News that politicians and most especially several provincial ministers left the country to take vacations over the Christmas break while exhorting ordinary people to stay home in various states of lockdown or mockdown has blown up over the past few days, and one of the biggest places this will impact is Jason Kenney's Alberta.  For a province whose political machinery is built on fomenting and capitalizing on anger, the fact that members of the government have essentially thumbed their noses at the people they were telling to stay put is having an outsized impact as the very voter base that Kenney courts is now furious at him.

To be clear, this is not a problem solely in Alberta federally, we know of two Liberals who went to the US for family reasons, two Conservatives who went to the US to deal with their second homes in that country, and one NDP MP who went to Greece for an ailing family member.  A Conservative senator was also found to have gone to Mexico for vacation.  The case that set the country off was in Ontario, where the finance minister went off to St. Bart's for two weeks, while having his staff tweet out images that made it look like he was in his riding, and telling people that "we're all in this together."  And while there was a sole ministerial case in Saskatchewan, in Alberta it has been much more egregious with one Cabinet minister going to Hawaii for an actual vacation, one minister who went to BC to check on property there after a water main break, and another half-dozen MLAs and senior staff who all went to tropical destinations, with the minister who went to Hawaii also having sent tweets out about Christmas being different this year.

For some, the deceptive tweets were part of why there is such anger.  For myself, I am particularly aggrieved by the three premiers Kenney, Scott Moe, and Doug Ford who have all lied about not knowing that their ministers were leaving the country, and in Kenney and Moe's case, being complete weasels by pretending to take responsibility by saying that they should have been clearer in their directives not to leave the country (never mind that this has been the prevailing public health advice since March).  We know that all three lied because ministers need permission to leave their respective provinces, as they need to ensure that there is an acting minister in place for the duration of their absence, and that takes coordination and paperwork.  While all of these premiers insisted that they weren't aware, the ministers who eventually resigned in each province over this essentially covered for those premiers' lies, meaning that they now are owed political favours.

There is justifiable outrage at what has transpired, because people have been told by these very same political leaders throughout the course of this pandemic that "we're all in this together."  For them to then either head off on vacations or deal with second homes in warm southern locales smacks both of a particular kind of elitism, and that there is a different set of rules for the wealthy and connected than there is for everyone else.  There is a palpable sense of betrayal that people have been told not to gather, be it at Thanksgiving or Christmas, and for those who did follow the rules and didn't get together with family members, or who couldn't see dying family members or attend their funerals, to see certain politicians meet up with their own families in Hawaii or St. Bart's, makes it all the more cutting.

The reason why this is especially damaging to Kenney is not only because it was so much more egregious among his party (not to mention his chief of staff, who not only went to the UK, but returned to Canada via the US in order to skirt the travel ban), but in part because Kenney didn't take immediate action for any of the scofflaws or trust-breakers, and instead waited several days before he decided to accept resignations and to strip his backbenchers of additional duties though I've never been quite clear why getting less work in Parliament or the legislature is seen as a punishment.  And throughout, he continued to lie about his culpability, and pretended to take responsibility for "not being clear" when the public health guidance has been pretty clear to not travel for months now.

More to the point, Kenney has made a career of whipping up frothing and irrational anger, particularly since he's transitioned to provincial politics, and pointed it in the direction of his enemies, whether Rachel Notley or Justin Trudeau.  Part of this has been to wind up separatist sentiment as a weapon (while insisting he doesn't support separatism), and feed that artificial sense of grievance from the people of the province.  Kenney has long fancied himself to be clever enough to be the kind of arsonist who sets fires and gets ahead of them to put them out so that he can look like a hero.  But now it's blowing up in his face.  The anger he fomented is turning toward him and his government, and he's been too flat-footed to respond to it properly, and he's been lying about his own culpability in those travelling ministers and MLAs the whole time.

Make no mistake, this is going to cost Kenney's political fortunes, but I fear that this is going to embolden the swivel-eyed loons in the province's separatist movement, who has been suckling on the resentment against "elites" thanks to Kenney and his cadre of salaried shitposters only for his own ministers to be caught out as the elites he wants his base to despise.  And the UCP should be worried about this, because it will not only cost their right flank in their heartland with alarming consequences for what that entails, but it could allow the NDP to split votes in the next election and come up the middle, kind of like what happened when they formed government in 2015.  Kenney is reaping what he's sown, and things are going to get ugly.

Photo Credit: Maclean's