Jason Nixon

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.[19] His wife works for a pipeline company.[2]

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."[14]

As the newly-appointed Minister, he announced plans to stop the project entirely.[20]

[Nixon said] 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.[21]

Other plans include possibly re-writing Alberta's provincial park legislation to be more friendly to agribusiness, forestry, mining, and oil and gas extraction,[22] and cancelling Alberta's climate leadership plan that was implemented under the previous NDP government.[23]

A 2005 incident resurfaced in the press in 2017, where Nixon had fired a woman in retaliation for her sexual harassment complaint.[12][24]

A ruling from the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal, handed down on Dec. 30, 2008, involved three companies: Nixon's company, Nixon Safety Consulting (NSC); 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.[12][25]

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.[26]

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,[27][28][10] and was cleared of all charges.[22] 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.[11]

In 2011, he was arrested for allegedly killing a wild horse in 2009, but was later acquitted, and successfully sued the RCMP.[9]

In 2015, while a student at Athabasca University,[2] 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.[29] 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%."[30]

In 2019, the former MLA for Rimbey-Rocky Mountain House-Sundre Joe Anglin asked the RCMP to investigate Nixon for obstruction of justice.[31]

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.[32]

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."[33]

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.[34] The March 5 publication—"Optimizing Alberta Parks"—listed the various actions the government would undertake in 2020 as part of a cost-saving initiative.[18][35] This included "fully or partially closing 20 provincial parks" with 164 other parks being handed to "third-party managers".[18][34] This represents "more than one-third of all the province's parks, recreation areas and other protected areas."[34] While the "Optimizing Alberta Parks" statement included the possibly of selling Crown land,[36] Nixon said in a March 5 Calgary Herald interview, "We are not selling any Crown or public land — period."[35] 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.[36]