GSA issue sticks to Kenney — even in the Maritimes

Maritime visit also offers tantalizing look at how UCP leader plans to run his campaign

As if United Conservative Party Leader Jason Kenney isn’t busy enough in Alberta.

Now, he’s making headlines in New Brunswick. But not for the reasons he would appreciate.

A Liberal candidate in New Brunswick’s provincial election is trying to make Kenney a campaign issue.

Brent Mazerolle, who’s running in the Progressive Conservative-held riding of Riverview, has seized on the fact that Kenney was in New Brunswick Sunday and Monday to attend a fundraiser and news conference with PC Opposition leader Blaine Higgs.

Kenney’s appearances were in no way controversial or even particularly newsy.

At the news conference, Kenney showed support for Higgs, who announced he was against a carbon tax, both provincial and federal. The two men have said if they win their respective elections (New Brunswick on Sept. 24 and Alberta sometime next spring) they will join Saskatchewan and Ontario in fighting a federal carbon tax.

That’s not what Mazerolle was complaining about.

Instead, he was hoping to tie Higgs to an issue that has dogged Kenney for the past year or so — the controversy about “outing ” children to their parents if the students joined a gay-straight alliance at school.

Kenney has tried repeatedly to stamp out this political brush fire but it keeps popping up, including, for example, in a resolution passed at the UCP’s founding convention in Red Deer last May.

Kenney has insisted he has no intention of having children automatically outed and suggested he would ignore his party’s resolution because it was “poorly worded.”

But it’s an issue that refuses to go away, thanks largely to Alberta’s NDP government, which continues to use it to whack Kenney over the head.

And now a New Brunswick election candidate is using it to whack, by extension, the leader of his province’s PC party.

“We’re 29 days out (from the election) and we still, as New Brunswickers, aren’t sure where Mr. Higgs stands on a lot of issues,” Mazerolle told reporters.

Mazerolle, a former school teacher, has been wondering out loud that if Higgs is so friendly with Kenney, who harboured controversial views on GSAs, then perhaps Higgs harbours those views, too.

“Potentially outing schoolchildren in their one safe place in their life, that’s not a gay issue, that’s a safety issue,” Mazerolle said. “Kids who are struggling with these issues, they’re in serious danger a lot of the time in certain communities.”

It is, to say the least, a bit of a stretch.

Kenney does not have a policy to “out” children to their parents and in fact appears determined to kill this issue without overtly admitting as much to his socially conservative supporters.

(Even if he did have that as a policy, it doesn’t mean Higgs shares his view.)

I don’t know what Kenney thinks of Mazerolle’s attempt to generate controversy or even if he is aware of it.

He must, though, be used to it. Kenney’s history as a social conservative is regularly hoisted up the flagpole by New Democrats in Alberta in hopes of rallying their troops.

And even though Kenney is a provincial politician, he has a national profile, both because he was a senior cabinet minister in the Stephen Harper government and because he is loudly helping organize a political and legal fight against Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s carbon tax (where the federal government threatens to impose a tax on provinces that don’t introduce their own carbon price).

When Kenney met with Higgs privately, he offered some advice on the topic.

“He (Higgs) should make this (election) partly a referendum on the carbon tax,” Kenney told reporters. “That’s what happened in Ontario and it resulted in a change in government. Everywhere the carbon tax is actually put to voters they say no.”

It’s debatable that the Ontario election was determined solely by opposition to the province’s cap-and-trade system (and in fact 60 per cent of voters cast ballots for the Liberals, NDP and Greens who support a price on carbon).

But Kenney does have a point that it’s easier to rally support against taxes than for them.

And we can see how Kenney is planning his own campaign, one where he’ll attempt to frame the Alberta election as pretty much a referendum on the NDP government’s controversial carbon tax.