Now comes the hard part for premier-elect Jason Kenney, the svelte young man in the light grey suit who doesn’t look like he’s spent 18 months carving his way to the premiership.
For a year and a half, his focus has been to create a viable United Conservative Party and lead it to election victory.
Governing will be his biggest challenge.
He and his cabinet are to be sworn in April 30, and he has promised a 100-day launch of his four-year term that will start with Bill 1 to abolish the carbon tax and another bill early on repealing farm safety Bill 6.
This is just the overture.
He has bet his newly acquired farm on a 33 per cent corporate tax rate cut, from 12 to eight percent, a low tax rate he hopes will draw new companies and jobs from the new economy and to Alberta.
Twinning agriculture and natural resources with technologies such as artificial intelligence would create a diversified engine of growth.
A team of former civil servants has been privately drafting orders-in-council and legislation during the campaign to repeal the NDP’s legacy.
The United Conservative Party’s private polls during the campaign found 70 per cent support for a corporate tax cut. Remaking the economy became the promise that decided the vote.
Kenney’s first legal fight will be to take the federal government’s carbon tax to court.
The second will be his promise to stop crude oil and natural gas shipments to British Columbia if it continues to impede pipeline construction.
It’s legislation that B.C. will take to court and likely win, meanwhile it can turn to its own natural gas fields and its established oil supplies from the United States to replace Alberta fossil fuels.
Kenney’s B.C. boycott would mean shutting down the existing Trans Mountain Pipeline to show the B.C. government that it has to get out of the way of expanding it.
Why Kenney wants to forego royalties on oil and gas sales to B.C. and let Ottawa instead of Alberta collect the carbon tax from Albertans when the province is running a deficit, is a puzzle.
Meanwhile, he’s junked a promise to restore Ralph Klein’s flat personal income tax rate.
His pipeline promises are as wishful as were Rachel Notley’s initiatives. He doesn’t control whether or not they will be built and rejecting diplomacy in favour of confrontation won’t help matters
Kenney has promised to replace the oilsands cap on greenhouse gas emissions and to halt the shutdown of coal production and use.
Both actions that would energize climate change activists, who are not intimidated by a promised war room to counter attacks on the oilsands and fossil fuels.
But it is the social policy and culture wars that will be Kenney’s immediate vulnerability and the NDP Opposition’s biggest strength.
Cuts to education and health budgets, confrontation with unions in those two sectors, a move, however subtle towards two-tier health care and the rollback of school curriculum revisions are fields full of landmines.
And Kenney’s uneasy relations with the LGBTQ community and his rigidity toward gay-straight alliance governance are precursors to culture wars during his term.
The conservative restoration in Alberta has begun but the 2023 election campaign is also underway.
– Frank Dabbs is a veteran political and business journalist and author.
