By any measure, the victory of Jason Kenney and the United
Conservative Party (UCP) over Rachel Notley and the NDP in the April 16 Alberta
provincial election was impressive: 63 seats versus 24 for the NDP, with 54.8%
of the popular vote versus 32.7% for the
NDP, on a 71% turnout. The UCP tapped into the economic insecurity
of Albertans caused by a sluggish oil economy and growing frustration with the
lack of pipelines. Conservative candidates promised to “stand up to Justin
Trudeau” , and “get tough” with opponents in British Columbia and Quebec.
Listening to Kenney and his supporters in the right-wing media, you would think
that the problem was that Notley played too nice with the Feds and those
“foreign-financed” environmentalists and Native peoples, and that all that was
needed was to replace the carrot with the stick. In truth, the exact opposite
was true: if the government of Alberta had simply tried to force BC and the Feds to
allow the pipelines by threatening to “turn off the taps”, the likelihood of
regulatory and judicial approval would have been even smaller.
Thus the campaign waged by the Alberta Conservatives was fundamentally
ironic. It was the federal Conservatives between 2011
and 2015, including Mr. Kenney, who discredited the National Energy Board and
sparked the Idle No More protests---and ensured defeat in court over Northern
Gateway. And, if the Trans-Mountain is finally approved this spring, it will
be because governments and TMX have finally met the high standards of
environmental protection and First Nations consultation that the law now
requires. This is the biggest irony that
I have seen in federal politics since the Harper Conservatives took credit for
avoiding the worst of the financial crisis, after promoting the use of
sub-prime mortgages in their first budget in 2006.
As for the supposed failure of "social licence", were
conservatives suggesting that a truth-based energy and climate policy is only
warranted if it gets a pipeline built in under 4 years? The irony is that our most enlightened oil
companies have more in common with Ms Notley on this point than they do with
Mr. Kenney: the CEOs of Suncor,Shell and
Cenovus all favour the carbon tax.
Furthermore, the NDP’s farsighted industrial diversification policy was
better than anything Alberta had seen
since the days of Peter Lougheed.
All this from the
first gender-equal government in Canadian history, a government whose entire
caucus had fewer scandals than any new government that I can remember. Support
for pipelines outside of Alberta rose from 40% to 70% thanks primarily to the
efforts of Rachel Notley, Canada’s finest premier. Can Jason Kenney really do better? It
seems more likely that he will benefit from a pipeline that was enabled by
Notley’s salesmanship and paid for by the Canadian taxpayer. As Alanis
Morrissette might say, that’s more than
a little ironic.
