KENNEY COULD USE A REALITY CHECK ON HIS ‘ASCENSION’
Exaggerated falsehoods, lack of humility on his political rise may drag him down
In one of his social media videos posted over the holidays, United Conservative Party Leader Jason Kenney offered some sage advice to his supporters: “As long as we work hard, stay humble and earn every vote, we will be in a very strong position to present a credible, common sense, free-enterprise alternative to the NDP in the spring of 2019.”
Of course, staying humble is proving difficult for more than a few of his supporters on social media, who are gleefully predicting the destruction of the NDP government in the next election.
Staying humble seems to be a bit of struggle for Kenney’s staff, too. In a UCP news release Wednesday trumpeting the certification of the results of last month’s byelection in Calgary-Lougheed, the party referred to the “ascension of Kenney to MLA and Leader of the United Conservative Caucus.” Really? The ascension? Yes, ascension does mean being promoted. But it also refers to the ascent of Christ into heaven on the 40th day after the Resurrection.
Kenney had a remarkable year in 2017 and he is poised to shake Alberta politics to its core in 2018. But I’m not sure the UCP should be playing with Biblical allusions to Kenney’s political successes. It doesn’t seem very, you know, humble.
Both the UCP and Kenney might also want to take things down a notch when it comes to their hyperbolic attacks on the NDP.
In one of his holiday videos that targets the carbon tax, Kenney claimed the NDP promised during the 2015 election campaign it would not introduce such a tax.
“This is the carbon tax they claimed they had no intention of imposing in the last provincial election,” Kenney said as he filled up his truck on New Year’s Eve in advance of the tax hike.
It’s an effective way to call the NDP hypocrites. It’d be much more effective if it was true. It’s not.
The NDP didn’t mention a carbon tax during the 2015 campaign.
Journalists did ask NDP Leader Rachel Notley at the start of the campaign to see her party’s climate change plan. She avoided the issue by saying: “We probably deserve a month or two” to come up with a plan if the NDP won the election.
At that point nobody, including Notley, expected the NDP to win.
And nobody had a climate change plan, not the NDP or the Wildrose or the Progressive Conservatives. Nobody was talking about a carbon tax.
The UCP says I’m splitting hairs, that the NDP “lied by omission” by not mentioning a carbon tax during the campaign.
That’s to believe the NDP thought it was going to win the election and had a hidden agenda. The reality is that the NDP was as surprised as anybody it won, and it began scrambling to make up policy on the fly.
You can argue against the carbon tax for all kinds of reasons, but revising history to fit your argument is not the best strategy.
This is not a one-off. Kenney is displaying a tendency to overplay his use of hyperbole in attacking the NDP. And getting things wrong.
In one of his tweets, he said Alberta has seen its population shrink the past two years. It hasn’t.
When academics and others pointed this out, Kenney admitted he had been referring to interprovincial migration. More people had left Alberta to go to other provinces than the other way around. That’s true.
But our population still grew overall.
As I have said before, all politicians exaggerate to make a point. The NDP keeps saying Kenney would cut government spending by 20 per cent. He never actually said that. He would like Alberta to have spending in line with British Columbia. The NDP has seized on that to mean a 20 per cent cut. But Kenney says any reduction in spending would be much more modest.
We’d like to see details, of course, just as we’d like to see details in 2018 of how the NDP plans to balance the provincial budget.
The NDP can be attacked on many fronts. There’s no need to exaggerate problems or distort history. If you accuse the NDP of lying, but your accusation is based on a falsehood, you merely undermine your own argument.
And you make it more difficult to win over Albertans for your, um, ascension to premier.