UCP STAFFER MUST GO: NDP

Kenney speechwriter ‘harbours a deep prejudice’ against Muslims, Indigenous people, LGBTQ people and women, Pancholi says

The Alberta NDP Opposition is renewing its call for the premier to fire his speechwriter after uncovering more articles he wrote, including claiming the gay rights lobby bullies politicians and calling an Alberta First Nation an “oppressive, collectivist regime.”

The NDP released a statement Friday with 11 articles by Paul Bunner from the late 1990s to 2016 discussing issues surrounding Indigenous people, Islam, LGBTQ people and women, all of which they say prove he needs to be fired from his job in the premier’s office.

“Jason Kenney’s speechwriter clearly harbours a deep prejudice against Indigenous people, against LGBTQ2S+ people, against Muslims and against women,” NDP MLA Rakhi Pancholi said Friday.

“This is obviously completely unacceptable. There’s no excuse or justification for someone who holds these views to be one of the senior advisers to the premier of Alberta.”

Bunner was already facing pressure to leave the premier’s office after a 2013 article he wrote resurfaced in which he called the residential school system in Canada a “bogus genocide.”

On Thursday Premier Jason Kenney said he fundamentally disagrees with the parts of the article he has read.

Bunner was hired by Kenney in 2019.

Before that, he worked as head speechwriter for then-prime minister Stephen Harper from 200609.

In a statement Friday, Harrison Fleming, deputy press secretary for the premier, said the majority of stories the NDP found are old and Bunner’s views have “evolved.”

“As I am sure you can appreciate, societal norms have changed greatly over time. For example, NDP ‘saint’ Tommy Douglas previously called homosexuality a ‘mental illness,’” Fleming said. “Peoples’ views have evolved over decades — and that includes Mr. Bunner. Matters addressed in decades-old articles have long since been settled law.”

In an August 1997 opinion piece in Alberta Report magazine about the media’s coverage of medical stories, Bunner argues “AIDS gets more ink than it deserves (though that is often the point of our stories).”

In 1998, Bunner wrote an editor’s note about blowback Alberta Report received for a 1993 cover story with the headline “Can gays be cured?” He suggested the work was ahead of its time, pointing to similar stories more recently done by other publications.

“But it is just as likely that as gay goes mainstream, in movies, television sitcoms, in family and human rights law and in the media, the debate over the social and health consequences of the homosexual lifestyle may now, at last, be fully and freely engaged,” he wrote.

In September 1997, Bunner wrote about calls for an investigation into the Stoney Nakoda First Nation and called for political change.

“A community of people who are willing to give up their personal freedom to an oppressive, collectivist regime is a pretty sorry excuse for a culture. Moreover, it is a perfect recipe for real genocide,” he wrote.

In 1998, he questioned whether childhood memories of abuse can be repressed and “recovered.”

“The hysteria surrounding child sexual abuse was swamping reason. And feminist ideologues were flooding into the counselling field, their barren hearts bent on overthrowing the patriarchy, whatever the cost,” he wrote.

In a February 2015 article, Bunner, then editor of the C2C Journal, points out “Canada still has no legal restrictions on abortion. The gay rights lobby is still bullying politicians to do their bidding.”

The next year, while discussing a breakfast featuring Conservative Party of Canada interim leader Rona Ambrose that was moved to a different location in a hotel to make room for the Fourth Annual Treaty 6 Educators Conference, Bunner wrote the “hotel probably gets less business from conservatives than it does from modern-day aboriginal nomads who migrate from conference to conference just as their ancestors pursued the buffalo.”

Pancholi called the volume of prejudice the NDP has found “stunning ” and said Kenney must not only fire Bunner but also publicly apologize for allowing him to be part of his office.