Jason Kenney’s career as premier of Alberta looks like it’s over.
Regular rabble contributor David Climenhaga suggests Kenney might still pull a rabbit out of the hat and win his job back, but it looks like a long shot at this point.
The Alberta phase of Kenney’s career started promisingly enough when he succeeded in uniting the Alberta Progressive Conservative Party with the break-away, right-wing-populist Wild Rose Party.
Things went well for a while. The new United Conservative Party (UCP) won the last provincial election handily.
It was the exigencies of the COVID pandemic, and the public health measures it necessitated, that brought Kenney down.
Of all the provincial premiers (with the possible exception of his neighbour Scott Moe in Saskatchewan), Kenney was the least inclined to bring in tough restrictive measures to beat the virus.
The actions the Alberta premier did reluctantly take were still too much for the numerous and noisy far-right members of his own party.
A long career in Ottawa
Kenney has been a professional political activist and politician his whole life.
He was in his early twenties in 1990 when he became executive director of the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation (CTF).
The CTF does not advocate for a fairer and more just tax system. Canadians for Tax Fairness fulfills that role. The CTF’s over-arching goal is to reduce or eliminate as many taxes as possible and thus starve governments of funds and force them to shrink.
Kenney made a national name for himself at the helm of the Taxpayers’ Federation, and he used that name as a springboard to the House of Commons. In 1997, he won a seat for the Reform Party in Calgary Southeast. He was 29 years old.
From the outset, the new MP was an active participant in efforts to unite the right federally. Kenney was also one of the more visible and vocal parliamentary critics of the Jean Chrétien Liberal government.
When the new Canadian Alliance party emerged, after the Reformers took in some breakaway elements of the much-diminished Progressive Conservative party, Kenney was at the centre of the action.
At that time, Kenney proved himself to be motivated more by ambition than loyalty.
Kenney turned his back on Reform’s founding leader Preston Manning, who had piloted the party from one seat to Official Opposition. Instead, he supported Alberta cabinet minister Stockwell Day as leader for the new Alliance. Kenney’s man beat Manning and won the top job.
Like a lot of other right-wingers, Kenney had decided the bespectacled, professorial Manning lacked sufficient charisma to win a national election. Kenney and his colleagues thought Day had the winning combination of good looks, passable French, and government experience.
As opposition leader, Day rewarded Kenney with a number of major critic roles, including finance.
Then, in 2003, the Progressive Conservative (PC) party and the Canadian Alliance formally merged, and chose yet a new leader: Stephen Harper.
After this reincarnated Conservative party won power in 2006, Harper chose not to put Kenney in the cabinet immediately. Instead, he made Kenney one of his own parliamentary secretaries, a kind of understudy role.
Harper expected his understudies to be his attack dogs in Question Period and in exchanges with the media.
Kenney set the gold standard for that and Harper liked what he saw. He quickly promoted the young MP to cabinet, first to the low-profile multiculturalism job, then to the bigger role of immigration minister.
By the time the voters gave the Harper team the boot in 2015, Kenney would have served in two more key cabinet roles: employment and social development, and defence.
Castigating scapegoats one day; courting ethnic minorities the next
On the federal scene, Kenney combined some of the notable qualities of two of the leading current Conservative leadership candidates: Pierre Poilievre and Patrick Brown.
Like Poilievre, Kenney was merciless in his attacks on opponents, real and invented. Indeed, Poilievre followed in Kenney’s footsteps. He also served as an attack-dog parliamentary secretary for Harper before getting boosted to the cabinet.
As immigration minister, Kenney showed himself to be a master of divisive, scapegoating rhetoric. He demonized asylum seekers as “queue jumpers”, and was especially vexed by Roma (sometimes called Gypsy) refugees from what he called “liberal-democratic” countries in Europe, notably Hungary (hardly a model of tolerance and democratic governance).
Kenney abolished a modest, $20 million-per-year federal health program for refugees, claiming it was, somehow, “gold-plated”. And he brought in legislation making it more difficult for almost anyone to arrive in Canada and successfully claim refugee status.
As employment minister Kenney tightened rules for temporary foreign workers, on whom Canada’s economy had come to depend.
The Calgary MP used harsh rhetoric to tell so-called low-skilled temporary workers they could never be more than part of a rotating workforce in Canada. He shut off all paths to permanent residency for those who harvest crops and flip burgers. Software engineers would still be welcome.
Later, during the 2015 election campaign, Kenney was vocal in defence of a policy Conservative party leaders hoped would help their faltering campaign: a tip line to allow Canadians to report their neighbours’ “barbaric cultural practices” to the police.
Kenney was also a vocal supporter of the Harper government’s proposed ban on women wearing a Niqab (or veil) at their citizenship swearing-in ceremonies. The Conservatives believed the ban would be a big vote-getter, especially in Quebec.
That was the harsh and angry Kenney, a precursor of the equally angry and divisive Pierre Poilievre.
But, like Patrick Brown today, Kenney also took the lead for the Conservatives in reaching out to the ethno-cultural communities in Canada.
For the Jewish community – which had once voted in large numbers for the NDP, then, en masse, for the Liberals – Kenney (and his boss) offered a more-Zionist-than-many-Israelis policy.
Canada would pick a side in the Middle East, without nuance or qualification. Gone was any pretence that Canada could play an honest-broker role in that conflict-afflicted region.
Way back in 1957, playing a mediating role during the Suez Crisis in the Middle East earned Lester Pearson, then Canada’s foreign minister, a Nobel Peace Prize.
As for recent immigrants from such Global South countries as India, Pakistan and China, Kenney’s analysis was that a large number of them shared small-c conservative values with the big-C Conservative party.
Many new Canadians live in suburbs, drive cars, own small businesses, and value family and faith above all, Kenney argued. And he went about making friends with those folks by promoting his party’s suburban, pro-business, pro-traditional-family values.
Kenney was tireless in this effort, visiting thousands of temples, mosques, synagogues and community events. Almost singlehandedly, Kenney brought about a major shift in Canada’s political demographics.
More than anything else, he helped transform the face of his own party.
Kenney came to Ottawa as a red-meat, hardcore Conservative ideologue, but once in power he adopted Stephen Harper’s tactic of presenting what could at least be construed as a mainstream image.
Harper notably refused to allow his party to re-open the abortion issue, even though there were legions of social conservatives in his ranks who chomping at the bit to do so.
As a student at the Jesuit University of San Francisco in California (from which he did not graduate), Kenney had been an ardent opponent of women’s untrammelled right to abortion. If his views on abortion remained the same over the years, he kept them well under a bushel while Stephen Harper was his boss.
Now, in Alberta, Kenney has faltered because many in his current party see him as too moderate, too pragmatic, and too open to views not in line with far-right thinking, especially on COVID mandates.
To those who watched him make his way in the federal capital, there could be a measure of poetic justice in this.
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