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Month: April 2019

Jason Kenney has vaulted into the Alberta premier's chair after a long campaign driving a bright blue gas-guzzling pickup truck around the province while promising a renaissance for the oil and gas industry.

He proposes to get those pipelines built and to punish jurisdictions, such as British Columbia, that might try to stand in the way, with turn-off-the-taps legislation.  He will battle the federal government in court over carbon tax.  He will establish a war room to counter the anti-oil claims of "foreign-funded" environmental groups.

But the campaign, built on the deep yearning of the electorate for another run down the oil boom road, is at an end.  Nostalgia is a vote getter but it takes vision, tough choices and innovative policy to govern into the future.

If in four years the province's economy is still as dependent on oil and gas as it is now, Kenney will have failed to ensure Alberta's future.

The United Conservative Party platform so far is leaning on a 'get out of the way' strategy to appeal to business and investors.  Kenney has promised to cut the corporate tax rate to eight per cent from the current 12 per cent level.  The lost government revenue from the cut will be made up for in increased economic activity, claims the party.

One of the first pieces of legislation to be introduced in the snap legislature session in May will the Open for Business Act.  It institutes employer friendly provisions, including roll backs on some labour law changes instituted by the NDP government.  And, taking a leaf out of the Ontario Conservative book, it calls for a UCP Red Tape Reduction Action Plan, aimed at reducing the regulatory burden on job creators by one third.

The UCP's big policy platform book includes lots of references to economic sectors from agriculture to tourism to forestry.  Regulatory flexibility, consultation, more private sector and public-private partnership development and increased property rights are promised, all fitting with the conservative values the party believes will encourage more companies to grow and move to the province.

But the heart and soul of the UCP playbook is still oil and gas.  The discussion about intergovernmental relationships revolves around forcing the rest of Canada to recognize Alberta's right to export its oil wealth.  There is not a campaign speech or political rally where the word 'pipeline' does not feature loudly in the first five minutes.

Meaningful diversification over the next four years is going to take more than a tax cut.  The Alberta government is going to have to display more balanced attention to other, non-energy related, sectors of the economy.

Unfettered capitalism might appeal to some business owners and investors, but the new economy requires highly educated talent that craves high standards of healthcare, education, and recreation.  Young workers in high tech industries also espouse some values that the UCP is backing away from, including dramatic carbon emission reductions and sustainability.

Alberta has potential in artificial intelligence, health technology, advanced food processing, cannabis farming and processing.  The UCP government needs to develop some more detail in its strategies to attract capital, entrepreneurs, a skilled workforce and innovations in those types of sectors.

Premier Kenney is faced with a tough task over the next four years.  He must be prepared to start peeling the energy industry's grip off the province's steering wheel.  That will fly in the face of all political conventions related to party loyalties.  The UCP's strongest support in the provincial election was from Alberta's oil capital Calgary.

If Kenney lets the energy sector take up all the air in the policy room, Alberta will be stuck once again bewailing its dependency on nonrenewable resources, hostage to international oil politics and declining markets.

Photo Credit: Edmonton Journal

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.

kathy-kerr

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In the wake of the Alberta election, premier-designate Jason Kenney appeared behind a lectern that had a familiar phrase on the front "Open for business."  It's a refrain that those of us in Ontario are familiar with, given that our own premier, Doug Ford, has made it his slogan since his own election campaign, and part of his attempt to rebrand the province in the time since, removing the "Yours to Discover" from road signs at provincial borders and was rumoured to want to put this on licence plates before he was convinced that it was a bad idea.  Nevertheless, it trades on a certain mythology about how a certain class of politician thinks that business operates, without actually talking to any of those businesses.

If you actually talk to members of the business community (as opposed to some of their lobby groups), a few things become clear that they are generally looking for certainty, and for policy that they can plan around.  This is not what Ford delivered in Ontario when he cancelled a number of green energy contracts and more to the point, legislated immunity for the government from litigation so that these companies who spent the money to fulfil these contracts could not recoup their lost investment.  This is the opposite of certainty, and it created an investment environment that is a high-risk one that is actually hostile to attracting new businesses not that Ford cared.

