Willie Grieve, Chair
Willie Grieve brought extensive experience in utility regulatory reform, price regulation and competition policy development to the Alberta Utilities Commission when he became the AUC’s first permanent chair on February 1, 2008.

Mr. Grieve has been responsible for setting the overall regulatory tone of the AUC and for leading its efforts to explore the efficacy of different styles and manners of utility regulation. He has also initiated procedural reviews within the AUC in the areas of rate and facilities regulation to rationalize and streamline procedures. Mr. Grieve has led and chaired AUC panels that have issued major regulatory decisions in each of the areas of rates, facilities and markets.

Mr. Grieve has been involved in utility regulation and competition policy for more than 25 years. Immediately prior to his appointment Mr. Grieve was the vice-president of regulatory affairs with TELUS Corp., where he oversaw the firm’s regulatory policies and played a significant role in the regulatory evolution of Canada’s telecommunications sector. Earlier, Mr. Grieve practised law in Saskatoon, Sask., concentrating on public utility and telecommunications regulation and competition policy as well as construction law. He has acted for and appeared before the Public Utilities Review Commission of Saskatchewan, the government of Canada, SaskTel, the Stentor Alliance of major Canadian telecommunications companies and the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. Mr. Grieve has also worked with Canada’s Bureau of Competition Policy, the government of Poland and the People’s Republic of China in areas related to regulation and competition policy.

Mr. Grieve is a graduate of Carlton University in political science and the University of Saskatchewan College of Law. He is a member of the Law Society of Saskatchewan and the Law Society of Alberta.

Mr. Grieve is a former professional musician and an active community volunteer. He previously served as president of the Edmonton Eclipse Junior A Lacrosse Club and is currently serving as a member of the board of governors of Grant MacEwan University and co-chair of Concordia University College of Alberta's advisory board for business management.

Tudor Beattie, QC, Commission Member
Tudor Beattie, QC has served as an Alberta special prosecutor, assistant chief Crown prosecutor, Crown prosecutor and bencher of the Law Society of Alberta. With more than three decades interpreting and applying legislation and policy in Alberta, Mr. Beattie has demonstrable expertise and experience in the field of commercial and economic crime, along with competition policy. His background includes extensive experience in applying administrative law in a quasi-judicial surrounding and he has appeared for the Crown at all levels of the Alberta Courts. Mr. Beattie has also had substantial exposure to general law and litigation, including civil, criminal defence and matrimonial, with an emphasis on commercial litigation.

Mr. Beattie has been a lawyer - practicing first in Ontario and since 1971 in Alberta - for nearly four decades. He was appointed as Queen’s counsel in 2002.

Mr. Beattie’s background prosecuting commercial crime is supported by significant exposure to securities law. He has served as an Alberta delegate to, and lecturer on litigation to, the North American Securities Administrators Association. He was also for many years a training lecturer to the commercial crime sections of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Calgary Police Service, and served as a consultant and advisor to other lawyers in criminal and quasi-criminal matters.

Mr. Beattie joined the AUC in April, 2008 to focus on the Commission’s new mandates in the areas of wholesale markets and compliance and he led efforts to establish the AUC’s principles around independent system operator rules and specified penalties. Since that time, Mr. Beattie has chaired multiple AUC panels adjudicating matters such as challenges to specified penalties issued by the Alberta Market Surveillance Administrator. A number of these applications and the decisions that flowed from them laid the groundwork for the Commission’s approach to and procedures for similar cases. Mr. Beattie has also been involved in decisions surrounding the adoption of reliability standards for market participants.

Along with a substantial focus in the area of markets and compliance, Mr. Beattie has brought his expertise to bear in major AUC rate-making and facilities decisions.

Kay Holgate, Commission Member
Kay Holgate has been a professional accountant for more than 35 years, with exposure to the oil and gas, electricity generation, not-for-profit, professional services, mining and service industries, among many others.

Ms. Holgate has taught or lectured at the University of Calgary, for the Diploma in Forensic Accounting Program at the University of Toronto, Mount Saint Vincent University, Athabasca University and for the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Alberta (ICAA). She has taught professional development courses on money laundering to the Calgary and Edmonton police services, and on fraud awareness to the Institute of Internal Auditors. She has been an investigator for a provincial accounting body professional conduct committee and from 1999 to 2001 she was contracted to the RCMP Integrated Proceeds of Crime Unit.

