Former prime minister Stephen Harper has been appointed chair of Alberta Investment Management Corp., a move that has been widely anticipated since the province fired AIMCo’s board of directors and relieved chief executive Evan Siddall of his duties less than two weeks ago.

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Three of those board members fired from the province’s $169-billion pension and endowment fund manager were reappointed Wednesday: Jason Montemurro, Jim Keohane and Bob Dhillon. But the Alberta government has also established a permanent board seat, unpaid, for the deputy minister of treasury board and finance, in order “to ensure more consistent communications between AIMCo and Alberta’s government.”

In a statement about Harper’s appointment as chair, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said the former prime minister will be instrumental in the province’s plans to increase the size of its $25 billion Heritage Savings Trust Fund, which is managed by AIMCo, to more than $250 billion over the next 25 years.

“We’re incredibly fortunate that Mr. Harper has agreed to take on this leadership role with AIMCo,” Smith said. “His appointment, and that of the rest of the board, are a strong step forward in giving all Albertans confidence in the long-term sustainability and success of AIMCo.”

Harper said he was taking the role pro-bono as “a meaningful act of public service to my adopted home province of the last 46 years.”

He said he feels “uniquely positioned to help the organization improve its governance,” and noted that Canadian pensions have a global reputation for their professional operations, upstanding ethics and prudent risk management.

“I want to see AIMCo further embody these values and to positively contribute to this culture,” Harper said in the statement, adding that he is looking forward to working with the new board of directors and AIMCo’s new management team.

The Alberta government, including finance minister Nate Horner, have maintained that the unusual step of firing the board and four members of the management team including Siddall was taken because AIMCo’s costs had risen without commensurate returns.

But former chair Kenneth Kroner disputed that assessment in the letter to Horner and several sources have detailed increasing tensions between the government and the pension management organization over the past year, with many of these sources saying the government made clear it wanted to exert more control over AIMCo.

Horner took over as chair following the board purge, a position he relinquished Wednesday.

Harper left politics after the Conservatives lost the 2015 election to Justin Trudeau’s Liberals, and has been involved in private business ventures since, including becoming a working equity partner at Azimuth Capital Management, an energy-focused private equity firm. He also teamed up with former Carl Icahn protégé Courtney Mather to launch Vision One Management Partners, an activist fund that took on U.S. department store operator Kohl’s earlier this year, according to a Reuters report in February. 

He has also been on the boards of a handful of companies including Colliers International Group Inc., Alimentation Couche-Tard Inc. and Recover Inc.

Keohane, one of the directors reappointed to AIMCo’s board Wednesday, is well-known in the pension world, having successfully led the Healthcare of Ontario Pension (HOOPP) between 2011 and 2020.

Less well known in the sector are Dhillon and Montemurro. Montemurro’s initial appointment to the AIMCo board in March raised eyebrows inside and outside the investment management organization because of his connection to Harper, who was seen as the government’s favoured candidate to chair the board for months following Mark Wiseman’s departure from the role at the end of 2023. Both Montemurro and Harper worked at Azimuth Capital Management.

Naheed Nenshi, leader of Alberta’s NDP Party, said in an interview last week that the choice of Harper might not sit well with some pensioners rattled by the boardroom and executive purge that also claimed three members of Siddall’s team.

“It would take a lot of work for him to convince the financial markets that he is interested in maximum return for pensioners, rather than the creation of a piggy bank fund for the government to invest in projects that it wants to invest in,” Nenshi said.

On Wednesday, the leaders of nine of Alberta’s largest unions representing hundreds of thousands of workers and retirees, wrote a letter to Smith demanding representation on the AIMCo board.

“This is not your government’s money,” the letter said. “It is the retirement savings of nearly 500,000 working and retired Albertans.”

• Email: bshecter@nationalpost.com

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