The ROUGH RIDE to unite Alberta’s RIGHT
KENNEY HITS THE ROAD WITH A SIMPLE MESSAGE: STOP THE NDP
• Despite their mutual animosity, there is one key fact that Alberta and Quebec share: They’re the only parts of Canada where a separatist can ruin a political meeting.
“You’re full of crap! The only hope we have is the Independent Dominion of Alberta,” said a man in overalls as the rest of the gathering collectively face- palmed. “Oh, here we go,” said one.
This is now the life of Conservative MP Jason Kenney as he attempts to unite Alberta’s two right-wing parties before the next provincial election.
He’s met popes and presidents. He once dispatched fighter jets to vaporize Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant fighters. His luggage is still adorned with the weather-beaten tags of a 2015 prime ministerial trip to Europe.
And now, he’s driving from town to town, steering around road kill, handing out pamphlets and introducing himself to strangers over the sound of mooing cows.
His ride is a new pickup truck dubbed The Unifier, his companions are two staffers and his accommodation is the guest rooms of random supporters.
Meanwhile, the Progressive Conservative party he is hoping to lead appears ready to skunk his candidacy. ( So far, he’s the only one declared for the March 2017 vote.) The executive renewed a rule on the weekend that says leadership candidates must “avoid causing harm or disrepute” to the party; presumably that includes his plan to dissolve it.
But Kenney’s simple elevator pitch to Albertans is, “I’m doing this to stop the NDP getting a second term.”
Journeying into rural Alberta can often feel like travelling back in time.
On t he Unite Alberta tour, in diners and doughnut shops throughout the heartland, farmers, roughnecks and small- town mayors in bolo ties are gathering to hear the unamplified thoughts of an earnest bachelor with immaculately combed hair.
Every Kenney event essentially gets t he same 30- minute speech: He was raised in Wilcox, Sask., he’s all about fiscal conservatism, he served in the “not perfect, but pretty good” government of Stephen Harper and the NDP will cause “catastrophic, irreversible damage” to Alberta if right- wingers don’t get it together.
“They ( the NDP) are even raising beer taxes. I guarantee you Ralph Klein wouldn’t have done that,” goes one of his three guaranteed laugh lines.
The campaign is all carefully designed to win over a voter base that, quite frankly, has abandonment issues.
First, Alberta conservatives saw their Klein Revolution turn into a home for urban spendthrifts. Then, neighbour was pitted against neighbour when l i felong Tories ripped up their membership cards to form the Wildrose.
Finally, Ji m Prentice swooped in from Bay Street, tried to murder the Wildrose in an Edmonton backroom, accidentally handed Alberta to the NDP and then immediately disappeared forever.
“How are you different than Jim Prentice?” is a frequent question from Progressive Conservatives.
“Waistline,” is the funny response. “I’m not rolling in from a bank boardroom to the premier’s office,” is the harsh response.
Both Wildrosers and PCs are showing up to these Kenney gatherings, but the Tories are usually identifiable by their thousand-yard stares.
Many Progressive Conservatives spent their lives in the service of a party that ruled Alberta unchallenged for almost as long as Communists ran East Germany.
Now, many Tories have a genuine sense that their time has passed; that the cities have been taken over by fixed- gear- riding hipsters and that it’s only a matter of time before their land is expropriated for a solar farm.
“Edmonton is the socialist capital of Canada right now,” one man told Kenney in Stettler.
Probably the strangest thing about all this is that there are actually very few ideological differences between Alberta’s two conservative parties. The rift is almost completely due to mistrust: PCs think the Wildrose are gay- bashing rednecks, and the Wildrose think the PCs are corrupt potted plants.
Kenney ran the numbers on the current legislative session and found that, with the exception of the left- leaning PC MLA Sandra Jansen, the Wildrose and the Progressive Conservatives voted together all but 14 per cent of the time.
The essential thrust of the Kenney tour is to tell conservatives to suck it up.
“I’m not trying to lead a group- therapy session,” said Kenney. “My encouragement to people is to do what we did federally; let’s just move beyond those bruised egos.”
If this whole “driving a truck around to rally antiNDP support” seems familiar, it’s because it is. In Saskatchewan, Brad Wall famously built up the Saskatchewan Party by racking up clicks on his Dodge.
