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Kenney unintentionally unifies elements of left and right

Updated: Mar 29, 2021

During the NDP's brief four years at the helm, there was no shortage of people incessantly blathering on about the Notley government's so-called disastrous attempt to adapt Alberta's economy to a transitioning world economy that is trying to wean off of its dependency on the roller coaster commodity ride of oil and gas.

With apparently a total absence of critical thought, many of them bought hook, line and sinker, the unscrupulously opportunistic and populist charade of an Eastern politician who blustered his way around Alberta, posing for pictures in a blue pickup and pretending to be from the province while whipping up resentment against Ottawa and promising to scrap the carbon tax.

The UCP government's effort to expand Alberta's coal industry, a move that would mostly benefit only foreign-owned corporations at our expense, has been roundly condemned by the usual suspects on the left. But this time, many voices among the party's core base seem to be joining the chorus of cries against new projects.

In other words, Jason Kenney was not elected on a platform of hope and forward-thinking vision for a progressive future less dependent on an industry that isn't any time in the near future expected to return to anything resembling past booms.

No.

The former federal cabinet minister who under the Harper government helped create the equalization formula he now rails against, rode a populist wave of deep-seated and festering malcontent against a leftist or perhaps as many would argue, with merit, centrist government that had the misfortune of inheriting not only growing deficits passed on from previous conservative governments, but also the catastrophic crash in the oil patch that sent the debt into a death spiral.

But despite cutting childhood poverty in half and starting to set the stage for a more diversified economy, the NDP was depicted as an awful bogeyman that was destroying Alberta.

These days, with the UCP in power almost two years with nothing to show for it but one scandal after another, the supporters seem to just mumble and dither impotently about the Kenney government's series of monumentally colossal failures.

However, fissures in the otherwise impregnable conservative cement finally seem to be showing.

The premier's popularity has plummeted among the lowest in the country, after peaking high in the poles fresh after the election.

There are a growing number of reasons why even the base is now grumbling.

The pandemic protocol measures, deemed by anti-maskers as draconian attacks on their personal freedom, the Hawaiigate scandal that displayed the kind of elitism supposedly despised by conservatives, and the unexpected, never-campaigned-on assault against the Eastern Slopes to expand coal developments in the Rocky Mountains that will largely only benefit foreign billionaires while we in exchange will for a pittance get scarcer, more polluted air and water.

Or perhaps all of the above.

Yet while the masks and other public health measures to combat COVID depressingly remain a point of contentious political controversy, it seems as though the thought of Selenium-tainted headwaters that millions depend on in an already semi-arid province which struggles at the best of times to meet its water supply, coupled with post apocalyptic images floating in people's heads of industry run amuck in pristine vistas that are considered public treasurers, has more than any other issue singularly unified two otherwise ideologically opposed camps.

It sure wasn't health care (the war with doctors and nurses), education (cuts and taking teacher pensions), policing (downloading RCMP costs onto small municipalities while at the same time working to terminate the RCMP in exchange for a provincial police force and put another expense on the shoulders of Alberta taxpayers), emergency services (defunding emergency heli firefighters).

It certainly wasn't the farcical, state-sponsored oil industry propaganda machine that's guzzling tens of millions of dollars and producing nothing close to justifying that grotesque expense, nor the embarrassing wild goose hunt public-yet-super-secretive inquiry that conveniently keeps requiring extensions.

It isn't other deadbeat oil companies deciding they don't feel like paying their taxes because times are tough, leaving rural municipalities on the hook for the tab. Just like abandoned wells and oil infrastructure. The companies reap privatized profits, but the costs are socialized onto our collective shoulders.

It wasn't any of that, which the base somehow manages to shrug off and dismiss indifferently despite being hurt by all of these disastrous policies.

Nope.

It was the mountains that brought Albertans together.

Our mountains.

But this extremely arrogant government still has two years in power, and the promised "consultations" are coming up. I wonder what those questions will look like.

Q: How many coal mines would you approve of in the Rocky Mountains?

1) Just a few.

2) A whole bunch.

3) There can never be enough!

Q: How much do you want to see the coal industry expanded?

1) Just a little.

2) A whole lot.

3) No limits!

Q: Are you worried about water and air pollution?

1) Not really.

2) What, me worry?

3) Industry can totally be reliably depended upon to responsibly self regulate in our collective best interest. The issue of orphan wells is just radical leftist propaganda!

The consultation process, much like the MacKinnon report penned to justify all of these shenanigans, will be a political stage show to push through the government's corporate-approved agenda with the pretence of public support.

I can only hope Albertans will remember all of this in 2023.

Not that it'll matter for Kenney and his cohort. Because even if his government fails to get re-elected, they've already got it made with their golden parachute pensions and favour-owing pals in the private sector.

Of course if he manages to pull off another Trumpian feat and actually secures another term, Alberta will deserve everything that comes in the fallout of blindly pursuing short-sighted greed at the expense of our collective futures.

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