Ms. Holgate is a member of the ICAA, the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants (CICA), the Standards Committee of the CICA’s Alliance for Excellence in Investigative and Forensic Accounting and a former member of the ICAA Complaints Inquiry Committee. She has appeared as an expert witness before the Alberta Utilities Commission, the Tax Court of Canada and the Federal Court of Canada. Ms Holgate has also served as a tribunal member of the Handling Commission Review Panel of the Alberta Beverage Container Management Board. She is a graduate with great distinction of Mount Saint Vincent University (bachelor of business administration) and of the University of Calgary (master of business administration, member Beta Gamma Sigma). Along with a chartered accountant designation, Ms. Holgate is a CICA-designated specialist in investigative and forensic accounting.

Neil Jamieson, Commission Member
Neil Jamieson has worked as a senior-level professional engineer and manager, with a focus on infrastructure, public works, the environment and public utilities, for 25 years. Mr. Jamieson joined the AUC in February, 2011 from the City of St. Albert, Alberta, where he was the general manager of planning and engineering.

Since 1986, his oversight and expertise has been applied in three provinces and territories working largely at the municipal level - both urban and rural - and included planning and development (including land-use planning) and responsibility for drainage, water, sanitary and solid waste utilities, consultation and interaction with community and other stakeholder groups, and liaison with governments at the provincial and federal levels. Mr. Jamieson has also worked in three separate Canadian jurisdictions as a consultant project engineer centred on design, contract administration, construction inspection and surveying for civil and municipal engineering projects.

In Alberta, Mr. Jamieson has significant experience dealing with regional utility commissions and a working familiarity with provincial quasi-judicial tribunals in the fields of development and municipal government. He has had first-hand working exposure to the province’s major publicly-owned and privately-owned transmission and distribution utility providers, generation companies and the electric system operator.

Mr. Jamieson is a member, or former member, of the associations of professional engineers in Alberta, the Northwest Territories and Ontario. He is also a certified local government manager, a graduate of the civil engineering program and senior executive fellows program of the University of Alberta.

Anne Michaud, Commission Member
Anne Michaud has an extensive professional background in tax and civil litigation, and transfer pricing. She has appeared before the Federal Court of Canada, the Federal Court of Appeal, the Ontario courts, the Canadian International Trade Tribunal and the bi-national panel of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Prior to joining the AUC in 2008 Ms. Michaud was an associate tax partner with Deloitte & Touche LLP’s Calgary office, specializing in transfer pricing. Ms. Michaud worked with Canadian and multinational energy exploration and development companies, oil and gas service firms as well as energy marketers and traders in establishing and defending their transfer pricing models. During most of the 1990s Ms. Michaud was a Crown counsel with the Department of Justice, working in Ottawa and Vancouver, managing litigation related to the Income Tax Act, customs and trade, dumping, federal sales tax, bankruptcy, employment and regulation.

She also delivered policy and legal advice as counsel to federal negotiators in discussion of treaties with First Nations and the Province of British Columbia.

Ms. Michaud has a master’s degree in international trade law from Universite d’Aix-en-Provence, France, along with degrees in law and linguistics from the University of Ottawa. Her legal, linguistics and business education is supplemented with training in securities, mediation and negotiations.

Dr. Moin A. Yahya, Commission Member
Dr. Yahya came to the AUC from the University of Alberta, where he was an associate professor in the faculty of law. He received his law degree summa cum laude from George Mason University School of Law in Arlington, Virginia in 2003. Previously, he received his Ph.D. in Economics in 2000 at the University of Toronto, and his Master and Bachelor of Arts in Economics at the University of Alberta. His Ph.D. thesis examined the capital structure of regulated utilities. Before attending law school, Dr. Yahya was employed with Industry Canada’s Competition Bureau in Ottawa, where he worked on various merger and civil non-merger issues. He is also familiar with the work of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in the United States. He has published articles on various topics, including antitrust, corporate and regulatory law. 

Patrick Brennan

Patrick Brennan, DVM is an equine veterinarian and business owner with extensive experience as a member or chair of Alberta association boards, quasi-judicial tribunals and councils at the provincial and municipal level. He has been active in Alberta’s veterinary, municipal government and horse racing communities for his entire career and was appointed an acting member of the Commission in April, 2011.