I have strong suspicions that we're about to see a repeat performance of that same show in Alberta, as Kenney has promised to scrap the province's carbon tax which the majority of the oil and gas industry was in favour of and would rather have the federal carbon price backstop imposed upon them so that they can challenge it in court (and in all likelihood lose), in the hopes that Andrew Scheer's federal Conservatives will win in October and repeal that federal price something that will only create uncertainty for an industry already doing poorly.  Add to that, Kenney has promised to go to war with CEOs who disagree with him, particularly on carbon taxes, which again, makes no sense if his goal is to attract business.  As well, the cancellation of the current green plan in Alberta would likely mean cancelling the investments that its proceeds were funding, and you can imagine that Kenney would also try to insulate his government from the ensuing litigation as Ford has again, creating a disincentive to invest.

And yet, the rhetoric has been focused around lowering corporate taxes, which Rachel Notley's NDP government raised by two percentage points as the province was heading into a recession caused by a collapse in world oil prices.  This is something that many business lobby groups will always demand, but some of the more credible ones are asking instead for tax simplification.  And sure, there is an economic case to be made that cutting corporate taxes could create jobs, but I hear more often that policy predictability is the bigger concern, and I don't see that coming from Kenney.

One particular case in point was how weirdly specific policy ideas started appearing in the party's platform documents mid-campaign items that had not been there in the initial release of the document.  Any changes were supposed to be limited to typos or grammatical clarification, but out of the blue, reclassifying service rigs, doing away with rural road permits, and extending equipment certification periods were all added after the fact, and it was done with a shrug of "we said there was more to come," without any particular discussion.  Kenney's positions like Ford's have changed depending on who has his ear at the particular moment, and this sudden new policy adoption is indicative of that, which seems unlikely to engender a level of trust that there will be the kind of predictability that investors look for.

The other aspect of "open for business" that Kenney is pushing that we should be aware of is that it's a certain kind of business that he's open to, but there are a number of other economic ventures in the province that have been looking for support to grow and expand, but they can't seem to get the attention of a government NDP or conservative that is obsessed with trying to recapture the glory years of the oil booms.  To a certain extent, it's a behaviour that echoes the "chasing the dragon" phenomenon of opioid addicts who keep trying to replicate their first high, but they never can.  And given the changing global energy market that came along with the shale revolution, it seems unlikely that Alberta will ever see another boom like it was used to.  And as much as the bumper stickers would read "Please God, give us another oil boom and we promise not to piss it away this time," they always did, and that is unlikely to change, particularly given that Kenney's apparent single-minded focus is about trying to recapture that status-quo rather than moving toward a future with a more diverse economy.

There are other structural problems that Kenney doesn't seem to want to face either, such as the cohort of under-educated men who have come to expect high incomes in the oil patch, which is going to become more acute as the economic high of the boom doesn't return.  Kenney scoffed over social media when this was flagged, trying to dismiss it as coming from elitists rather than real people, but as the economy changes, this cohort will be less able to adapt.  In fact, when one economist pointed out that the province's economic recovery had worked out well for women, who were seeing more employment in the years since the last oil crash, there was crickets in response.  This is something that should concern everyone an angry population of undereducated men who are used to wielding outsized economic influence is something that will breed hard-right populism if history is any guide.  Kenney's decision to stoke that anger for his own ends will be a problem he has to deal with sooner than later, and ignoring the structural problems will only make it worse.  But right now, the focus remains on chasing the dragon, and it will have consequences.

Photo Credit: CBC News

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To paraphrase Game of Thrones, climate change is here.

We're now no longer able to prevent climate change from happening, but we can hope to limit its disastrous effects — if we act quickly and aggressively.

Conservative politicians would prefer to focus on the dollars and cents that putting a price on carbon pollution carries to consumers.  This is quite literally missing the forest for the trees — or more accurately, missing the forest fires for the trees.  The cost of pollution pricing is minuscule to the point of nonsignificant compared to the costs of climate change itself.

Carbon pricing, whether through a Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney-style cap-and-trade system or a conservative Premier Gordon Campbell-style carbon tax, is the bare minimum we need to do to blunt the effects of climate change.  By making the cost of polluting the planet greater, market-minded economists argue, we can shift behaviour to less carbon-intensive consumer patterns.  It's self-evident.

