National Post (National Edition)
Kenney must share blame for Tory loss
Jason Kenney is a wizard in a scrum. Intellectually nimble, rhetorically agile, reflexively partisan, the Conservatives’ former “Mr. Fix-it” is everything one could ask for in a future party leader, yes? Of course yes. Kenney is also, it turns out, a comedian.
“We need a conservatism that is sunnier and more optimistic than we have sometimes conveyed,” he was quoted by The Canadian Press as saying, following his party’s historic drubbing at the hands of Justin Trudeau, a man Kenney himself has incessantly belittled and mocked, for years.
Apparently defeat has refocused the former immigration and multiculturalism minister’s mind on the better angels of his nature. Kenney, long believed to be angling for the Tory leadership in a post-Harper era, has had his conversion on the road to Damascus. He wishes to purge his party of its grim, Harperesque baggage. Perhaps he will be the wire brush, to borrow the Liberal expression from the post-Sponsorship-scandal era, to scrape the Conservative party clean. Perhaps he will tell jokes and smile and speak of building a greater Canada. Perhaps he, too, will hold a news conference in the National Press Theatre, during which he gently reminds shell-shocked journalists they have a role to play in democracy, and are not despised.
Optimism, it has been miraculously revealed, works, and Jason Kenney will be its new blue paragon.
Seriously, now. If there is a single minister other than Stephen Harper who must wear the Conservative loss, it is Kenney. That’s due to his abilities and strengths, ironically enough, as much as his omissions and flaws.
It was Kenney who famously delivered Ontario’s Toronto-area seats, where many hundreds of thousands of new Canadians reside, in the 2011 federal election. It was he, lovingly dubbed the Minister of Curry-In-a-Hurry, who managed to pull off the apparent miracle of streamlining and toughening Canada’s immigration and refugee system, while increasing support among the various communities most affected.
It was Kenney also who spoke up most loudly and clearly, among federal ministers, in the fall of 2013 when former Parti Québécois premier Pauline Marois hauled out her xenophobic charter of values, which later cost her the premiership. “If you want people to become a part of your society and fully participate in it, then you have to create a space (and) send a message that people are welcoming (and) including,” Kenney was quoted by CTV as saying at the time.
But two years later, in the heat of a campaign, there was Kenney front and centre in the bid to transform fear of the niqab into votes. It was on Oct. 2, in fact, the day his colleagues Chris Alexander and Kellie Leitch unveiled their proposed “barbaric cultural practices” tip line, that Kenney said this to radio host Evan Solomon: “I believe it (the niqab) reflects a misogynistic culture that — a treatment of women as property rather than people, which is anchored in medieval tribal customs …”
Four days later, prime minister Stephen Harper doubled down, saying in an interview with CBC’s Rosemary Barton that he’d consider banning the veil across the civil service. There were no women wearing niqabs in the civil service, it later emerged, but never mind. This was the Conservative leader saying the wrangling would go on, and on. That very week, Conservative support began to slump, polls showed. It never recovered.
But there’s more. It was Kenney, in February of 2014, who defended the Conservatives’ $2.5-billion-a-year pledge to introduce incomesplitting for couples, after then-finance minister Jim Flaherty publicly questioned how many it would help. Only the wealthiest 15 per cent who can live off one income, was what the C.D. Howe Institute had judged. This laid the table for Trudeau’s Liberals to offer their more broad-based middle-class tax cut. There was talk among senior Tories at the time that this left them vulnerable. But Kenney, the party’s leading social conservative, had won the argument.
Set against two such major strategic blunders, Rob Ford may be incidental. But it’s worth noting Kenney also clearly understood how toxic the scandal-riven former mayor was to the Tory brand. In November of 2013, at the apex of the Ford madness, Kenney publicly called on him to resign. He was one of a few Harper ministers — perhaps the only one — with the personal standing among the party’s base to speak truth to the Boss. Where was the great optimist, one wonders, when the disastrous Ford fiasco unfolded in the campaign’s final days?
If one were unkind, one might suspect Kenney sensed his mentor was going over a cliff and was not chagrined to see it happen, secure in the knowledge a leadership contest was imminent, which it now is. Which isn’t one bit surprising, politics being what it is. But sunny? Not so much.