Some very interesting revelations about the state of Alberta's public inquiry into alleged foreign-funded attacks on the province's oil and gas industry came to light over the weekend, which should be of concern to anyone in this country that believes in things like "procedural fairness," or that the conclusions of a public inquiry should be just that public. For Jason Kenney's UCP government, this particular inquiry is a key piece in their ability to construct the narrative that the province is under attack from all sides, both from Justin Trudeau's federal Liberal government, and by environmental activists purportedly funded by American pockets, and not that they have simply kept their public finances exposed to the vagaries of global oil prices for too long.
As reported by the CBC, environmental law charity Ecojustice has been pushing back against the inquiry because it was set up for expressly partisan purposes in contravention of the Public Inquiries Act, and that they are likely to suffer "irreparable reputational harm" because there aren't even rules in place for how they are to respond to the inquiry's findings, nor was there any particular ability for them to examine the evidence or cross-examine witnesses like the conspiracy theorist blogger whose "research" is at the heart of the inquiry. What is galling is that in response to their court challenge, the head of this inquiry someone who worked on the election campaign for the then-justice minister who set up the inquiry replied on August 27th that he still hadn't determined the rules for how those organizations would be able to respond, even though his deadline (already extended) for the report is October 30th.
To be clear, the Public Inquiries Act requires that there be a right to cross-examine, and that anyone who is alleged to have done wrong must be given the opportunity to give evidence. That there is only seven weeks for the Commissioner to determine what the rules around this process is to be, give those charities who are being accused of wrongdoing a chance to respond to the evidence presented against them, to cross-examine the witnesses who have made the allegations against them, provide their own evidence and responses, and have that integrated into the final report of the Commission, is pretty unlikely to say the least.
But it gets better in recent weeks, Kenney's government has gone ahead and altered the terms of reference for the inquiry to read that the "commissioner shall inquire into the role of foreign funding, if any, in anti-Alberta energy campaigns." The addition of the "if any" is a big deal because it underscores that this process is actually a farce and that these kinds of campaigns are not actually in existence outside of the original blogger's imagination. Add to that, the interim report of the commission was never made public, and yet another change to the terms of reference now says that the commission "may" make findings and recommendations which essentially means that this can now be kept entirely hidden, in spite of it supposedly being a public inquiry.
So why does this all matter in the grand scheme of things? Because Kenney and his government rely on keeping the province distracted in a state of perpetual anger and outrage at outside influences or "enemies of the state," as it were, while they continue to consolidate power and not actually deal with the province's real problems. Kenney launched the public inquiry as a very public exercise in rooting out the people who are supposedly keeping the province down, but the closer that it gets to its inevitable conclusion, it is increasingly apparent that the whole premise for its existence is a house of lies built on a foundation of sand. In order for Kenney to continue to profit from the anger that he must continually stoke, he must ensure that the inquiry tells him what he needs to hear and if that means that it can't publicly be disclosed, then he will have to use secrecy in order to continue to intimate that the dark happenings are there even if they have no proof.
The other troubling aspect of Kenney's need to keep stoking anger is not just that he is trying to be the person who starts fires with the intention of putting them out publicly in order to look like a hero something which the creation of the Wexit Party is very much a product of it's that it fits a pattern of previous totalitarian regimes who achieved and consolidated power because they had a program of constant distraction and pointing to outside enemies that kept the population off-balance as their rights were being eroded. And while I'm not saying that Kenney is actually a totalitarian, his end goal remains power, and he has proven himself to be not above using some of these very same techniques that keep the people of the province off-balance and continually distracted while he weakens the accountability functions inherent in the structures of government so that he can continue to consolidate that power. These structures that have already been weakened by the fact that but for a blip in the past decade when the NDP briefly held power when the Progressive Conservatives collapsed under the weight of their own corruption, the province has largely been a one-party state for nearly half a century, where the population has been brainwashed into believing that they are culturally conservative (in spite of all evidence to the contrary).
Kenney needs to continue to keep that anger burning in order to maintain his power base, no matter that the basis for it is illusory. That this exercise in naming his enemies is crumbling before his eyes means that he needs to adapt his tactics, which is compounded by the fact that he has been forced to tone down his rhetoric against the federal government because he needs them more than they need him during the response to the pandemic. And so, he must look for another fire he lights before rushing to performatively extinguish it and pray that it doesn't get out of control because he knows no other way to govern.
Photo Credit: CBC News