Of course, like former president Barack Obama implementing a Republican proposal for market-based health-care reforms, once a liberal is for it, Conservatives cannot help but spot an opportunity to engage in a little intellectual dishonesty.  So, Conservative politicians across the country are laser-focused on opposing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's pollution-pricing scheme — and they have no plan of their own, just mindless and self-defeating opposition.

Yet, climate change is too important to risk on cyclical partisan manoeuvring.  It's a national security concern and an existential threat.  Anyone who says otherwise is either lying or ignorant — or both.

As David Wallace-Wells argues in his new book, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, we will face "a planet battered daily by hurricanes and monsoons we used to call 'natural disasters' but will soon normalize as 'bad weather'… the foreign minister of the Marshall Islands offers another name…'genocide'".

Wallace-Wells cites scientific studies that label the coming decades "the century of hell", with global damages approaching $600 trillion dollars — "more than twice the wealth that exists in the world today".  That certainly puts the extra cents at the pumps Conservative politicians have been visiting so religiously lately into shocking perspective.  Put another way, he suggests "every degree of warming, it's been estimated, costs a temperate country like the United States about one percentage point of GDP… you have almost entirely wiped out the very possibility of economic growth".

The economic impacts are nothing compared to the human suffering that will unfold: "150 million more people would die from air pollution alone in a 2-degree warmer world… more than twice the greatest death toll of any kind, World War II".

He argues, "climate change appears to be not merely one challenge among many facing a planet already struggling… but the all-encompassing stage on which all those challenges will be met".

And therein may lie the solution.

Recent polling commissioned by the progressive social media community North 99 by Abacus Research points to the solution: 61% of Canadians surveyed favour a "Green New Deal" effort to combat climate change as aggressively as possible.  The aspirational plan calls not for the technocratic, baby-step efforts we've seen from politicians, but rather a massive mobilization of national resources not seen since the first New Deal harnessed the purchasing and employment powers of the entire United States government to put thousands of people to work on century-defining public works projects — a programme of civic imagination Franklin Delano Roosevelt would convert into the "great arsenal of democracy" that propelled America out of the depths of the Depression into super-power status, victor in a World War and defeater of "fear itself".

As Taylor Scollon of North 99 puts plainly: "The conversation among politicians has revolved around pollution pricing, but climate change is an existential challenge and requires a solution that matches its scale.  Canadians know we need a much broader mobilization against climate change".

Conservatives may choose to bury their heads in the sands of climate change denial and obstructionism, but progressives need not join them.  The time has come for a Canadian version of a Green New Deal, one that puts thousands of blue-collar folks to work building renewable energy, public transit and electric-car infrastructure, retrofitting government buildings to be energy efficient, and far, far more.

Averting the worst of the climate disasters we've been warned about my entire lifetime is possible; so, too, is the chance to put people to work.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.

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I hate to tell you this, but if for some reason the federal Liberals fail to win re-election later this year, the blame for their loss will fall directly on your shoulders.

Yup, it won't be Prime Minister Trudeau who will be blamed, it won't be his strategists who will be blamed, it won't be his policies which will be blamed; it'll be seen as all your fault.

Mind you, it won't be just you.

Indeed, if Trudeau loses all of us Canadians will be castigated, scorned and mocked for the grievous sin of failing to appreciate the glorious divineness of our wonderful prime minister.

It's true.

Pundits, journalists, activists, CEOs and academics will all solemnly and tearfully proclaim how sadly tragic it is that regular, dumb, stupid Canadians were simply not enlightened enough to appreciate Trudeau's grand genius.

How could it be otherwise?

After all, media and cultural elites both within and without our borders have spent the last four years or so pushing the narrative that Trudeau is a gleaming beacon of progressive tolerance in an otherwise dark world of fear and hate.

If anything, I'm pretty sure the general opinion in places like the CBC or the Toronto Star or the SNC-Lavalin corporate boardroom, is that Trudeau should be worshipped as a planet-saving, feminist-loving, marijuana-legalizing deity, who should perhaps be installed as Canada's permanent God-King.

So this is why, if voters were to unceremoniously toss Trudeau out of office and replace him with (horror of horrors) Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer, it'd cause an instant case of shock within the ranks of our ruling elites.

