NDP carbon tax remains as reminder of how Alberta got shaft

For Kenney and UCP crew, pipeline ruling surely seals deal for winning next election

Here are three phrases you’ll never again hear emanating from the lips of Premier Rachel Notley: “social licence,” “green shoots” and “we’re batting a thousand.”

In fact, the only place in Alberta you might stumble across these words, at least in the next short while, would be in the campaign literature of Jason Kenney and his quietly chuckling UCP cohorts come the next provincial election campaign, due in the late spring of 2019. Hey, after all, why would any politician look three golden gift horses in their respective mouths?

As to that now infamous social licence: yes, the one that was supposed to get us knuckle-dragging Alberta rubes a secure and expanded pipeline to tidewater in return for a self-imposed carbon tax, it is well and truly expired.

As are the green shoots of our so-called economic recovery: this city’s unemployment rate still hovers around the seven per cent level after three years of struggle. And that leaves the only baseball analogy left on deck available for the NDP being: “three strikes, you’re out.”

Yes our province, along with those weak-kneed Grit cousins back in Ottawa — under the remarkably ludicrous leadership of the Clown Prince of Dress Up — did indeed emerge victorious in several lower court battles over the seemingly endless Trans Mountain pipeline expansion fiasco.

But when the big legal kahuna that is the Federal Court of Appeal weighed in against Alberta and the floundering feds, then all that previous pontificating piffle was adjudged for naught.

Suddenly Notley discovered what anyone who has lived through some part of Alberta’s recent history should never have forgotten; you do not partner happily and innocently with Ottawa because, inevitably, you will be the one left scarred, scared and scuttled, which is just about where she and her suddenly deer-in-the-headlights MLAs now find themselves.

So now — hallelujah — we are pulling out of the national carbon tax program, refusing to increase levies to $40 a tonne, then $50 a tonne in the coming years. Well, sorry to disillusion you, Premier Notley, but come next June you’ll not have a single word to utter on this cross-Canada process. (As though anything these days involving the whole country has a snowball’s chance of implementation.)

That’s because your party’s done like dinner. Sure, you can try to invoke some gay rights division over schooling or appeal to those wanting free child care, in an attempt to divide Kenney’s always-suspect coalition of conservatives. But it won’t work.

This lad is a tested political operative and if there’s one thing that binds politicians of different stripes it’s the smell of power in the offing. And right now the UCP is inhaling the aroma of fine Alberta political beef.

No way they will mess that up by breaking party ranks and saying something daft.

Because, while we might well jettison the federal plan for a national carbon tax, the one the NDP willingly imposed on Albertans remains.

It was annoying people before this latest legal fiasco but now, every time someone fills a gas tank or pays a power bill that still-in-place provincial levy is a stark reminder of how the province has been given the shaft from every quarter.

Truth be told, even ditching the provincial $30 a tonne carbon levy won’t save the Notley government from electoral defeat but it could prevent the political Armageddon they face.

But their pride and stubbornness won’t let them budge. Which means the provincial carbon tax will stick around for a few more months. That’s fair enough: dance with the one you arrived with if you wish, even if the tune playing is more like a funeral dirge leading to electoral oblivion.

As for Kenney, holy moly, he must feel as if he’s won the lottery on a ticket he found discarded in the gutter.