Alberta's former Environment Minister, Rob Renner, is reported to be retiring at the end of this current term by the Medicine Hat News.

Renner was first elected under Premier Ralph Klein in 1993, and made his way into Klein's cabinet in 2004 when he was appointed the minister of Municipal Affairs.

The CTF estimates that if an election is held on April 1st, 2012, Rob Renner will be eligible to collect a severance payment (er... "transition allowance") of approximately $872,300.

Mr. Renner, much like every retired or defeated MLA in the 2012 election will be benefitting from an increased transition allowance due to the 30% pay hike he and his cabinet colleagues gave themselves in 2008.

In fact, the CTF estimates that without those pay hikes (and even adjusting MLA wages upwards each year by the Average Weekly Earnings Index - as was the practice until 2008), Mr. Renner's transition allowance would be $728,000.

That's a $144,300 increase thanks to the 2008 MLA pay hike.  And of course that's on top of the extra $35-ish thousand dollars in additonal pay they recieved as cabinet ministers each year since 2008.

Lastly, in addition to his transition allowance, Mr. Renner, like every MLA elected in 2001 or before, will have also collected $97,975 in RRSP contributions, courtesy of the taxpayers during the past decade.