Another day in Alberta waiting to hear UCP’s policies.

Alberta UCP still has little actual policy

At the weekend’s inaugural United Conservative Party general meeting in Red Deer, Alta., Jason Kenney delivered a remarkable, incendiary half-hour speech that revealed a grand strategy for the election campaign to come. The keyword is: anger. I hear you scoffing already, reader. What conservative politician doesn’t exploit anger? But in this case there’s an important detail: Kenney is going to cultivate anger directed outward, at the perceived exterior enemies of Alberta, while laying off his immediately obvious opponent, the ruling New Democratic Party of Alberta.

Please note that I say “perceived enemies” as opposed to “imaginary.” Alberta’s public treasury and the carboniferous part of its workforce definitely face organized forces working hard against their ostensible interests. I know that there will be readers who don’t understand why the province doesn’t just switch to a rainbow-based economy already, this being the year 2018, but Alberta-the-way-itis does have adversaries capable of doing it harm. This is not a question of mere paranoia.

But one could be forgiven if the p-word came to one’s mind. Much of Kenney’s speech was devoted to enumerating and threatening those exterior enemies, and the crowd ate it up. The Kenney Axis of Evil included anti-oil sands charities, banks targeting Alberta for decarbonization, the government of B.C., and Justin Trudeau. Kenney’s list of vague plans for counterattack involve courts, a propaganda “war room,” a legislature committee empowered to investigate “anti-Alberta special interests” (including the Russians), and “turning off the taps” on B.C.’s gasoline supply. The leader’s pet idea for “forcing” negotiations with the federal government over interprovincial equalization payments was re-aired.

And what did the UCP leader have to say about Premier Rachel Notley? That she is ... an honourable public servant, and that people who send her death threats are loathsome and misogynistic. This is the line Kenney has held to very consistently all along, but the speech, with its frenzied promises of unholy vengeance against the global anti-Alberta conspiracy, highlighted the contrast. Notley and the NDP are to be treated almost as if they were already out of the way: they are to be respected up until the moment they wither and vanish.

You cannot call it “patronizing.” Kenney’s talk of decent behaviour to political opponents is strong and consistent, and, after all, it is only what any civilized, sane individual already believes. But the effect is to suggest implicitly of Notley and her braintrust: “The poor dears. They meant well, didn’t they?”

Kenney’s determination to fight for Alberta in a myriad of battle theatres struck such a thrilling note with the assembled UCP membership that they may have scarcely noticed how little actual policy the party yet has. When you’re listing the banks you will boycott and the charities you will sue, it leaves very little time for describing exactly how you are going to pull Alberta out of a debt spiral and put its economy back on its pre-NDP trend (which it isn’t, quite). Perhaps these problems will be solved by means of sheer combative élan.

Whenever Kenney has been challenged to talk about future budgets or economic programs or the like, he has always been able to say that his party is young and that its program is going to be created by the “grassroots” anyway. As many of you will already have read, the “grassroots” at the convention voted in favour of a principle of parental notification concerning sex-education activity in schools, creating a media stir about the endlessly debated “gaystraight alliance” clubs that have tended to dominate Alberta politics since Alison Redford was premier.

Members were urged whimperingly by innercircle UCP legislators not to vote for the parental-notification resolution, and they voted for it (by a margin of 57-43) anyway, which created some embarrassment for Kenney. Or, if it didn’t, it ought to have: up until the moment of that lost vote, his organizational powers had seemed invincible.

At the close of the meeting Kenney told a press scrum: “A United Conservative government will not be changing law or policy to require notification of parents when kids join GSAs. We will not do that. You can take that to the bank.”

But what about them consarned grassroots, Mr. Leader? “I will take the resolutions adopted today as important input but I hold the pen on the platform ... That platform and our governing approach will not ever include mandatory notification of peer groups, including gay-straight alliances, which we support 100 per cent.” On the actual GSA issue, it is hard to imagine Kenney being more categorical than this. He may be hoping that the continued criticism by the New Democrats in the face of “take that to the bank” and “100 per cent” will backfire, and it might.

As for the grassroots, if you study the “Grassroots Policy Plan” Kenney made such a big deal of last summer, you find that it always contemplated a distinction between the populist “Policy Declaration,” which is what UCP members were creating on the weekend, and the work of the “Platform Committee,” which meets next February, and which will be easier for Kenney’s young cadre to rig. But this means that, as of now, no one has to let Kenney wriggle away from questions of substantial policy anymore. The man said it himself: “I hold the pen.” Terrific: what do you intend to write with it, sir?

HE HAS ALWAYS BEEN ABLE TO SAY THAT HIS PARTY IS YOUNG. — COLBY COSH