What’s Going On in Alberta!?
It seems as though there’s quite a storm brewing in Alberta. Premier Jason Kenney has found himself in the midst of a leadership review and a successful confidence vote that may have actually done more harm than good. How? One would think that he would be enjoying a swelling of support thanks to him being on the vanguard of easing Covid restrictions in a very Conservative province. But something’s gone wrong. Kenney is under fire and his government’s collapse is potentially playing out in real time!
How did we get here? It’s time for our first ever Moevestigation:
In 2017, the Wildrose Party of Alberta merged with the Progressive Conservative Party to form the United Conservative Party. The Wildrose Party was led by Brian Jean and ran on a populist platform. The party promised to balance the budget, give any surplus back to the people through an energy rebate, and voting reform that would allow for MLA recall, fixed election dates, and citizen initiated referendums. The party’s platform makes no mention of climate change nor doing anything to offset or reduce C02 emissions from the oil and gas sector. The platform also failed to mention any of the many social issues in Canadian/Albertan society. The party was also enjoying popularity among voters and had grown from holding a single seat in the Legislative Assembly in 2009 to being the official opposition by 2015 despite being reduced to only five MLA’s due to several members crossing the floor to join the reigning Progressive Conservatives.
The Progressive Conservatives at the time were led by Jason Kenney who had won the 2017 leadership race; the first leadership race since the PCs lost the 2015 provincial election which saw Rachel Notley and Alberta’s NDP form a majority government. That election saw the Wildrose Party become the official opposition with 21 seats while the PCs were reduced to only 10. By 2017, however, the PCs had begun to recognize how hard it could be to oust Notley’s NDP while splitting the conservative vote share. Thus, Jason Kenney decided to try and unite Alberta’s two conservative parties.
The merger was ultimately successful with both parties receiving 95% pro-unity votes from their caucuses. This formed the United Conservative Party we know today and led to yet another leadership race that now pitted Jason Kenney against Brian Jean to decide who would be leading the newly unified party. This is where Premier Kenney’s modern problems actually began. The leadership race wasn’t exactly “clean”. The leadership race saw Kenney and Jean throw their hats in, as well as Doug Schweitzer, MLA for Calgary-Elbow, and Jeff Callaway. But one of these things was not like the others. Callaway was never actually a serious contender for UCP leadership and was actually running his campaign secretly alongside Jason Kenney in order to attack Brian Jean before dropping out and throwing his support behind Kenney. While Kenney has maintained his innocence, the money trail seems to show a different story. And it looks like the situation might get a whole lot worse for the Premier. The result of the race was a victory for Jason Kenney and a whole lotta friction between him and Brian Jean, and, eventually, a majority government in the 2019 provincial election.
And that brings us to the now. The problem that Jason Kenney is acing now is that Brian Jean is back, and he’s not happy. From early on, it seemed like the Premier was caught between a rock, a bigger rock, and a hard place. None of the potential outcomes from the byelection in Fort McMurray-Lac La Biche would be seen as “good” for the Premier. Brian Jean, the aforementioned former leader of the Wildrose Party and current UCP candidate, Paul Hinman, current leader of the separatist Wildrose Independence Party, and Ariana Mancini of the NDP are ALL against having the province led by Jason Kenney. The winner would be Brian Jean, who won 63.6% of the votes, which essentially places the biggest direct threat to Kenney’s leadership of Alberta inside his own party. And what happened immediately after Jean’s victory? He put Jason Kenney’s leadership squarely in his crosshairs.
Yikes. And with a leadership review coming up on April 9th, Jean has a real chance. With he UCP as divided as it is, now would be the perfect time to put pressure on the Premier and try to oust him. While some UCP members believe that Jean’s victory in the leadership review would only deepen the division that already exist in the big tent UCP, those divisions have actually been deepening all on their own. Those divisions, for the most part, seem to exist over Kenney’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, with some members believing the government was too heavy handed in their approach, and others believing they did not do enough. Kenney has stated that his presence at the helm of the UCP is the only thing standing in the way of the lunatics taking over the asylum; a statement that was captured in a recording and he has since defended by stating that the UCP is under siege from homophobes and bigots. He might not be wrong, but he might also not be doing everything he can to ensure those extremists are distanced from the UCP.
The leadership review was set to occur on April 9th in Red Deer and has so far seen roughly 14,000 members register to vote and the UCP Constituency Association has set out a number of recommendations to help make the review as efficient as possible including expanding voting hours and keeping the review in a single location as opposed to having voters be able to participate in multiple cities, as was suggested by the Premier. However, on March 23rd it was reported that registration fees for voting members would be waived and refunded, and the review would be conducted through mail-in ballots, a feature that Brian Jean said would lead to fraud and cheating. Following this, the calls for Kenney to resign seemed to reach a fever pitch, with even some of his own MLA’s calling for him to step down. Rachel Notley and the NDP attempted to seize on this instability by calling for the upcoming budget to serve as a confidence vote and urged disgruntled UCP MLAs to join the NDP in voting against the current government in order to plunge the province into a full-throttle provincial election. A move that could’ve actually worked seeing as how Kenney’s approval rating is in the gutter and Brian Jean seems to be the bigger threat to the NDP. This move could have also benefitted Kenney since it would have allowed him to bypass the leadership review and attempt to maintain his grip on the provincial government. It didn’t work though, and the budget passed.
So where does Jason Kenney find himself now? Well, he finds himself staring down the barrel of a leadership review that could see him replaced with his biggest rival. He’s also facing an increasingly emboldened NDP party with a capable leader in Notley who are circling the waters in hopes of reforming a majority government. Now, Danielle Smith, another former leader of the Wildrose Party, has said she will end her seven-year hiatus from politics, run in the byelection for Livingstone-Macleod, and vote against Kenney’s leadership in the upcoming review. Public opinion on Jason Kenney continues to drop and it’s clear that even if he wins the leadership review, he most likely won’t be raking in a majority of the vote. He has said that a fifty-plus-one majority is all he needs and would be enough for him to stay on as leader.
With the review still set for April 9th, all we can do is wait. In four days, we’ll have the results and will know both how the UCP feels about Jason Kenney and how they feel about his chances to stave off an NDP government in the next provincial election. It’s also hard to imagine that Kenney will keep Jean in the UCP if he retains his leadership, so it’s plausible that Jean could be expelled from the party in an attempt to silence dissent in Kenney’s own backyard. And if he loses? Perhaps the lunatics have control over the asylum. Perhaps Jean takes the party in a new direction and thwarts Notley’s next attempt to form government. Perhaps the big tent UCP finally falters to it’s increasingly unstable support base.
Only time will tell, and luckily, we’ll have the answers in less than a week.