New leadership announced for AFSC

“As you may recall, I dismissed the previous AFSC Board in June 2016,” Carlier said via tele-conference from Edmonton. “I felt this action was necessary after an examination by the Chief Internal Auditor raised concerns about the board’s oversight of senior executive expenses and procurement activities. I lost confidence in the last board after an investigation into staff expenses that were seriously troubled and a culture of entitlement at AFSC, enabled by the conservative government of the day.”

“Albertans firmly reject this culture of entitlement and this government will never tolerate it,” added Carlier. “The level of oversight simply didn’t meet the expectations of Albertans. It is important for the public to have trust in this valuable organization.”

He said as soon as the issue came to the government’s attention, the RCMP were notified and conducted an investigation which has since been completed.

“Throughout this entire process, we’ve been mindful of the public trust in this crown corporation,” added Carlier. “After I dismissed the last AFSC Board, I appointed an interim board to oversee the transition.”

“One of the tasks of the interim board was to strengthen internal controls,” explained Carlier. “These include removing the AFSC President as a board member, strengthening the code of conduct, including additional control on gifts and expense and procurement policies and strengthening board oversight of international travel. With those in place, a new board was chosen.”

As for Blakely, he said his first order of business is to familiarize himself with the priorities and direction the AFSC Board is now looking for.

“Particularly the lending mandate,” said Blakely. “It’s going to be critical for us here in Alberta as we move forward and we change sort of the way we do things here and I think it will be very much welcomed and very much a positive thing for the agricultural community in Alberta.”

Despite the change in leadership, Blakely anticipates the organization to carry on its good work in the years ahead, fine tuning what AFSC has been doing so well for so long.

“AFSC will look not dissimilar to the way it looks today because it’s a well-run organization and has an extremely good Board,” stated Blakely. “There’s been priorities put in place, strategic plans put in place, so I’d like to carry-out those things.”

AFSC Board Chair Jennifer Wood said the process of finding a new CEO for the organization was a long and thorough one with a national scope to it.

“We needed someone with a new, revised lending mandate,” said Woods. “We needed someone with strength in the lending sector but also understanding risk-management and the suite of programs that we offer here at AFSC.”

She said AFSC’s mission moving forward is to essentially grow and diversify the province’s agriculture industry.

Noting ag-value and ag-food as key areas, Woods concluded that, “Times have changed and we need to really focus on innovation and client service and we need to help our industry grow and diversify to make Alberta strong.”

by Sheldon Spackman

New leadership announced for AFSC

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