Jason Kenney preps to step down as UCP leadership vote looms
CBC
Don't cry for me, Alberta, I was leaving anyway.
It's Premier Jason Kenney's swan song message as he prepares to depart the province's top job, forced out by the very United Conservative Party he willed into existence.
"I was never intending to be in this gig for a long time," Kenney told an audience earlier this month. He had planned for one more provincial election, he said.
Instead, UCP members pick a new leader on Thursday, turning the page on a triumph-turned cautionary tale that saw Kenney's philosophy and management style crash head-on into a once-in-a-generation catastrophe.
Kenney, whose office did not respond to requests for an interview for this story, rode to success in the 2019 provincial election.
The former Calgary MP dismasted Rachel Notley's NDP using an audacious blueprint that united two warring conservative factions.
It was a time of woe. Alberta's economy was in the doldrums, its oil and gas sector in the bust phase of its traditional boom-bust cycle. Budgets were bleeding multibillion-dollar deficits.
Some Albertans were angry with Ottawa over rules deemed to be hindering energy projects. And they felt like suckers, giving billions of dollars in equalization payments and in return being ignored or demonized as climate criminals.
They sought a stick with which to hit Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Kenney was that stick. He came toting a "fight back strategy," vowing to take on Trudeau and the other happy hit men of the "Laurentian elite" hell-bent on strangling Canada's energy "golden goose."
To him, oil and gas were not just good business. It was a higher calling, a "moral cause" to redistribute earth's bounty to neighbour nations so they could avoid buying it from human-rights-abusing dictators.
Taking the reins of power, he went to work.
Kenney cut corporate income taxes, abolished the former NDP government's consumer carbon levy, slashed post-secondary funding, launched more privately delivered care in the public health system, reduced minimum wage for kids, went to war with teachers, sought wage cuts in the public sector, ripped up negotiated bargaining deals, and attacked doctors and nurses as comparatively overpaid underperformers.
He gambled big and lost $1.3 billion on the failed Keystone XL oil pipeline.
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