The portfolio that Albertans are watching closely

The cabinet selection for a new government may be the classic Ottawa bubble event, but Alberta will be watching closely for changes in one portfolio in particular.

There is widespread discontent in that province about the Liberal government’s environmental policies, including the federal carbon tax and Bill C-69, the legislation that overhauls the review process for major energy projects and which Alberta Premier Jason Kenney has dubbed “the no more pipelines bill.”

Some senior Liberals are expecting current Environment Minister Catherine McKenna to be shuffled out of her department, maybe with a promotion or a lateral move for a loyal soldier who has been the face of many of the government’s most unpopular policies.

And the Prime Minister’s Office confirms that, whether McKenna is in the job or not, the policy direction will not change.

“We have always made fighting climate change and growing the economy a priority, and we will continue to do that,” said PMO director of communications Cameron Ahmad, who declined to speak specifically about any possible cabinet decisions.

On the cabinet front, the Liberals will find no shortage of advice.

At the end of October, Kenney said in an interview with the Globe and Mail that “we certainly hope that there will be people in those relevant portfolios who are actually seeking a balance between environmental concerns and jobs and growth, including in our energy sector.”

To the extreme annoyance of Kenney and his staff, those comments were characterized as a full-on demand that McKenna be sacked as environment minister, rather than a more general statement that ministers take the west’s concerns seriously when governing.

Nevertheless, there won’t be any tears shed in the Alberta government if McKenna is shuffled out of the environment portfolio.

Just this year, McKenna has twice attracted the ire of Albertans with clumsy statements about the oil industry. In April, she complained that Conservative leader Andrew Scheer was “scheming behind closed doors with wealthy executives” when he attended a private meeting with a pro-oil group.

At the time, Gary Mar, the president of the Petroleum Services Association of Canada, told the CBC that McKenna’s comments were an “over-exaggeration of a normal political process.”

Two months later, representatives from the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers were annoyed when McKenna said that conservative politicians and oil-and-gas lobbyists wanted Bill C-69 to simply allow every pipeline ever proposed without protecting the environment.

Like the Alberta NDP, which governed the province before Kenney, the Liberals have argued that spurring the economy and fighting climate change can be pursued in lockstep. But that’s left Liberal politicians, especially McKenna as environment minister, walking a delicate political tightrope as she struggles to appeal to environmentalists on the left without offending centrist voters worried about the effects of climate policies on the economy and Albertans who rely on the oil-and-gas industry to make a living. At times, everyone has been offended.

If a change of leadership is on the horizon for the environment department, though, it’s hard to imagine how anyone could be more of a lightning rod than McKenna, who seems to have managed to upset numerous people cross the country, not just in Alberta.

Since being appointed environment minister, she has received nearly 7,000 messages on Twitter referring to her disparagingly as “Barbie,” according to an analysis by Conor Anderson, a PhD candidate in the Climate Lab at the University of Toronto. If you can think of a gendered insult it has likely appeared on McKenna’s Twitter mentions page, most of them too inappropriate for print.

Days after the campaign ended, McKenna’s Ottawa office was vandalized with a sexist obscenity and The Canadian Press has reported that McKenna was forced to employ a security detail after being screamed at in public when she was leaving a movie theatre with her children in Ottawa. She has been called the C-word, a traitor, an enemy and a “communist piece of garbage,” CP reported.

It could be that after all that, McKenna would welcome a change of scenery.

With the Liberals as committed as ever to their environmental polices, and likely to be governing with the help of the NDP in a minority Parliament, not much will change on the policy front. If the animosity was truly driven by policies like the carbon tax, the 2019 election did nothing to put out that fire.