Isn't it Ironic?

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.