When the conservative Opposition in Alberta was jockeying for position to reclaim its ancestral throne from the grip of the "accidental" NDP government of the day, the international collapse in the price of oil was relentlessly politicized as a weapon against former Premier Rachel Notley.
Despite the fact the volatile commodity's largest crash in a generation started to unfold many months before her government even took the helm, the then-PCs and former Wildrose Party, who of course eventually merged to become the United Conservative Party, kept blaming the NDP for factors far beyond any Canadian province's ability to influence.
More specifically, one of the main deflections was to agree Notley wasn't responsible for the global price of oil's crash and to instead argue everything the NDP was doing just made the recession worse.
It was apparently NDP policies that made oil giants reluctant to invest — not a historic plunge that saw prices plummet from more than $100 a barrel to record lows that at times reached below $30, making costly projects particularly risky ventures that might well never pay off in this lifetime in the face of an abundance of much cheaper oil.
Further "proof" conservatives presented when claiming the NDP was making a bad situation worse, was the fact that increasing corporate taxes actually caused revenues to drop.
Well, of course!
One will generate more revenue taxing $100 at 10 per cent, than levying 90 per cent on $10.
Despite all of the hyperbolic hysteria and pearl-clutching manufactured rhetoric regurgitated by conservatives, I submit — with no shortage of historical precedents to support how election outcomes hinge all but exclusively on the economy — that had there instead of the crash in the price of oil been a massive boom of soaring prices propelling the province forward to unprecedented heights, Notley would have won the 2019 election.
In a resounding landslide.
Even with relatively stable oil and gas revenue that plateaued at pre-crash peaks and maintained the past status quo, the NDP would have had a second term in the bag, leaving conservative strategists scrambling to fabricate new talking points.
Instead, the UCP capitalized on the recoiling economy and regardless of reality successfully placed the blame on the NDP's shoulders, going on to win the election largely on the populist promise to kill the carbon tax, which has instead been imposed by the federal government.
Now two years into his first term as Alberta's premier, Kenney and the UCP tout loud and proud their "majority mandate" when justifying their anti-democratic crusade to ram through questionable and often unpopular legislation with almost no meaningful debate.
Yet they won't boast too much about the fact about 45 per cent of Albertans — nearly half — did not vote for him or his moderate and fringe rightwing Frankenparty in 2019.
Kenney and the UCP might also brag about record turnouts at the time, which is true.
However, barely more than 60 per cent of eligible voters even bothered to cast a ballot. Seems somewhat disingenuous to celebrate less than two-thirds turnout. Frankly, that's arguably more of an embarrassing indictment on staggering levels of voter apathy and complacency in this province, that such a low turnout was hailed as historic.
Personally, I might be more inclined to pop a champagne bottle when we get closer to somewhere between 80 to 90 per cent turnout.
But I digress.
I would also submit that had Notley been re-elected, Albertans would have been set for a second term with a government that actually makes investments in the critical public sector, which makes possible and sustains a thriving private sector.
You know, rather than slashing social services and programs to bits and ribbons while showering profitable billion dollar corporations with "job creating" tax cuts, which always and invariably result in yet more layoffs while the companies still relocate and scale back or even cease operations.
And aside from all of the convenient corporate tax breaks that naturally end up downloaded on the rest of our shoulders either as a litany of fees or increased municipal taxes, these companies all too often dodge the long-term environmental costs, which end up another burden for taxpayers to bear.
Even lands that have supposedly been reclaimed leave lots to be desired, to put it mildly.
Photo ops and feel good propaganda stories, suddenly turn bitter.
Precious promises of pristine restorations from companies and lobby-influenced government officials evaporate in thin air, like a mist clearing in the morning, revealing an unpleasant truth so many of us for some reason seem dead set on refusing to accept.
And still, any politician that runs under a blue banner in Alberta is likely to be elected by a wide margin.
Being fair to Kenney and the UCP, the pandemic was indeed a factor beyond their scope of controlling. But so was the crash in the price of oil under the NDP's time at the helm.
And how anybody could possibly think blaming or criticizing Notley for bungling the response to the oil crisis was reasonable, but not Kenney in this instance for the pandemic, is beyond me.
Especially considering however someone wants to convince themselves Notley and her government mishandled the crash in oil, Kenney unquestionably fumbled several times before finally completely face-planting his lackluster and uninspiring response to the pandemic.
Thanks to his government's lack of vision and inaction, Alberta now has the dubious distinction of boasting the highest rate of per capita infections in all of North America.
There's irony in that arguably the only reason Kenney and the UCP was ever even elected to power in the first place — a global crisis beyond our ability to control — is the same reason his hopes for re-election seem to grow dimmer by the day.
