to collapse, the UCP scrapped a cap on auto insurance rates that the Notley administration had brought in back in 2017. The Superintendent of Insurance’s annual report, sneakily released late last Thursday before the long weekend, finally gives us some sense of what that handout to industry cost: a lot.
Almost immediately after the cap was removed, rates across the province shot up by nearly 20%. Albertans paid $385 million more in car insurance premiums than they did in 2019 and with claims way down because of people driving less due to COVID the car insurance industry raked in $173 million more in profits in 2020 than they did in 2019.
The UCP scrapped that rate cap right after Kenney’s former chief of staff, Nick Koolsbergen, lobbied the government on behalf of Alberta’s insurance companies.
Has your auto insurance increased by a lot since 2019? Reply to this email and let me know.
Sundrie
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ATCO Electric, owned by the billionaire Southern family, was fined $31 million after it deliberately overpaid a First Nation group for work on a new transmission line and then tried to get Albertans to pay it off via their electricity bills. That's uhh, how do you say… corruption
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Billionaire Murray Edwards made $16.1 million in 2021 just in compensation from Canadian Natural Resources Limited. That’s up from the $13.6 million he took home in compensation in 2020. And I’m sure you’ll be pleased to know that several other oil and gas CEOs are just raking it in right now.
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Because I hate myself I recently subscribed to Danielle Smith’s newsletter and it is incredibly unhinged. Without an editor or a few political talking points to stick to she writes these rambling, high-in-a-dorm-room screeds. On Twitter I document her latest newsletter where she combines the crankpot monetary theories of Social Credit with Bitcoin… it is wild. Smith says she’ll run for UCP leader if Kenney gets the boot. Will we never be free of her?
- Alberta’s most embarrassing contribution to the senior leadership of the far-right/anti-mandate/general-asshole convoy project, the loathsome Pat King, has been charged with perjury and obstruction of justice.
- Brian Jean fired a wicked rhetorical shot at Kenney’s main man in cabinet, famed sexual-harrasser-defender and alleged horse-slayer Jason Nixon, over the weekend, promising to overturn Nixon’s candidate nomination and hold a fresh nomination race if Jean wins the party leadership. “I would never trust Mr. Nixon for anything… I do not think he is a well qualified individual for representing the people. I do not trust him, " said Jean, which is wild, because Jean’ll trust pretty much anybody.
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