A former councillor of Parkland County in the Edmonton region, Mr. Brennan served on the county’s subdivision authority, the subdivision and development appeal board, the agricultural and rural life advisory committee, the economic development and tourism advisory committee and the Big Lake drainage committee. Mr. Brennan is also a former long-serving member of the Capital Region Wastewater Commission, during which he served as vice-chairman for six years and chairman for three years. In the 1980s, he served as a member and then chairman of the Alberta Veterinary Medical Association discipline committee, before a decade of service as a board member for the Western College of Veterinary Medicine equine research committee.

In 1996, Mr. Brennan became a board member of Horse Racing Alberta and was chairman for five years starting in 1997. He was selected by the Alberta Association of Municipal Districts and Counties as its representative on the provincial government’s foreign animal disease eradication committee, and aggregate review committee. Mr. Brennan has also served as a board member and chairman of the TransAlta Tri Leisure Centre in Spruce Grove, which promotes community sport, recreation and wellness in the Parkland County-Spruce Grove-Stony Plain region. He founded, owns and operates the Hermitage Veterinary Hospital in Edmonton and is a graduate of veterinary programs at the University of Alberta and the University of Saskatchewan, and an internship at Purdue University in Lafayette, Indiana. Mr. Brennan was born and raised in Edmonton and lives in Parkland County.

Gwen Day

Gwen Day brought an extensive history of membership on rural quasi-judicial tribunals and boards adjudicating matters of municipal planning, land development, land-use planning, seniors’ housing, resource development, waste water and other areas when she joined the Commission as an acting member in April 2011.

Ms. Day is a career farmer and the co-owner and operator of the Silver Willow Golf and Sporting Club in Carstairs, as well as a watercolour artist and instructor. She is a former municipal councillor and deputy reeve for Mountain View County. As councillor she served on Mountain View’s subdivision and development appeal board, the inter-municipal subdivision and development appeal board, the municipal planning commission, the Mountain View Seniors’ Housing Board, the Carstairs & District Fire & Emergency Authority, the Mountain View Regional Waste Water Commission and the Olds Inter-Municipal Planning Commission, among numerous other roles. She has received considerable training and experience in interpersonal conflict resolution, negotiations, governance, leadership, communications, ethics, land-use planning, environmental policy development and other areas. Ms. Day is active in her community, contributing or leading groups focussed on heritage, parenting and agriculture. 

Clifford Goerz

Clifford Goerz is former councillor and deputy mayor of Parkland County who has been active on provincial and municipal boards and committees for nearly three decades. At the local level, Mr. Goerz’s involvement extends back to the late 1970s. Much of his board activity was with organizations whose purview or influence extends across multiple municipal jurisdictions.

A former farmer and business operator, Mr. Goerz has held positions on the quasi-judicial Parkland County Subdivision Development and Appeal Board, on the county’s subdivision authority board, as chairman of the Parkland Ambulance Authority Board, as chairman of the seniors’ housing agency Meridian Foundation, on the agricultural service board and the economic development and tourism committee. At the provincial level, Mr. Goerz has served on the Provincial Agricultural Service Board and the Alberta Senior Citizens Housing Association.

Locally, Mr. Goerz has had extensive leadership involvement in his community association and church council and served as chairman of the Stony Plain Livestock Feeders Association Board. He was appointed as an acting member of the Commission in May, 2011.
 

Ian Harvie

Ian Harvie is a former councillor and reeve of Mountain View County who has owned and operated a mixed farm and ranching operation near Olds since the mid-1970s. His Harvie Ranching has produced award-winning Hereford, Charolais and Simmental cattle.

Mr. Harvie was appointed an acting member of the Commission in May, 2011.

Along with his experience in rural municipal government, Mr. Harvie has an extensive and distinguished history in the Alberta livestock industry. He is currently the vice-president of the Alberta Charolais Association, and has served as a board member of the Alberta Hereford Association, a director of the Canadian Charolais Association and a director of the Alberta Cattle Breeders Association. Mr. Harvie is also the former president of the Olds Agricultural Society, a former chairman of the board of the Canadian National Performance Program and president of the Foothills Forage Association.

Mr. Harvie is an accomplished and internationally-recognized cattle judge who has adjudicated at shows across North America as well as Holland, Sweden, Finland, Germany and England. His educational background includes courses at the University of Saskatchewan School of Agriculture and the Southern Alberta School of Technology.