It's Election Day in my home province of Alberta, and I am sick with dread and loathing about what the future holds.  A dangerous level of anger has been fomented, quite deliberately, and it has been accompanied by a litany of promises that can never be fulfilled because they are either unconstitutional, impractical, or simply built on a foundation of lies.  And worse, those who have been adding fuel to that fire seem to have no conscience as to just what the consequences of these actions will be, not only with today's vote, but in the years to come.

The outrage machine that has been revved up in recent months, because another collapse of world oil prices (largely because of an ongoing supply glut) happened to coincide with refinery shutdowns in the U.S. just as more production was coming online in Alberta created the bottleneck and the huge price differential.  Yes, there is a lack of pipeline capacity, but this is not for lack of trying.  In the course of those months, Jason Kenney was instrumental in feeding that anger over what are largely intractable issues, and yet presented a wholly skewed version of reality that was intended to foment more anger.  It was convenient to blame Rachel Notley for the situation, and to tap into the atavistic hatred for the Trudeau name in Alberta thanks to a persistent mythology about the early 1980s in that province.  It was almost too easy.

To blame Trudeau for the lack of new pipelines is to ignore history and reality.  Under a decade with the Conservatives in power federally, they did not get the Keystone XL through the process in the United States, and their "no brainer" PR campaign in Washington DC blew up in their faces.  In fact, having Donald Trump in the White House hasn't made Keystone XL move any faster.  The Conservatives didn't publicly champion Northern Gateway, didn't hold any press conferences or media events.  It was on their desks for some 2000 days, and they didn't advance it while court challenges wound their way through the process, the way they insist that the Trudeau government should be doing with the Trans Mountain Expansion (but really can't, because there is no constitutional magic wand).  And the decision to let it die was more based on practicality because the hurdles identified by the Federal Court were deemed to be likely insurmountable.

Energy East?  That was only marginally viable economically and as soon as either Keystone XL or TMX got approvals, there was no longer a case for it.  It also would not have supplied oil to the East Coast of Canada in order to displace Saudi oil because the economics for that were never viable — not unless Alberta wanted to accepted a $10/barrel discount.  But none of these facts matter in the cloud of anger that has been stoked, nor are they indicative of anything that Jason Kenney could do anything differently if he were premier.  Meanwhile, Justin Trudeau ensured that the federal government bought the existing Trans Mountain pipeline in order to assume the risk and is doing everything the Federal Court of Appeal is asking to ensure that the expansion gets built, but you wouldn't know it given the conspiracy theory that he simply bought the pipeline to kill it (ignoring the great political cost that Trudeau is paying for doing so).

And then there are Kenney's false promises.  Holding a referendum on equalization?  It will accomplish nothing because it's premised on a bad reading of the Supreme Court of Canada reference for Quebec separation, and provinces can't simply decide on which parts of the constitution they're going to opt into.  Confederation doesn't work like that.  "Turning off the taps" to BC with regards to oil?  It not only violates the Constitution (Section 92A(2) if you're curious), but it wouldn't materially affect BC as they would replace their supply from the American northwest, where they already get some of it from.  Eliminating the province's carbon tax and challenging the federal carbon backstop?  That will not only create a huge amount of investor uncertainty in the province, but combing that with going to war with oil and gas company CEOs who support carbon pricing is not exactly going to be opening the floodgates of investment.  And this is before the litany of policy promises like resource corridors that will face the exact same problems that current pipeline projects face.

And this is what worries me the most — Kenney is fully aware that he is promising snake oil and false hope to an angry population, while he stokes that anger in order to win votes.  He actively promotes all kinds of conspiracy theories (the ones about foreign funded environmentalists are some of his favourites), and takes no responsibility for things that happened under his watch federally that he now blames Trudeau for.  But what does he plan to do when this anger boils over because he can't deliver?

Certain pundits like to point to Preston Manning's analogy of using western populism in the early nineties to act as a "relief well" to safely relieve some of that anger in the population then.  I'm not sure that is Kenney's game plan this time, because there has been such a campaign of rank dishonesty that can only be seen as utterly irresponsible.  And rather than helping people come to terms with certain realities, he has given rise to this notion that if what is happening now isn't working (except that it largely is, albeit slowly), that somehow voting for false promises out of desperation that it might work (even though it won't, and will make things worse in many cases) is preferable.  It won't do anything about the anger — it will only make it worse when he can't deliver.  And while I'm sure he plans to rail about how this is all Trudeau's fault that his false promises didn't work, it still doesn't do anything about the anger that will continue to build and fester.  It will eventually need to go somewhere, but it's the where that concerns me the most, particularly if it starts to poison the rest of confederation.  All for what?  A few votes?  Where is the morality in that?

Photo Credit: CBC News