Kenney’s strategic dilemma

Jason Kenney, that longfamiliar (but startlingly slimmed-down) figure from federal conservative politics, entered the Alberta legislative assembly for the first time as Leader of the Opposition this week. It was the latest step in a long march — one could almost capitalize those words and turn them into a historical allusion — that Kenney intends to conclude in 2019 with the overthrow of Alberta’s New Democratic government. But it also showed that the last step in Kenney’s journey may be the hardest, requiring infinite subtlety and care.

Things, you see, are a little weird for Kenney right now. Historical circumstance has given Premier Rachel Notley the gift every Alberta politician begs Santa for, every year: an exterior nemesis. B.C.’s Greenbacked NDP government, hoping to shake free from its dependence on an eco-radical block of deputies, is looking for ways to slow the expansion of the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline from Sherwood Park to Burnaby.

This has led to a fratricidal war of symbols and bureaucracies between New Democrat-led Alberta and B.C. — a war reflecting a genuine conflict of interests between B.C. coast-dwellers and Alberta’s workers and its treasury. This is happening with the federal government hovering in the background as a third party, to be used or abused by either side, as political imperatives dictate.

As a new-minted Opposition leader, Kenney is at some risk of being regarded as irrelevant while Notley’s rhetoric in defence of Alberta oil and great national infrastructure works gets hotter, as it has. This is all the more difficult because there is another strategic angle: in his early days as an alternative premier, Kenney has been very careful to minimize the conservative politician’s occupational hazard of being denounced as “angry” and “divisive.” He seems to understand that in Alberta, there is no prospect of reversing the change of public mood that brought about NDP rule, which is, at root, a shift in demographic power to younger folk (and to an ever less pink, more brown electorate overall).

So Kenney recites a familiar litany about Doing Politics Differently, with extrasuper-doses of civility and respect, and has walked the walk. Even as he prepared to enter the corrida with Notley, he sent her polite Twitter congratulations on her 10th anniversary as an MLA, and he rarely misses a chance for other polite gestures of the kind.

For better or worse, Kenney has not chosen the path of the brawling, unapologetic populist. He saw that the late Jim Prentice, running as premier against the young female leader of a party traditionally about as well-liked in Alberta as anthrax, was still not careful enough in his argumentative language. He made a joke about math being hard in a TV debate, and Notley herself scarcely noticed; but voters did.

Yet Kenney still has the goal of showing Notley up as insufficiently tough in the battle against B.C. This intricate problem revealed itself in the assembly quickly, in a debate over a motion authored by the premier herself. (Takes deep breath:) “Be it resolved that the Legislative Assembly support the government of Alberta’s fight on behalf of Albertans’ interests to ensure the lawfully approved Trans Mountain pipeline expansion is built, and be it further resolved that the Legislative Assembly call for the federal government to continue to take all necessary legal steps in support of the pipeline’s construction, and be it further resolved that the Legislative Assembly reaffirm its support for the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion as a key component of Alberta’s energy future.”

The New Democrats have a big majority in the legislature: they don’t really need a showy gesture of support for the ministry. The motion is written for the national audience, before whose eyes I, as an Alberta patriot, put it now. There is nothing for Kenney or anyone else in Alberta to object to in the motion, which is why it passed unanimously. So the United Conservatives went for an amendment instead: they wanted the motion to recommend that the federal government invoke the Constitution Act’s “declaratory power” under Section 92(10(c)) to designate public works as being “for the general Advantage of Canada.”

As everyone with any knowledge of the subject pointed out pretty quickly, this idea doesn’t make an ounce of sense. Leaving aside the probable legal desuetude of the “declaratory power,” last trotted out a lifetime ago in connection with the creation of a federally regulated atomic-power industry, the section gives the federal government extra authority only over works “wholly situate within (a) Province”. For things like pipelines that cross borders, Ottawa’s jurisdiction is not in any doubt, or need of purely legal augmentation.

The purpose of the failed amendment was only to make a show of encouraging Notley to be more hawkish: United Conservatives can now complain on the hustings that it was rejected. But probably no one, including me, will remember the specifics of any of this four weeks from now. It is just part of an ongoing exercise in conservative storytelling — a challenging effort to bathe Premier Notley’s belly in soft, slightly yellow light, without descending to rudeness or invective.

GOAL OF SHOWING UP NOTLEY AS INSUFFICIENTLY TOUGH.