Landowner’s ethics complaints stem from broken system

By ZOE MASON on January 31, 2026.

The proponent of two requests for investigation into alleged conflicts of interest regarding an Alberta Energy Regulator board member says his complaints are motivated by frustrations with a broken system.

Dwight Popowich is a landowner in Two Hills, where he has been engaged in a years-long battle to have the orphan well on his property cleaned. He launched last year’s complaint to the ethics commissioner and last week’s complaint to the AER. He says the contentious 2025 Mature Asset Strategy has given landowners have little faith their concerns are being heard, particularly after an alleged exchange with the strategy’s architect David Yager in which Yager told him he expects favours from Premier Danielle Smith.

The complaints follow a years-long process in which Popowich and 900 other landowners inherited orphan wells, and the 2025 unveiling of new policy recommendations that have drawn widespread criticism from across the province.

Popowich says he signed a lease with Paramount Energy Trust, later Perpetual Energy Inc., in 2008.

In 2017, he learned the well on his property had changed hands, sold to a company called Sequoia Resources. He didn’t know about the sale until the cheques stopped coming.

Sequoia declared bankruptcy shortly thereafter.

When Sequoia purchased nearly 2,000 wells from Perpetual Energy Inc. in 2016, it took responsibility for environmental liabilities totalling an estimated $225 million. It purchased the wells for the nominal price of $1. Sequoia later launched a lawsuit against Perpetual, alleging its chief executive knew the deal would send the buyer into bankruptcy.

It’s a widespread and well-documented issue affecting thousands of landowners across the province. Currently, nearly 250,000 old wells and related infrastructure are inactive, or marginally producing and awaiting shutdown and cleanup.

Popowich says the Orphan Well Association, the industry-fed capital pool responsible for cleaning up inactive well sites, was launched in the early 2000s to provide a safety net for landowners who were left in the lurch by insolvent energy companies. But the OWA is decades behind on its to-do list. Landowners like himself who are affected when producers go under are often left hanging for decades. Popowich wants to know why.

“This is nonsense. If you’re underfunded, please explain why. According to the law, when you look at the funding, they’re not supposed to be underfunded.”

The OWA is funded by an orphan fund levy issued to energy companies annually. A report last year showed the OWA was facing a funding shortfall of $1.2 billion.

“When you turn around and allow the industry not to properly fund that, is it really a safety net? It’s full of holes,” he said.

Popowich says Sequoia’s bankruptcy left him and roughly 900 other landowners saddled with inactive wells. It has been nine years since, and the well is still languishing in the middle of Popowich’s land.

A leaked early version of the Mature Asset Strategy, the province’s latest report on addressing inactive wells, proposed a solution in the Legacy Asset Fund. The proposed fund was described as funded by licensees “but ultimately backstopped by the province.”

The final text of the report changed that wording to reflect a licensee-funded pool “managed by the province.” It is unclear what that management entails. Critics say cost will still ultimately come back to the taxpayer.

The province has denied that interpretation in public statements about the strategy.

In the intervening years, Popowich says the taxpayer has been dealt the burden of his and thousands of other landowners’ compensation.

While landowners wait for cleanup from the OWA, they are eligible to recover outstanding surface access payments and damages through the publicly funded Land and Property Rights Tribunal.

Just last year, Popowich says landowners affected by the Sequoia bankruptcy were pulled together by the AER and informed it would be another 10 to 12 years before their well sites were cleaned up due to funding restrictions.

The most recent estimates put the total cost of orphan oil and natural gas wells across the province at more than $1 billion.

“Meanwhile, the taxpayer is paying guys like myself. There’s 900 of us. We’re not being paid rent. We’re compensated for our financial losses. So we are indemnified against those losses through the taxpayer.”

Popowich says landowners affected by the Sequoia insolvency were compensated with roughly $3,000 per landowner per year.

“And that’s just one producer,” said Popowich. “There’s been many more before us, and more yet to come that are on the verge of bankruptcy.”

Popowich says it was this experience that spurred him to begin advocating for structural changes to the province’s systems around inactive wells. As a board member of the landowner activist group the Alberta Surface Rights Federation, Popowich lobbied for more input from landowners.

His lobbying put him in contact with David Yager, the subject of his ethics complaints. Popowich says the two spoke on the phone in December 2023.

Initially, Popowich says Yager resisted the idea of bringing landowners to the table to develop the new strategy. Ultimately, he says they found common ground. Both landowners and the Rural Municipalities Foundation were consulted during the formulation of the strategy, although both groups later released statements criticizing the final document for both its content and its failure to incorporate their feedback.

But over the course of the conversation, Popowich also claims Yager told him that he expected his close relationship with the premier to yield him favourable results.

“He said to me: ‘Me and my buddies put Danielle Smith into power, and we expect some favours in return for dealing with these inactive wells.'”

Yager’s political history is well-established. Files included in the submission to the AER show a “Political History” section on Yager’s CV that has since been taken down, which attests that he encouraged Smith to seek leadership of the Wildrose Party and describes Yager as a top donor in her 2009 leadership bid.

Popowich says the encounter with Yager and the systemic failures he has navigated highlights a need for a new approach. He says the complaints against Yager are the first step.

“The process of the Mature Asset Strategy was nothing more than a scam. Smoke and mirrors,” he said.

He and his lawyer are hoping to have the strategy revisited, a goal shared by the RMA and the ASRF.

Yager declined the News’s request for comment. Smith’s office did not respond to requests for comment in time for publication.