Once upon a time, Alberta’s first United Conservative Party (UCP) premier was an industrious social media commentator – or at least someone on his public engagement staff was on his behalf – generating no shortage of hostile responses on Twitter, the microblogging application we all so fondly remember.
But after being pushed out of office in the fall of 2022 by his own party’s MAGA base – “lunatics,” as we recall Kenney calling them before they proved him right by replacing him with Danielle Smith – he unsurprisingly retreated from his active life on social media. I mean, who could blame the guy?
Kenney has kept his @jkenney account on X, as Twitter is now known under the guidance of the odious billionaire that now owns the site, but he didn’t have much to say. And most of that was pretty anodyne.
If anyone actually saw the guy, he was going around in a scruffy beard and flip-flops on his way to the occasional corporate board meeting, possibly getting by on locusts and wild honey in the political wilderness.
In the past six months, he’s tweeted, posted or whatever, six times, according to my count, which I admit wasn’t particularly careful. (I mean, seriously, why bother?) Nothing in September, once in October, twice in November, once in December, nothing in January, and twice last month.
Then, all of a sudden, in the first week or March, @jkenney got busy again. I count at least 55 messages, more if you include replies and retweets .. uh, re-posts.
Some of them are pretty cranky, and while a few feature some of the former premier and federal cabinet minister’s favourite hobbyhorses, he’s taken on a noticeably patriotic and anti-MAGA tone.
“This treasonous kook once sued me to prevent Alberta’s conservative parties from merging democratically,” he complained about one Alberta separatist who found his way onto a Fox News program.
“The Blame Canada crowd is eager to point out that organized crime is operating in Canada,” Kenney barked in another. “Of course it is. It operates everywhere, even in dictatorships like the PRC.”
“The Rafale F3R is looking better by the day,” the former defence minister observed under a photo of the French fighter aircraft in response to a Globe and Mail reporter who wondered if Canada should cancel its planned purchase of hyper-expensive F-35 flying bricks from the United States.
“Why are the very online MAGA North folks so self-loathing that they reach for ever more absurd arguments to defend attacks on their own country?!” (I’ve never heard the “self-hating” shot applied to Canadian MAGA nuts before.)
“American farmers will be so pleased to know they can fertilize their crops with copies of Ayn Rand books while waiting a decade or longer for Argentina to become a major potash producer.” (Pretty good, that one.)
And so on.
So what, as we wondered above, is up?
Kenney’s explanation is droll, but hardly credible. Responding to a tweet by his former principal secretary, Howard Anglin, that he was giving up posting on Twitter for Lent, Kenney said: “Meanwhile I’ve rejoined Twitter as Lenten penance.”
The prevailing popular wisdom – quite believable, in my opinion – is that Kenney has seen his ambition to become prime minister revivified by the recent pre-post-Justin-Trudeau surge in support for the federal Liberal party and the apparent inability of federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre to do anything about it.
This may change, of course, if the Conservatives can figure out what will stick to Mark Carney. But after channelling MAGA at least since he took coffee out to the convoy occupiers in Ottawa, Poilievre may have trouble getting his campaign back on track in the face of belligerent Trumpism’s impact on Canada.
And maybe Kenney reckons he’s just the ticket – the Conservative ticket, as it were – to offer a more credible alternative than Poilievre to the notion of prime minister Carney.
If that’s what it is, it seems to have woken Kenney up like a dose of smelling salts!
So that other Jason Kenney – the Richmond Virginia marketer who owns the @JasonKenney X handle – had better brace himself for a new onslaught of sharp comments from pissed off Canadians, and not just Albertans this time, either.
Peter Guthrie on UCP ‘probation’; MLA Scott Sinclair kicked out of caucus
It’s ironic, one supposes, that while Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is trying to shove municipal political parties down the metaphorical throats of reluctant big city voters, her own supposedly united Conservative party is showing signs of restlessness in the ranks.
Leastways, the CBC confirmed the buzz that former UCP Infrastructure Peter Guthrie, who quit cabinet just over a week ago after raising concerns about the continuing dodgy contracts scandal but vowed to remain in the party caucus, has been put on “probation” for 30 days and told not to bother attending caucus meetings.
Meanwhile, also yesterday, Government Whip Shane Getson put out a terse news release stating that Lesser Slave Lake MLA Scott Sinclair has been thrown right out of the UCP Caucus for threatening in social media posts to vote against Finance Minister Nate Horner’s budget on the grounds it doesn’t do enough for rural ridings like his.
Naturally, many commenters on social media wondered why UCP Caucus members voted to give their only Indigenous colleague the boot while the former minister from Cochrane-Airdrie got only the political equivalent of double secret probation, a mere tap on the wrist.
It’s a fair question, although in truth it is most likely based in Parliamentary convention, which as Getson pointed out in his release, makes any money vote a confidence vote. Still, it’s not as if the UCP Caucus is going to bring down the government on such a vote … yet, anyway.
After all, Lacombe-Ponoka MLA Jennifer Johnson, who infamously compared trans children in school to poop in the cookie dough just before the last Alberta general election, was welcomed back into the UCP Caucus in October last year, and remains there. Clearly, a grateful Poop Cookie Lady can be counted on to support the budget, anyway.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Rockies, the BC Conservative Party seems to be unravelling much faster.
Leader John Rustad – who came within a hair’s breadth of becoming premier in the B.C. election last fall – has kicked his justice critic out of the party for making offensive comments about residential schools, and immediately had two more MLAs jump ship.
Getting back to Wild Rose Country, the day before yesterday the RCMP admitted they are now officially investigating the allegations of improper efforts to influence Alberta Health Services to accept sketchy medical services contracts made by fired AHS CEO Athana Mentzelopoulos in her wrongful dismissal statement of claim.
No one should expect the RCMP to move quickly on this file. It seems to take them about seven years to wrap up one of these cases.
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Nick Seebruch, editor
