KENNEY SWIMMING FORWARD TO ENSURE NDP GOVERNMENT IS ‘ONE AND DONE’
A political junkie acquaintance of mine who nominally knows Jason Kenney, described the 49-year-old United Conservative Party leader as “the Great White Shark of Canadian politics.”
A shark, I wondered. “Yeah, he doesn’t sleep, he always moves forward, he’s efficient and he shreds his prey.”
It’s a pretty good analogy. On Monday morning, however, Kenney is actually sitting quite still at a Route 66-decorated booth at the Blackfoot Truck Stop on 9th Avenue S.E. He’s drinking tea with lemon and honey, trying to fend off the feared coming “crash” after running on adrenalin over the past 18 months in a veritable political Ironman competition that is exhausting just to think about.
To recap in brief, on July 6, 2016, Kenney announced he would seek the leadership of the devastated Progressive Conservative Party of Alberta, with the aim of seeking unity with the Wildrose Party in order to ensure that the provincial NDP government of Premier Rachel Notley is “one and done.”
On March 18, 2017, Kenney won the PC party leadership with 75 per cent of the vote. Scarcely taking a breath, Kenney hit the road in his pickup truck, urging members of both parties that unity is the only way to defeat the NDP in the 2019 election. On July 22, both parties voted 95 per cent in favour of merging. A final deal was hammered out on July 24.
On Oct. 28, after a very tough battle against Wildrose Leader Brian Jean and Calgary lawyer Doug Schweitzer, Kenney became the first leader of the United Conservative Party on the first ballot with a resounding 61 per cent of the vote.
Finally, just last Thursday, against six candidates, including a doctor for the NDP and leader of Alberta’s Liberal party, Kenney embarrassed his challengers and naysayers by garnering a whopping 71.5 per cent of the votes, a clear sign that the NDP is in trouble.
Forget Thomas as his middle name, or even Sharky. Landslide is more apt for Kenney.
“When I look back and think about it, I can hardly believe it myself,” admits Kenney, who won seven federal election campaigns, starting in 1997, with big majorities. “When we set out to do this 18 months ago, it even seemed a little bit crazy to me.”
Crazy but necessary.
“I just realized that you cannot have a viable national conservative movement if Alberta becomes a socialist democratic province,” he explained. “We need Alberta back as the beating heart of free enterprise and the conservative movement in Canada.”
Come late February or early March, Kenney says he will take his seat at the Alberta legislature as the leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, and focus like a “laser beam” on the disastrous fiscal and economic policies of Notley’s government.
“They’re going to increase the carbon tax by 15 per cent on Jan. 1,” adds Kenney. “This is the carbon tax they didn’t mention in the last election, and it’s going to increase the cost of everything, filling up your tank, heating your home, buying your groceries, because it’s a tax on everything that’s transported, and our disposable incomes are down in Alberta.
“There’s 200,000 people out of work. Investments have been fleeing and Rachel Notley’s answer is a higher tax?” he adds with incredulity.
What Kenney doesn’t understand is why Notley is not using the carbon tax as a bargaining chip with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
“Trudeau wants a $50 a tonne tax, so why doesn’t she tell him right now that she’s not going to increase it any further unless they rein in the National Energy Board (which effectively killed the Energy East pipeline by including upstream and downstream carbon emissions through a massive mandate creep).
“She should say, ‘You have to change the NEB legislation to rule out up-and-downstream emissions as part of the pipeline assessment and you’ve got to guarantee that you’re going to do everything required to ensure the construction of Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline to B.C., and if you’re not going to do those things we’re not raising your carbon tax,’” he suggests. “Use some leverage.”
The approximate $34 billion of capital that has fled Alberta’s oil and gas sector since the NDP won power hasn’t left the industry, it’s fled Alberta, points out Kenney.
“These corporations (including Shell, BP, Chevron, Imperial Oil and in excess of a dozen more) have reinvested in oil and gas in other parts of the world. This tells us it’s not about the price of oil and gas, but it’s about policy. When all these companies have sold their assets at bargain-basement prices, they’ve moved that money — that capital — to Texas, to North Dakota, to Kazakhstan. So again, the price hasn’t been helpful, but the constant increase in taxation, in the red tape burden, in uncertainty, in costs, plus the difficulty in gaining market access through pipelines, all of this combined has made the province much worse than it used to be.”
As for the next election, Kenney vows to take nothing for granted. “Which is why, every day I say, ‘We have to work hard, stay humble and earn every vote,’ and I mean that.”
Kenney also plans to focus heavily on improving Alberta’s education system.
“It’s a scandal that we’ve seen a precipitous decline in math competency from Alberta students in the past 10 years,” said Kenney. “This started with the PCs adopting the absurd fad of discovery math, and I’m very concerned the NDP intends to broaden the failed approach to discovery learning in their curriculum reform, so we’ll be watching that very closely.”
So what are his plans for Christmas? “I’m going to hibernate for a bit,” he says with a chuckle. “I’m going to catch up on my sleeping and reading, do a little non-political volunteering, spend time with family.”
Who knew that sharks hibernate?