Jason Nixon
Jason John Nixon is a Canadian politician and current Member of the Legislative Assembly of Alberta representing the electoral district of Rimbey-Rocky Mountain House-Sundre.
He was first elected as a member of the Wildrose Party in 2015, and then he served on the negotiation team that created a framework for unity between the Wildrose Party and the Progressive Conservative Party of Alberta. The agreement was ratified and approved by the members of both parties in July 2017, establishing the United Conservative Party.
After the merger, Nixon endorsed Jason Kenney in the 2017 United Conservative Party leadership election. After Kenney was elected as the leader, Nixon served as Leader of the Official Opposition in Alberta until Kenney won a seat in the Alberta legislature in a by-election.
Nixon served as the Opposition House Leader in the Legislative Assembly of Alberta. He has previously served as the Wildrose opposition critic for Human Services and was a participant on the government's Ministerial Panel on Child Intervention.
Nixon was formerly the Executive Director at The Mustard Seed, a non-profit organization founded by his father Pat Nixon. Nixon took online courses at both the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology and Athabasca University.
During the 2019 Alberta election, Nixon was dogged with controversies about a peace bond for an assault of a woman over his alleged involvement in a poaching incident on her property, a subsequent confrontation with a Fish and Wildlife Officer, as well as an earlier British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal ruling about his handling of a sexual harassment complaint at his former company.
After winning the 2019 election on the UCP ticket, he was sworn-in as Alberta's Minister of Environment and Parks on April 30, 2019. Before the election, he was a vocal opponent to the previous Minister, Hon. Shannon Phillips, especially in relation to the proposed Bighorn Wildland Provincial Park.
He and his brother Jeremy Nixon are the first brothers to serve in the Alberta legislature at the same time. Jason Nixon is one of four men named Jason serving in the UCP cabinet.
Under Nixon, the Ministry of Environment and Parks introduced a cost-saving initiative to save Alberta's tax payers millions of dollars, by closing or placing under third-party management, about a third of Alberta's provincial parks, recreation and protected areas in 2020.
Environmental views
After the 2019 Alberta general election, Nixon was appointed Minister of Environment and Parks.According to a biography on his website, he has worked in Alberta's oil and gas industry. His wife works for a pipeline company.
While Nixon was the Leader of the Opposition in Alberta, he was vocal in his opposition to the proposed Bighorn Wildland Provincial Park, calling the plan a: "foreign-funded plot to wall off the back country to Albertans who call the region home."
As the newly-appointed Minister, he announced plans to stop the project entirely.
that he is pleased that the NDPs plans to make changes to the Big Horn Country will not happen. “They are completely stopped,” he said, adding that the UCP is looking at increasing investment in the area.Other plans include possibly re-writing Alberta's provincial park legislation to be more friendly to agribusiness, forestry, mining, and oil and gas extraction, and cancelling Alberta's that was implemented under the previous NDP government.
Controversies
A 2005 incident resurfaced in the press in 2017, where Nixon had fired a woman in retaliation for her sexual harassment complaint.A ruling from the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal, handed down on Dec. 30, 2008, involved three companies: Nixon's company, Nixon Safety Consulting ; Navigator, a company building a condo in Kelowna; and Con-Forte, a company that performed concrete work on the site. It also involved Greg Ford, an independent contractor. The tribunal found that Nixon's company fired its safety officer, Kori Harrison, in December 2005 after she complained that Ford had sexually harassed her.
The Tribunal ordered Navigator and Con-Forte to pay Harrison lost wages, $14,144, an additional $15,000 compensation for injury to her dignity, feelings and self-respect, and $3,000 for improper conduct during the hearing.
In 2009, he was charged for assault for allegedly threatening an Alberta woman over what she alleged were his poaching activities, along with two other men, on her property. A peace bond was entered. Nixon denies the claims, and was cleared of all charges. A dashcam video submitted as evidence during a 2011 trial related to the alleged assault—allegedly showing Nixon confronting a Fish and Wildlife Officer—was blocked from public release by Alberta judge and former Progressive Conservative MLA Marlene Graham.
In 2011, he was arrested for allegedly killing a wild horse in 2009, but was later acquitted, and successfully sued the RCMP.
In 2015, while a student at Athabasca University, his student union voted to expel him from the organization for allegedly: taking an Executive Director salary while not working for six months, interfering with the student newspaper, raising executive salaries without student consultation, and other bylaw violations. According to the student news magazine, the raises he initiated made him the: "highest paid Student Executive in Alberta. And not by a few dollars, but by more than 30%."
In 2019, the former MLA for Rimbey-Rocky Mountain House-Sundre Joe Anglin asked the RCMP to investigate Nixon for obstruction of justice.
On May 13, 2019 Nixon sent a fundraising communiqué to UCP party supporters, asking them to make a "small donation" to support cuts to the corporate tax rate, and scrapping the provincial carbon tax. This — and another fundraising communication from Kenney's office — resulted in the NDP opposition filing an ethics complaint on the basis of improper use of the office of the premier for party fundraising.
In June 2019, he was the subject of a point of privilege raised by the NDP, claiming Nixon, "deliberately misled the legislature when he said no one used the earplugs distributed by Premier Jason Kenney during last week's debate on a bill to delay wage talks for 180,000 public sector workers."
Nixon said on March 3, 2020 that Alberta's provincial parks, recreation and protected areas were only generating $36 million annually while costing $86 million of tax payers dollars. The March 5 publication—"Optimizing Alberta Parks"—listed the various actions the government would undertake in 2020 as part of a cost-saving initiative. This included "fully or partially closing 20 provincial parks" with 164 other parks being handed to "third-party managers". This represents "more than one-third of all the province's parks, recreation areas and other protected areas." While the "Optimizing Alberta Parks" statement included the possibly of selling Crown land, Nixon said in a March 5 Calgary Herald interview, "We are not selling any Crown or public land — period." However, the province listed a 65-hectare plot of land east of Taber in a March 31 auction with a starting bid of $440,000.