But with one key difference: Brad Wall can spend hours talking mixed grain or discussing the merits of the Ram 1500 versus the Ford F-150.
Jason Kenney, by contrast, is a dweebish policy wonk with a weird penchant to intersperse conversation with Gilbert and Sullivan references.
Nevertheless, Prairie conservatives have a proud history of investing their hopes and dreams with soft- handed leaders who don’t necessarily know the difference between a Charolais and a Hereford.
Preston Manning has a bachelor’s degree in economics. Stephen Harper has a master’s degree in economics. Peter Lougheed and John Diefenbaker were both lawyers.
“He’s a communicator; he got the Muslims in, he got the Chinese in,” said one Sylvan Lake supporter, referring to Kenney’s famed outreach to ethnic communities on behalf of the federal Tories.
One of Kenney’s key boasts, in fact, is his track record of picking up microphones in front of people without Tory membership cards — a rare thing indeed in the latter years of the Harper government.
This is Kenney the Big Tenter. The pitchman for what he calls a “broad, tolerant, diverse free enterprise coalition.”
In his younger years, the 48- year- old Calgarian was once a wild- eyed Reform party idealist. But, just like his libertarian- leaning former boss Harper, he now appears ready to shelve as much of that as necessary to obtain power.
“I have learned, in 19 years in Parliament … that ‘conviction conservatives’ can’t do anything unless they can work in a coalition with others,” he told the National Post.
This all makes Kenney gatherings dramatically less exciting than your typical anti- NDP Alberta political meetings.
He tempers his NDP criticism with an acknowledg- ment of l ow commodity prices. He doesn’t entertain fringe dreams of some kind of magical pre-election NDP overthrow. He says “I respectfully disagree” whenever someone decries the “socialist takeover” of their province.
Actually, Kenney’s speeches are mostly a bunch of math.
His favourite stat is that 773,000 Albertans checked their ballots for a right-leaning party in the last provincial election. Only a few months later, more than one million Albertans voted for the federal Conservatives.
Vote for my plan, he says, 400,000 embittered conservatives will come back to provincial politics.
Kenney contends at every opportunity that he’s a reluctant saviour. There were “many interesting things” he turned down to pursue provincial politics instead. He’s quitting his MP job in October and will henceforth be living off his savings.
“Someone has to do this, right?” he said in Red Deer.
Nevertheless, for all this stated humility, the potential payoff is massive. If all goes according to plan, Kenney will be able to crush Canada’s only NDP government and spend the rest of his working life commanding the country’s most interesting pentagonal shape.
Jason Kenney Provincial Park. Jason Kenney Highway. Heck, Alberta premiers even get towns named after them; just ask the fine people of Manning, Alta.
But the going is slow. Kenney needs to stir the hearts of thousands of people to come out in the winter and cast the ballots needed for him to become PC leader.
For the 30 hours the National Post followed him, Kenney spoke six times, to an average crowd of about 30 to 40 people. Even at this pace, the rate of Albertans meeting Jason Kenney is about the same as the province’s birthrate.
And nobody frowns quite like a rural Alberta crowd.
“( Wildrose Leader) Brian Jean’s talking out of the side of his mouth about unity, but what has he told you? After all, you guys were in proverbial bed together in Ottawa,” came a question at a particularly tense meeting in Rocky Mountain House.
“I wouldn’t say we were in bed together,” replied Kenney.
Another frequent question is why he’s journeying into the darkest corners of Unemployment Land while still pulling down an MP salary. Kenney’s well-rehearsed answer is that he’s just waiting to wrap up some loose ends in Ottawa, after which he’ ll resign on Oct. 1 and complete the rest of his Unite Alberta quest while living off his savings.
His answer even has math. Kenney got parliamentary researchers to dig up 35 MPs who ran for provincial seats. In all cases, he tells crowds, they kept their Ottawa paycheques until they got into the legislature. Notably, the list doesn’t include Jean, who resigned his MP’s seat in January 2014, only to step up for the leadership of the embattled Wildrose a few months later.
It’s entirely possible that conservative Albertans may come to see Kenney as the heaven- sent answer to their Unite the Right prayers.
But if Kenney needs reassurance during his neverending journeys through the most stoic corners of Wildrose Country, he’ll have to find comfort in imperceptible hat tips and the occasional “I guess you’re the one who’ll be getting everything sorted then.”