In November, Maclean’s magazine published a front-cover Photoshopped group picture of the five horsemen of the conservative apocalypse embarking on the carbon tax crusade.
They are federal Conservative Leader Andrew Sheer and premiers Jason Kenney of Alberta, Scott Moe of Saskatchewan, Manitoba’s Brian Pallister and Doug Ford of Ontario.
These men have never been in the same room together, but Maclean’s photo editors put them together as a phalanx of political warriors uniting to unseat Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government in the Oct. 21 federal election.
This federal Conservative crusade to return to power and once and for all crush the Liberal Party has been planned and perfected since weeks before the 2015 federal election when the party’s inner circle realized they could not win one more election with Harper.
On July 2, 2016, Kenney left Ottawa to re-enter the Alberta political fray.
He already had a goal bigger than to be the premier of this province. He and his fellow travellers wanted to change Canadian politics for this century by shifting it decisively to the right.
Not satisfied with remaking Alberta’s conservative parties and the province’s government, Kenney’s non-stop campaign is now marching back to Ottawa.
Kenney, backed by influential federal conservatives from Alberta has emerged as the most combative and articulate of the crusaders, and the most effectively partisan.
The objective of the crusade is to make Conservatives the “naturally governing party” in the 21st century. In the 1990s the Liberals were in power for 67 years and the Conservatives for just 33 years.
The unpopular carbon tax is the issue that will give the Conservatives the majority in Parliament after Oct. 21, but getting rid of the carbon tax is not the point.
Having a conservative government is the objective.
By 2020, the Conservatives will have been in government for 12 of the first 20 years of the century, the same two-thirds of the period that the Liberals held power for in the previous century.
The political tide has turned in Canada, and Alberta’s new Premier Kenny is a leader at the forefront of the change.
The recent Alberta election was as much about the future of Canada as it was about the future of this province.
Alberta’s leadership was restoring an economic conservatism pioneered by Social Credit Premier Ernest Manning 60 years ago.
But the leadership was also restoring Alberta’s rightful place as a leader in a new national conservative power structure, pioneered by Stephen Harper from an Alberta base.
Frank Dabbs is a veteran political and business author and journalist.
