ALBERTA AS CASH COW?
O’Leary banks on ignorance: Simons
Would-be federal Conservative leader Kevin O’Leary didn’t exactly mince words Thursday, when he went on the attack against Alberta Premier Rachel Notley.
“She’s a vicious, poisonous, toxic cocktail of mediocrity (and) incompetence, put together,” O’Leary, dressed in a leather bomber jacket and tie, told a group in St. John’s, N.L. — while a CBC camera rolled.
“She requires an extreme amount of adult supervision.”
You could compare it to the way Donald Trump talked about Hillary Clinton — except I’m not sure that even Trump went that far down the road of public personal attack. But at least Trump was running against Clinton. Notley, though? She’s not a party to the Conservative Party of Canada leadership race.
But our home-grown bombastic reality-TV star wasn’t content merely to attack Notley personally. He took a pretty good shot at Confederation, too.
If Notley won’t eliminate Alberta’s carbon tax, O’Leary said, he would, as prime minister, simply cut transfer payments.
I’m not asking you to feel sorry for Notley because a male politician said something mean.
Notley can take care of herself. Indeed, her response to O’Leary’s toxic cocktail of loopiness was pitch-perfect.
“There’s a number of people in that particular race,” Notley told reporters Thursday, at an event to announce the twinning of the Fort Saskatchewan bridge. “Some of them are interested in generating attention through a whole series of fun, creative and somewhat wacky approaches to generating media attention.
“It’s not really my plan to participate in that,” she added, with a grin and an eye crinkle, declining to mention O’Leary, or his party, by name.
One of Notley’s best tricks is her ability to transfigure the vitriol her political opponents sling at her, and emerge shining. She doesn’t do outrage. She doesn’t play the victim card. She simply has a gift for looking like the only adult in the room, and of making her critics look foolish in the process. The more they rant, the calmer and cooler and more in control she appears.
It’s certainly not a universal gift within her caucus. And maybe Notley can only get away with it because she can rely on the more pugnacious likes of Sarah Hoffman and Shannon Phillips to be the Semenkos to her Gretzky. Still, in the face of O’Leary’s bluster, Notley’s ironic response kept her well above the fray.
But whether you like or loathe Notley and her policies, O’Leary’s tactics should give Albertans pause.
Either O’Leary is an ignoramus who has no idea how the Constitution works, or he’s hoping to mislead voters who actually are that ignorant.
Canada is a federation of provinces, which have control over their own budgets, their own resources, their own tax policies. Premiers are elected by the people of their provinces. They don’t report to the prime minister. The prime minister isn’t their boss.
A particular prime minister might not approve of the way Quebec runs its daycare program, or the way New Brunswick runs its school system or the way Saskatchewan operates its carbon capture initiative. But a prime minister doesn’t get to backseat drive,in areas of provincial jurisdiction. Nor does the House of Commons.
Alberta, in particular, fought furiously for decades to win control over its natural resources and its natural resource policy. Wherever you fall on the political spectrum, you should be wary of any would-be prime minister, from any party, who thinks that Ottawa should be calling the shots, and telling us how to run our own province.
“I can’t have her running the No. 1 piston of economic growth in Canada into the ground,” O’Leary told his Newfoundland audience. “The transfer payments out of Alberta in the last 35 years funded practically every province. And it’s broken.”
So is that how a leading candidate for the federal Conservatives sees Alberta? As a cash cow, whose role it is to underwrite the rest of the country, without murmur — while he can threaten to cut off transfer payments here, if he doesn’t happen to agree with a provincial environmental or economic policy? Does he imagine the prime minister as the feudal overlord of Canada, and the provinces as vassal states, meekly tithing to Ottawa?
O’Leary’s attempt to rabblerouse via his extraordinarily personal attack against a democratically elected premier is disquieting enough. But his attack on the underpinnings of Confederation is every bit as “wacky.”
Notley might have the right personal strategy — laughing at O’Leary’s posturing, calling his tactics, refusing to say his name. With O’Leary a putative front-runner in the Conservative leadership race, I’m not sure the rest of us have that same luxury.