Then, once the shock wears off, they'll be forced to grapple with how such a miscarriage of political justice could ever possibly occur, and since they're also stuck on the notion that Trudeau himself is close to absolute perfection, they'll have no choice but to push the idea that Canadians were just not worthy of such a magnificent leader.

And if you think I'm joking here, keep in mind this is how "elites" always respond when one of their favored politicians or causes gets rejected by the public it's never the politician or cause that's wrong; it's always the voters who screwed up.

Recall, for instance, how after Britain's Brexit vote, the immediate reaction from on high was to blame stupid, old white people; or how when Donald Trump emerged victorious, they blamed the stupid "deplorables".

And this sort of thing, of course, happens in Canada too.

As a matter of fact, Canadian elites were horrified last year when Ontario voters turfed Liberal Kathleen Wynne and replaced her with Progressive Conservative Doug Ford.

Despite the plethora of scandals afflicting her government, despite the fiscal mess she had created, despite the arrogance of her persona, the official elite reaction was that Wynne's loss couldn't possibly be her fault, since she was a media darling, much adored by the ruling classes.

So logically, the problem had to be the beer-swilling, uneducated, non-downtown urbanite voters.

Writing in the Toronto Star, for instance, John Barber called Ford's victory "populist derangement" and noted, Wynne "failed because she's a woman, and because she's gay.  She failed because she's Ontarian, at the mercy of Ontarians, and we're as ugly as anyone."

Take that you unwashed masses!

This attitude is also now resurfacing in the wake of Rachel Notley's recent electoral loss in Alberta.

In fact, a theme is emerging which suggests Notley's loss really had nothing to do with anything she might have done wrong, but was actually part of a trend in which inherently misogynist  Canadian voters are voting against all female leaders.

As former Ontario Liberal MPP Eleanor McMahon put it on Twitter: "Reflecting on the #AlbertaElection results and the fact that there is not one female Premier, whereas at one time we had 5.  We don't seem to re-elect women Premiers in this country.  What does that say about us, and about women in public life?"

At any rate, you see my point, right?

If this pattern continues it means a Trudeau loss (which is by no means a given) will result in mainstream commentary heaping elitist-style abuse on the Canadian public.

Indeed the groundwork for this is already being laid.

EKOS Research Associates recently released a poll which showed that about 40 per cent of Canadians feel there are too many immigrants coming to this country and that race plays a factor in this attitude.

Commenting on his poll, EKOS president Frank Graves noted, "It's a pretty clear measure of racial discrimination.  A sizeable portion of Canadians are using race as something that would alter their view of whether or not there's too few or too many immigrants coming to the country."

So prepare yourself, if Trudeau loses in the fall, odds are good you'll be called a racist.

Photo Credit: CBC News

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.

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So, I've been sitting here all day banging away at my keyboard, trying and failing to get my blood up enough to deconstruct what it is about Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer that I find to be on the one hand so wretched, but on the other so uninspiring.

And after plenty of writing, and plenty of deleting what I've just written, I think I've come around to the idea that the reason I can't get mad about Scheer is because there is so little to him.

He's like a beige wall.  There's nothing there to like, but how do you get viscerally upset about a beige wall?

Andrew Scheer does not thrill, he drones.  He's not the sort of guy that draws people to him through animal magnetism or even pleasant charm, he just exists.  He's like the nitrogen in the air we breathe.  He's there.

It's perhaps his greatest weakness, but at the same time something of a strength.

It's this empty quality of his that allows him to hammer away in question period on multiple occasions about the horrible dangers to Canadian sovereignty by agreeing to a UN compact on immigration, with little to no longterm damage.

Throughout the text of the compact it is clear to explicitly say it is both non-binding and does not interfere with a nation's sovereignty, it even clearly says that countries can define "regular" and "irregular" migrants however they see fit.

Scheer and the Conservative Party would have you believe otherwise:

"Andrew Scheer opposes signing on to this international agreement, because Canada must be in control of our borders and have full autonomy over who enters our country — not some foreign entity that cannot be held accountable by the Canadian people."

That's not some off-hand comment, that's from a part of the party's website where they're looking to get email signups to attract more donations.

It's the type of message that attracts the very worst elements of modern conservative politics.  The elements which are now becoming the very core of conservatism.

Maybe it's because he believes in this stuff, maybe it's because he's too much of a coward to oppose it.

