I'm attending the Heritage Fund meeting this morning, on the topic of AIMCo's losses on risky trading schemes that the government itself didn't tell us about - they waited for a media leak& then held back the report on the preliminary assessment of the losses. #ableg Background:

Right now, @ChristinaNDP is asking about the investment benchmarks. Why is this important? It's complicated, but the teachers' pension fund has said they don't want to be locked in to AIMCo because they don't like the returns comparisons.

The reason there's been so much chatter about this is teachers were never given a choice - they were forced to move billions of dollars belonging to teachers to AIMCo management. If there had been an actual conversation about this, conflict could have maybe been avoided..

The issue of how AIMCo generates returns is really important to not just teachers and all public sector workers who have their money taken off their cheques and invested in a pension. It's important to us because of how our Heritage Fund generates returns...

...and then that money is used to fund our services, like health and education. So if AIMCo doesn't get good returns for us, it affects us all.

Now, the govt is telling us why they deliberately blew the deadline &broke the law on reporting the Heritage Fund annual report to the Legislature & the public. The Deputy Minister of Finance says it was her fault. Actually, no. In our system, we have Ministerial Responsibility.

@ChristinaNDP also asked about the leaks via the media, which is how we found out that up to $2 billion of our money was gambled away by volatility trading schemes that only AIMCo seems to have taken big losses on. AIMCo CEO says that they told their clients about the losses..

...and that's all very nice, but the fact is that the PUBLIC didn't know, we had to wait to find out via a Wall Street publication and the Globe and Mail. So there's a problem there.

AIMCo CEO also confirms that the thin 7 page report on the volatility trading losses IS the report. It's not a summary. Seems a bit thin and I'm not sure the board should be satisfied with it, given that the public still have a lot of questions.

@ChristinaNDP asking about the review. For example, a billion dollars was lost out of the Local Authorities Pension Plan - that's nurses, firefighters, city and town maintenance workers, school board custodians, etc. They weren't talked to about the review...

CEO Uebelein says he's been hyper-transparent with clients about AIMCo's volatility losses. Says press coverage of the losses "very unhelpful." Well, I think the public might think that an unsupervised gambling scheme resulting in loss of billions of our money is also unhelpful.

@ChristinaNDP now asking who knew what and when and what was done about it. Because the risk level of the volatility trading was known by AIMCo in January 2020, before the market meltdown...

CEO goes back to transparency issue, and makes a good point to understand as context, and I think it's fair: the media coverage was problematic because competitors knowing too much about internal strategy before it plays out can result in losses. That's a fair point...but...

I'm not sure if it helps the public understand what actually happened &I also think that the damage that's been done by the Finance Minister in terms of trust of AIMCo by the public makes Uebelein's life more difficult. Probably has an effect on his organization's reputation...

CEO of AIMCo talking about new board chair Mark Wiseman. I agree he is a good choice, particularly having come so recently from Blackrock, who have $7 trillion under management and have recently moved their strategy toward a strong climate change lens in investment decisions...

...I mean, time will tell, but having someone at AIMCo who understands how Environmental, Social, Governance criteria and climate risk are part of returns isn't the "flavour of the month," as @jkenney told the Globe&Mail, helps steward our money for the long term...

I asked about CEO and named executive officers pay packages and future actions for better risk management. The response that there will be a number of new protocols within the organization. Risk professionals need to be better integrated in to all strategies....

...and apply that to all scenario testing. That's fine. But usually these kinds of blow-ups result in some kind of reorganization at the top. Also, Uebelein did not answer my question as to whether they received any direction from govt to clean stuff up...

I just asked about when AIMCo delivered their annual report on the HSTF to government. They said July 9th. That's weird, because it was uploaded to the committee's internal website on June 23, taken down, and then not released prior to the legislated deadline.