Danielle Smith’s fixation on funny money could wreck your pension—and the climate, too
It might be a relatively harmless and money-losing affectation for a former talk radio show host turned business group lobbyist to have a mid-life conversion to the church of cryptocurrency. It becomes a lot less harmless when that person becomes the premier, can tell Alberta’s pension fund manager what to do and wants to take Alberta out of the Canada Pension Plan.
And Danielle Smith really is cuckoo for cryptocurrency. [...]
Quadriga was a cryptoexchange that was found to be a fraud and a Ponzi scheme by the Ontario Securities Commission. Smith lost her money because Quadriga’s founder died in December 2018 while on his honeymoon in India and no one else had the passwords necessary to access and run the site. Quadriga users reported roughly $190 million in missing cryptocurrency. Smith talked on her Western Standard show about how the loss was closer to $250 million.
Smith has also said that she has investments in Ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrency after Bitcoin. Smith’s public disclosure that details her investments and is published by the office of the ethics commissioner is not yet available.
But it’s not just crypto that Smith is obsessed with, it’s also your pension. In December, Smith floated the idea of having a referendum on separating Alberta from the Canada Pension that would line up with the upcoming provincial election, before quickly backtracking the next day on having a referendum in May. [...]
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