During the 2011 federal election, successful attack ads run by the Conservative Party dismissed Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff as “just visiting” for the campaign.
The ads said, “He’s not in it for you.”
In other words, the ads said that Ignatieff was politically unqualified to be prime minister after 35 years in the United States and the United Kingdom making a living as an academic, author and journalist before his return to Canada in 2006 to assume the leadership of the Liberal Party.
In the absence of a Liberal counter-narrative, the attack on Ignatieff was overwhelmingly successful. The Liberals were annihilated, losing 34 seats in the House of Common including Ignatieff’s and garnering only 19 per cent of the popular vote.
Harper won the only majority government in his political career and the NDP led by Jack Layton replaced the Liberals as the official Opposition.
Premier Jason Kenney has been tagged by his critics for “just visiting” in Alberta because he was out of the province, visiting in Ontario – Ottawa and Toronto -- twice in May.
His blue campaign pickup truck is Ottawa bound, these critics say.
The narrative that his opponents offer is that Alberta is just a stepping stone on his career path, he is campaigning to be federal Conservative leader and, some day, prime minister.
He doesn’t care as much about being Alberta premier as becoming the prime minister, his opponents say.
In the 50 days since his election, Kenney has turned Alberta’s relationship with the federal government upside down.
He claims his first objective is to fix the energy industry.
The recently-deposed Alberta NDP government sugar-coated its demands that the federal government get out of the way of new pipelines and not impair the industry with, to use Rachel Notley’s indictment, "stupid” regulation.
Premier Kenney is blunter. The federal government will destroy national unity if it disables the energy industry and pipelines, he says to anyone in Ontario who will listen.
He has found Alberta’s Ottawa allies outside the Prime Minister’s Office in the Senate and House of Commons. They are Conservatives of course.
He and Conservative Party Leader Andrew Scheer are singing from the same song sheet.
Conservatives don’t believe a change of government policy can replace private investors as the primary agents of the energy industry, but getting the government out of the way of investment will help.
Jason Kenney believes a change in the fortunes of the energy industry depend on a change in government.
He thinks he can fix Alberta himself. To change federal energy regulation, environmental and pipeline policy requires a new national government, a Conservative one.
So Kenny is haunting the halls of power in Ottawa to do his bit for the election of a new government.
The best idea from his incursion into Ottawa is that Alberta should have an office there, with a desk reserved for Premier Jason Kenney.
His first objective is the recovery of the oil industry, but that isn’t his sole objective.
Kenney is part of an alliance of Conservatives who want to run Justin Trudeau out of office.
There’s more at stake in the Ottawa-Alberta conflict than energy and pipelines.
– Frank Dabbs is a veteran political and business journalist.