It's this emptiness that allowed his campaign manager to provide IT support for, and sat on the board of the miserable hell site The Rebel, and somehow not carry the stain of that collection of far-right trash merchants.  Sure, the guy helped get the site off the ground, but Scheer says he won't do interviews with them anymore, so what's the harm?

Even when he's trying to show some kind of backbone and make himself out to be some kind of tough, there's something flat about it.  Just three hours after Jody Wilson-Raybould finished her first round of testimony in front of the justice committee, detailing the misdeeds of the Prime Minister's Office, Scheer was looking to put Justin Trudeau's head on a pike.

His demand for Trudeau's immediate resignation fell flat.  Trudeau is still prime minister, and after expelling some troublesome members, his caucus has closed ranks around him.

And yet, Scheer persists in our politics.  His party polls at levels of popularity similar to Trudeau's Liberals.

His most vivid policy is his opposition to carbon taxes, but that's not a policy it's a declaration of opposition.  Scheer has said he's got a climate plan coming soon, but he's been saying that for months now with nothing to show for it.  The easy conclusion is he hasn't released a plan, because he doesn't plan to do anything.

If you ask him, he'll tell you he believes in climate change, and he believes it's the fault of human activity.  But it's clear he's going though the motions.  What conservatives have learned through the years is rather than try and dodge the question of whether you believe in climate change, answer in the affirmative and then do whatever you want.

Look to Ontario where Doug Ford promised no one would be fired and no services would be cut because he could get things under control through "efficiencies."  He had to say it to win, but now that he's won it doesn't matter what he's promised.  Teachers are being fired, the axe is falling all over the provincial budget, and Ford blusters onward.

You can expect similar results in Alberta, where Jason Kenney has just won a campaign with a core of fairy tale promises about unilateral constitutional change with no hope of success.  He carried a number of candidates with vile views across the finish line.  His leadership campaign was being investigated for possible voter fraud and it's been alleged he was doing everything he could to kneecap his leadership opponent by letting a stalking horse do all his dirty work.

The consequences to both leaders has been limited.  That may change with time, but while the clock spins Ford and Kenney have power.

And this is the ultimate lesson for a beige wall like Scheer.  You can bullshit your way through a campaign.  You can make absurd promises.  You can indulge the worst wings of your party, and you can even get into some dirty tricks.

As long as people are angry enough, you can channel that anger to your advantage.  Fortunately, no one has ever been burned playing with fire.

Photo Credit: CBC News

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I recently learned of a rumour that an up-and-comer in federal politics, who happens to be an acquaintance, has resorted to some underhanded tactics to eliminate a political rival.  According to my informant, they apparently tricked their nemesis into making less-than-savoury comments during what they believed to be a private conversation, which they later shared with people who had the power to end this person's nascent career.  Of course, this probably wouldn't have happened if my friend didn't know said nemesis to hold these views already.  But when bozos won't erupt in public, you gotta do what you gotta do, right?

I can't say how true any of this is, but it wouldn't surprise me if it were true.  If you get involved in politics, you'll meet people like this every now and then: people who will gladly destroy the reputations of others if it makes their own path to power a little smoother.  They might remind you of a certain TV anti-hero who has done much worse.  They might even consider him an inspiration, even if their version of his approach is somewhat Disneyfied.

This comparison occurred to me after I heard two-time presidential loser Hillary Clinton compare her own life in politics to a different program, after Democratic consultant Paul Begala asked her to compare it to one of two other programs during an event last week.  Over the next few days, this and the story of Canada's under-Underwood crystallized into a unified theory of political behaviour: Everyone involved thinks they're in a TV show, and the show they think they're in perfectly summarizes their attitude toward their profession.  Observe:

If the rumour about my acquaintance is true, that puts them squarely in the realistic/optimistic quadrant, or the House of Cards quadrant.  People in this corner have what they believe to be a clear-eyed view of what it takes to get ahead in politics (realistic), and are confident that they will reap the rewards of it if they do it well (optimistic).  Typically, they highly overestimate their skills as practitioners of the political dark arts and end up humiliating themselves sooner or later, as one does after leaving enough fingerprints.  This being Canada in the 2010s, however, it's doubtful that any of them will come to the fate of Francis Urquhart in the original British House of Cards.  (I cite that version because Frank Underwood's fate doesn't really count.)

