Alberta Premier Kenney set to step down from top job

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’s plan for Alberta was founded on the conservatism of “prosperity first,” said political scientist Jared Wesley with the University of Alberta.

Kenney, said Wesley, spelled it out in his maiden speech as UCP leader in 2017 by reminding supporters that “in order to be a compassionate and generous society, you must be a prosperous one first.”

Wesley said such an ethos may have captured the mood of conservatives and enthralled others, “but as Albertans and their government were forced (during COVID-19) between prosperity and compassion — or as Kenney put it ‘livelihoods and lives’ — his focus on livelihoods was really out of touch with what people were looking for.”

Political scientist Laurie Adkin said the prosperity-first doctrine was narrowly defined to the benefit of a select few.

“There was really no light between the Kenney government and the oil and gas industry, and that is not good for democracy,” said Adkin with the University of Alberta.

The math was simple, the corollary obvious: If Alberta’s identity is defined by economic prosperity through oil and gas, then those who challenge this worldview are, well, anti-Albertan.

Kenney and his UCP vilified the green left and high-profile oilsands critics like David Suzuki and Tzeporah Berman. When world-renowned green teen Greta Thunberg came to the legislature, Kenney left town.

Kenney mocked Notley’s NDP government as a docile servant to Trudeau’s oil-killing agenda, kowtowing for crumbs, grubbing for “social licence.”

Over time, the enemy tag broadened. Kenney characterized the NDP as disloyal for its COVID-19 criticism. He linked one radio interviewer’s criticism of his government to an attack on Alberta itself. Reporters were at times dismissed as shills for the NDP or special interest groups.

As COVID-19 hit with full force in 2020, decimating the economy, Kenney found himself battling a two-front war as bubbling rifts between him and his caucus and party exploded.

Those divides had started before the election, when Kenney promised his UCP would be run by and for the members, but then at the party’s founding convention in 2018 told reporters “I hold the pen” on what will and won’t be policy.

The UCP won in 2019 on the strength of rural votes, said political scientist Duane Bratt. But when Kenney picked his first cabinet, it was Calgary-centric, leaving disgruntled backbenchers seething in silence, poised to push back when things went south. “It was a topdown government,” said Bratt with Calgary’s Mount Royal University.

Kenney’s government was lauded in the first wave of COVID-19, invoking rules and closures to keep gatherings down, hold the illness at bay and keep hospitals operating.

But in subsequent waves, Kenney’s promise to balance “lives and livelihoods” left him whipsawed by those wanting rules to keep hospitals from cratering and those who felt the rules were unnecessary and a violation of personal freedom.

As the calendar flipped to 2022, the drumbeats of dissent grew louder, even as COVID-19 receded and oil and gas prices soared, returning Alberta to multibillion-dollar budget surpluses.

UCP discontents had been angling to accelerate a party leadership review.

That vote was moved, changed to a special one-day vote, then altered again to a mail-in referendum. Critics said Kenney’s team was moving the goalposts to keep from losing.

Kenney called his critics “lunatics” and then, in his speech to kick off the leadership vote, asked for their forgiveness.

No matter. On May 18, he got 51 per cent support — technically enough to survive, but he said it was time to go. On Thursday, UCP members meet in Calgary to seal his fate. A new premier will be chosen. The gig is up.