PDF Version: Alberta’s Royalty Review and the Law of Grandparenting
The Royalty Review Panel made it quite clear in its Report that existing projects should not be protected from the proposed changes. In other words it recommended in very strong terms that there should be “no grandparenting”. In recent days this position has been the subject of considerable comment and reaction. Some (e.g. Murray Edwards of Canadian Natural Resources) seem to suggest that the refusal to grandparent constitutes an interference with vested rights and have further suggested that, if implemented, the decision not to grandparent will be open to challenge in the courts. Deborah Yedlin, a columnist, offered comments on CBC Radio on September 26 which seemed to concur and suggested that the panel’s refusal to grandparent is a “non-starter” and “has to be taken off the table”. Others have suggested that this may be a matter on which the government might indeed seek to “pick and choose” i.e. to accept the panel’s recommendation on a go-forward basis but not to apply the recommendations to existing projects. And finally we are told that the American Embassy has been warning us that Alberta should not seek to change arrangements for existing projects.
In sum, the grandparenting issue is emerging as one of the critical issues in the debate on the implementation of the recommendations of the Review Panel. In this comment I propose to examine: (1) the reasons that the panel gave for not grandparenting, (2) the law on grandparenting, and (3) the (potentially) unique position of the Syncrude and Suncor projects.