The diametric opposite of the above perspective is where Clinton has placed herself: the idealistic/pessimistic quadrant, or the Game of Thrones quadrant.  Having been burned by one Democratic primary, one philandering spouse, and probably countless former surrogates, she had every reason in the world to be pessimistic by 2016.  It may seem bizarre to describe one of the coldly calculating Clintons as an idealist, but she was, at the time, about precisely one thing: that Americans cared about qualifications and psychological stability and would reward her for having both, if not for forces operating against her.  Most Starks and two Baratheons can tell you how that tends to work out.

The more cheerful version of this can be found in the idealistic/optimistic quadrant, or the West Wing quadrant.  This is where many political newcomers begin, and where an unfortunate number stay.  They believe that they are working in the service of just causes (idealistic), and that they will convince the electorate to rally behind it in turn (optimistic) with the right combination of messaging and statecraft.  Often, it is impossible for them to see bad actors and actions on their own side for who and what they are, leading to the blind loyalty that characterizes a significant portion of the Liberal Party.  If their side should suffer for their mistakes, the solution is always to double down, preferably after some stirring music and a Canadian Screen Award-worthy monologue.

And then there are the deep cynics in the realistic/pessimistic quadrant, or the Veep quadrant (or the Thick of It quadrant, for my fellow Britophiles).  They know the price of ambition perfectly well (realistic), but after witnessing enough incompetence on top of corruption on top of spite as far as the eye can see, you won't catch them dead paying it (pessimistic).  They expect the worst of both opponents and colleagues, and they usually get it.  People they know elsewhere on the spectrum will either join them here eventually or be crushed under the weight of their own stupidity.  Having given up on any previous lofty career goals, they remain in politics out of inertia and just try their best to get through the workday with minimal nonsense.  Or they run to the private sector while they still have their dignity and their mental health.

Rarely, you'll meet one of the true neutrals in the Office convergence.  For these people, usually nonpartisan civil servants, politics is just a day-to-day job, nothing more and nothing less.  They are the strangest of all.

If you are an elected official or you work for one, you may find yourself moving around this spectrum throughout your career.  Just remember this: there are far more heroes and badasses in fiction than in reality.  If you think you're one of them, you're not.

Written by Jess Morgan

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Looks like it's another swing and a miss for me, folks. I really and truly thought Kenney was going to get shellacked. I thought the lines he crossed, accidentally and on purpose, were red lines.

But the Canada that tossed aside conservative leaders one after another, for far lesser offences, appears to be gone.  Hell, the Alberta that nuked the Wild Rose over homophobic blog posts, that returned Naheed Nenshi to office, is gone.  The wind, and the window, has shifted.  We can now be sure of that.

The first thing we can surmise from the UCP victory is that the anger out there is real.  The leader that captures that lightning in a bottle carries the day.

Doug Ford, Francois Legault, and now Jason Kenney won by tapping that well.  We're not at the stage where we can let the crazy flags fly yet, but we're getting there.  Controlled populism, rather than full on anti-government madness, is what's called for.

But it's also clear that Canadians want decisive leadership.  Swiftly dealing with bozo eruptions now earns you points.  Taking punches from the centre- like Kenney did from his friend Charles Adler- and bouncing back strengthens you.

The NDP, for their part, needs to abandon all hope of holding the middle ground.  Motley ran a vicious campaign, but she tried to remain personally above the fray.  She could have harnessed the power of the hard left.  She chose not to.  Like it or not, this loss will serve as a
powerful argument in favour of the loudest and angriest voices in the NDP camp.

But there are still a few questions left unanswered.  The NDP are not the Liberals.  They may have laid claim to the Lougheed legacy, but they lacked the institutional credibility that allows you to weather a storm like the one that blew through Alberta's economy.  Peter Lougheed
faced down oil busts.  Rachel Notley couldn't.

That's bad news for mild-mannered Andrew Scheer.  Now more than ever, he's got to take the fight to Trudeau in October.  He has to get a little mad if he wants to get even.  He's been handed a gift in the form of LavScam, and he should go full tilt in running with it.  The question is: can he?

