It’s pretty much consensus that Jason Kenney has been a bad premier. His United Conservative Party (UCP) government has been characterized by hypocrisy, incompetence, and dishonesty. The need for brevity prevents me from listing all of Kenney’s mistakes, but if you really want a reminder, here is a handy summary. Kenney faced a mutiny in his own party over Covid measures and this was made worse when polls showed the UCP badly trailing the NDP. While he survived a leadership review with 51.4 percent supporting him, he decided to resign anyway. I don’t think the fact that Kenney was inept played a role in his ouster. Remember, conservatives constantly tell us that government is useless, and then they get in office and spend their terms proving their point. Incompetence is a feature, not a bug.
The main reason Kenney was unpopular with his party was simply the fear that he was going to lose the next election. Color me dubious on that notion. For one, the people in the more rural ridings outside of Calgary and Edmonton vote conservative without even thinking about it – you could put an unhousebroken poodle in charge of the UCP and they would shrug and vote Blue. That’s about 40 seats you can put safely in the UCP column and that already puts them close to a majority (44 seats). Since Edmonton is now dominated by Rachel Notley’s NDP, this leaves Calgary, with its 26 seats, as the battleground. But even when the NDP won the 2015 election – solely due to the vote splitting between the Wild Rose and the-then Progressive Conservatives - they won 15 of the 26 seats in Calgary. In 2019, they won 3 seats. Calgary, with all its corporate headquarters and oilpatch millionaires, is never going to be a very welcoming place for the NDP, and that’s why I have a hard time believing Kenney would have lost the next election, even as bad as he was.
One of the first to announce she was running was Danielle Smith, former leader of the Wild Rose Party. The last thing most Albertans will remember about Ms. Smith is when she and 8 other Wild Rose MLAs crossed the floor to join Jim Prentice’s Conservative government in 2014. That’s right, the leader of the Official Opposition flushed her own party down the toilet to join the folks in power. I can find no instance of this ever occurring in any of the British parliamentary systems across the world. Smith should probably be in the Guinness Book of World Records with the title of Worst Craven Opportunist.
Somehow shocked by the negative reaction to her betrayal, Smith left politics and after trying briefly to make an honest living running a restaurant in an old boxcar (no, really), she began hosting her own radio show. And what a show it was! Any crank, quack or conspiracy loon could get airtime, spewing nonsense and paranoia. Smith became the rarest bird, a new age right-winger, ripping modern medicine and promoting wholly unproven cures for serious illnesses. (In a way, she’s pretty much another Trudeau.) The pandemic was a godsend for her; she talked to all sorts of covid deniers, anti-vaxxers and fraudsters shilling misinformation and bogus health products. She touted Ivermectin and said hydroxychloroquine was a “100 percent cure for Covid.” But the most outrageous thing she said – and one that may cause her ongoing grief – was her mind-numbingly stupid contention that unless you were in Stage 4, cancer was “completely within your control.” Once the blowback from that doozy hit, Smith gave a non- apology and lied that those words were said by the naturopath she was interviewing. She really doesn’t have an ounce of shame.
Despite all this – or because of it – Smith seems to have emerged as the front runner. Who are the other choices? Well, there’s another former Wild Rose leader, Brian Jean. He says he believes in man-made climate change but of course he doesn’t really want to do anything about it. He has disavowed social conservatism, saying its “none of my business what people do behind closed doors in their personal lives.” So far, so not bad, right? Jean also said “Covid killed a lot of people, but so did the vaccine.” (Fact: Health Canada has not definitively tied a single death in Canada to the vaccine.) He’s made a nonsensical promise to reduce the price of gasoline. And at the recent leadership debate, held in a helicopter hanger (no, really), Jean said some Albertans he talked to were so mad “they were going to get their guns out.” Um, what? Are we full-on caving in to violent lunatics now?
The safest choice would appear to be Travis Toews, who is the Minister of Finance in Kenney’s government. At first glance he seems like your run-of-the-mill conservative who isn’t all that ideologically rigid. But now it’s also come out that Toews is on the board of the Peace River Bible Institute, a tiny college that has a strict code of conduct for its students. All sex outside of heterosexual marriage is banned, as are profanity, drunkenness, and gambling. The school also prohibits “witchcraft, sorcery and spell casting”-obviously, they think the Harry Potter movies were documentaries. In 2017, the school even banned Yoga, because apparently being flexible and relaxed will lead you straight to the devil.
When it comes to policies, all three of these candidates are on the same page about one thing: blame Ottawa for everything. As such, separatist dog whistles have come from the mouths of each one of them. Smith is trumpeting her Alberta Sovereignty Act, which she thinks would allow Alberta to just ignore federal laws it doesn’t like. Her line of thinking on this is just as sound as it is on health care. Meanwhile, Jean says that Canada is “broken” and that Alberta should leave if it doesn’t get what it wants. But he’s adamant he's “not a separatist," even if he sounds exactly like one. Toews wants to have an Alberta police force (dumb) and an Alberta pension plan (dumber). His whole platform reads like we are at war with the federal government and the rest of the country. You would think $100 a barrel oil would stop this insipid whining, but no; the politics of perpetual victimization are just too easy.
It seems likely that no matter who wins this contest, the UCP will lurch further into Crazy Town. The same math I detailed above for Kenney applies to these candidates; no matter how dumb, dishonest, and cynical they are, one of these people is going to be our next Premier. It would be great if Notley moved the NDP a little more to the center to try to attract more moderate voters, but I doubt she will, and even if she did, a lot of people simply refuse to vote NDP no matter what their policies are. Are there any other options? Maybe the centrist Alberta Party could find themselves a well-known, capable leader with a proven track record. You know, someone like a former mayor of Calgary…
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