Jason Kenney understands that in Alberta it eventually boils down to us against them.
It’s been that way almost from the start – with the Prairie populist United Farmers of Alberta, to Social Credit under "Bible Bill" Aberhart with his funny money, followed by an energetic Peter Lougheed and the fledgling PCs who engaged in a bitter energy war with "Trudeau The First" and, more recently, with Preston Manning and the then nascent Reform Party message of "The West Wants In."
Kenney, Opposition leader and head honcho with the United Conservative Party, made it plain with his speech to the weekend party convention in Red Deer he understands Alberta’s rowdy political history. No ambitious politician ever lost votes taking on Ottawa, the eastern banks, the railways or, in today’s world, the fervent eco-warriors at our borders.
His battling, defiant speech tapped into long-standing grievances defining Alberta since its inception, some valid, others perhaps not so much (we actually do have the highest standard of living in the country, after all). Still, you don’t have to dig deep to unearth them, especially as we recover from a brutal recession while raucous opponents surround us to the east, west and south.
In most places such venom and anger from an Opposition leader would be directed solely at the party in power, but Kenney seems to grasp there’s a problem with that singular line of attack – the current NDP government members might be many things but, in the end, they remain Albertans.
As recent polls show, most folk seem unlikely to vote for Rachel Notley’s party when the election arrives in a year. But they also show the premier remains personally quite popular. Other than the interminable trolls and the zealots who brand her as a type of she-devil, most people, party affiliations aside, acknowledge she isn’t lazy, rude, stupid or corrupt.
Which is why Kenney got the tone right when he disavowed those morons making death threats against Notley, calling such behaviour pernicious and fuelled by misogyny that has no place in Alberta.
And if the main criticism to be levelled at Notley is she and her party have been too lax and naive in adhering to weird reasoning that imposing a carbon tax would bring in return some social licence from opponents, then Kenney ensured his party wasn’t going to fall for such a ruse.
Nope, there was no quarter given, no olive branch extended, to any perceived enemies of Alberta.
"If I am elected premier of Alberta I will not relent. I will go to the wall. I will form alliances. I will go to court. I will use every tool available to defend this province," is how he phrased it.
And, just in case anyone was still a bit unsure what he meant, Kenney spelled it out in even starker terms: “Alberta will no longer be a soft target. We will fight back for our economic survival.”
Heck, when he began attacking well-heeled special interest groups, including those in the U.S., who happily fund the eco-warriors to the east and west of us, you’d have been forgiven for imagining we’d been transported outside of Canada altogether. There wasn’t a "sorry" uttered within earshot.
“The special interests that have targeted Alberta oil and not Saudi, Venezuelan or Russian oil because they saw us as the boy scouts, the soft target,” he told the crowd.
It was strong stuff indeed. But there’s an underlying anger across the province and that type of tough talk taps into it. The NDP’s no longer the real enemy. It’s everyone else. History shows that is a winning platform in Alberta.
- Nelson is a syndicated columnist