We also need to see the results of a few more provincial elections before we can conclude whether the voters are willing to punish successive governments until they find one that works.  They voted in the NDP, and then voted them out.  This could hold true for upstart parties of the right as well.  Ford and Legault can count themselves lucky, but they'd better rely on more than luck if they want to be re-elected.

And it must be said: the curse of female Premiers failing to win re-election is real.  It did bring Notley down. Trudeau might well get away with being a fake feminist, simply because he himself is a (completely inadequate) man.  I don't like it, but there it is.

Thinking more broadly about the state of the conservative movement  Kenney's win means that it's unlikely to develop any further than being a vehicle  for rage against the progressive machine.  No organizing principle, or conservative principle, other than "Orange
Woman Bad", guided the UCP's march to victory.  Well, other than flying together in tight formation.

And that enforced Unity means bad news for those Albertans hoping for freedom of political speech once Premier Kenney takes the front bench.  We'll likely see more punishment of dissenters and those that refuse to be team players, or play poorly.  Look forward to centralized
message control, repetition of slogans, and standing ovations.

And finally expect a growth and hardening of political partisanship.  This has been the one thing that's remained consistent.  Ideology has not completely trumped competence or civility yet in Canadian politics, but parties are becoming zealous ideologies unto themselves.  We've lost this particular moral high ground over our neighbours to the south a long time ago, and it's only now becoming obvious.

Photo Credit: Times Colonist

Written by Josh Lieblein

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The demise of Rachel Notley's NDP government in Alberta was not only predictable, but predicted.  Once the Alberta Progressive Conservative and Wildrose parties decided that, whatever their differences might have been, they were not worth giving a chance for the New Democrats to survive, it was game, set and match.

Of course, one cannot take anything for granted, least of all victory.  There was never any guarantee that the merger of the right-wingers would automatically translate into the sums of the two ex-parties' votes, which would have been 52% in the 2015 election presumably.

That is, of course, leaving aside the fact that a poll by Ipsos at the time found that 33 per cent of Wildrose voters and 19 per cent of PC voters ranked the NDP as their second choice.  The animosity between the two conservative camps was well entrenched.

Yet, since the Progressive Conservatives and the Wildrose parties merged on July 22, 2017, there has been 41 opinion polls conducted.  The United Conservative Party has lead in all of them, peaking at 36.5% ahead of the NDP in October 2017.

In fact, the NDP was even trailing both the Wildrose party or the PCs before the merger, sometimes both.  The last time New Democrats were ahead was on November 10th, 2015.  It's been an uphill battle ever since.  The arrival of the Freedom Conservative Party in June of last year, led by rogue UCP MLA Derek Fildebrandt, didn't materialize in a new split on the right.

Now, does this mean that the New Democrats' historic breakthrough in 2015 was accidental?  Not so fast.  Despite difficult economic circumstances beyond her control, including falling oil prices compounded by forest wildfires, Rachel Notley is not being driven out of town the way Bob Rae was in Ontario after the NDP's first (and only) term in government in the province.

The UCP's healthy lead shrunk to single digits in the dying days of the 2019 campaign.  Notley ran a good campaign, an easy contrast versus Jason Kenney's performance and the multiple bozo eruptions in the UCP slate, under his watch.

The question Alberta New Democrats need to ask themselves now is, was this unavoidable?  It would be easy, as I did at the outset, to say it was.  Indeed, a bit lazy.  There was a path to victory and it wasn't found, despite Notley's high personal popularity.

Adopting the same strident frame of Alberta-the-victim was perhaps not the best thing to do, although Alberta New Democrats would argue it was the only thing to do.  Unfortunately, the Conservatives own that frame and the NDP could never complain loud enough to out-compete the UCP in tone against Ottawa and the other provinces.

Still, the NDP has firmly established itself as the only governing alternative to the Conservatives.  It will form a robust, experienced Official opposition, ready to take over in 2023 should Albertans realize the UCP government is not living up to expectations.

Being now the government-in-waiting, after having formed a government that did not bring the apocalypse upon the Wild Rose Country has some hysterically predicted, Albertans now know they can count on someone else to take over.  And perhaps they also now know that having a one-party state, as it was for 44 years under the Progressive-Conservatives, is not democratically healthy.

Photo Credit: Edmonton Journal

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.

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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

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.

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