Reuters

Brian Topp

May 21, 2022

What is left to say about the resignation of Alberta Premier Jason Kenney? This:

Die ich rief, die Geister,

Werd’ ich nun nicht los

(The spirits that I summoned

I now cannot rid myself of again) 

These words are the heart of the poem Der Zauberlehrling by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – best known in the English-speaking world through a timeless Walt Disney animation, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

In that cartoon Mickey Mouse drowns himself (almost) by summoning spirits he can’t control.

Which is, pretty much, what just happened to Jason Kenney. He was a driving force behind the merger in 2017 of Alberta’s mainstream Progressive Conservative Party and the right-wing Wild Rose to create the United Conservative Party, which defeated NDP Premier Rachel Notley in the 2019 election.

And to Goethe’s point, he was defeated by the very people he himself recruited.

Someday, there will be a full public disclosure of who funded Kenney’s entrée into Alberta and exactly what he and his friends did to capture Peter Loughheed’s proud and once competent Alberta PCs; to force it into a shotgun marriage with its bitterest critic, the hard-right Wildrose Party; and then to defeat the folksy and popular Wildrose Leader, Brian Jean, for its leadership. It must be a pretty good story, including the apparent extravaganza of tactical politics that was the “kamikaze campaign” of Jeff Callaway, still under investigation by the RCMP. As  Kenney once explained on International Women’s Day, men “understand tactical politics a little bit better” than women do – one of many remarks that got him in a lot of trouble.

What is not in doubt is that Kenney was able to flood riding association meetings with supporters – elbowing out the elderly country club conservatives of the PC party; overwhelming the true believers who had stuck with Wildrose; and defeating Brian Jean through, shall we say, hook and crook.

Who gets on a mysteriously-funded bus to travel to meeting after meeting to vote, again and again, for Jason Kenney? Students at bible colleges. Members of rural religious minorities. Anti-modernist Catholics, and highly-motivated Catholic pro-life groups. Religious home school and private school entrepreneurs and activists. And, seeping in all around this, the circle of support who would rally to the “trucker’s convoy” call in February 2022.

Not to forget the socially conservative new Canadian communities who used to be Kenney’s principal focus as Stephen Harper’s cabinet field organizer. Although there, the potential might not have been what it once was. Those communities did not like being betrayed by Kenney and the Harper Conservatives through the 2015 “barbaric cultural practices” and snitch line campaign that vilified them. Not the last time Kenney would trigger a political car crash by vilifying his own best supporters.

Having won his leaderships, Kenney recruited a slate of candidates who closely mirrored the people he recruited to help him capture these parties. It was all excellent tactical politics – and a grotesquely bad fit for the issues Kenney and his team would then face in office.

Kenney has never worked in the private sector. He and his colleagues believed that cutting corporate tax rates would cause the economy to spontaneously return to growth. As his sole meaningful act on jobs and the economy, he handed billions in public revenues to corporations – who then gratefully flowed the money through to their out-of-province shareholders, cut 50,000 more jobs, and continued to shut down their headquarters and operations in the face of a commodity price crash in Alberta’s oil and gas industry.

Goethe taught us that sorcerer’s apprentices end up destroying themselves by unleashing spirits they can’t control. Another eternal verity is that if you can’t govern yourself, you can’t govern a province.

Kenney also knew nothing about public education. He and his colleagues believed that public education trains students to be ungodly “woke” activists. And so, working through an education minister who is a Catholic home-schooling activist, he set out to dumb down public education, and to fund private religious schools as a more attractive alternative. Brave public school boards across the province near-unanimously refused to implement an antiquated and on many points odd curriculum.

Neitther was Kenney a friend of Canadian Medicare. And so, he and his colleagues ripped up the doctors’ contract, confronted the province’s nurses; and  privatized surgeries and services while causing growing chaos and gridlock in Alberta Health Services, before forcing out its CEO.

And then came COVID-19.

Let’s stay in Kenney’s world of tactical politics and consider his problem here. Alberta’s emergency rooms and long-term care facilities were on the cusp of collapse. Failing to act decisively would kill many people – certainly dooming Kenney and his party to defeat. But  Kenney’s foot soldiers, the people he delivered to all of those meetings, didn’t see things that way.

Ken Dryden once said that politics is like hockey – it doesn’t build character, it reveals it. In the face of this brutal collision between the public interest and the bed Kenney made for himself, a strong and competent leader would have led; told the truth; and accepted the consequences. That is how politicians become leaders whom the public trusts. Kenney did what born second-in-commands do. He waffled; lectured; sulked off-stage; got tough; ran scared; brought in mandates; tried to pretend they weren’t mandates; made gross politically-motivated misjudgments (“the best summer EVER!”); and in all of this succeeded in angering both his core of supporters and the broader public.

Then, just as he had alienated the new Canadian communities he had once courted, he did the same with his own followers on the populist right. “These are just kooky people generally,” he told his team in an artfully leaked video in March. “There’s more than a few bugs attracted to us, this party, right now.” One of his staff told CBC News that the rebellion Kenney had triggered among his own supporters was an attempted “hostile takeover of our party by fringe elements”. Something  Kenney and his team knew all about.

What does this all mean for the official opposition, Alberta’s New Democrats? It means a period of uncertainty, waiting to see who will lead Kenney’s party. And it means a period of opportunity, to talk with Albertans about what they want next for their province, while Kenney’s party talks to itself about itself.

Since Kenney’s former supporters aren’t going anywhere, Notley and her team can appeal to a very wide tent indeed: progressive New Democrats and liberals; progressive conservatives; and conservatives who know that climate and medical science are real. That’s 70 percent to 80 percent of the population of Alberta — an unusually large portion of any electorate to be conceded to an opposition party by a government. But that’s tactical politics for you — as practised by a sorcerer’s apprentice.

Goethe taught us that sorcerer’s apprentices end up destroying themselves by unleashing spirits they can’t control. Another eternal verity is that if you can’t govern yourself, you can’t govern a province. That risks being the final word on Kenney’s less-than-one-term government, and on his party.

We will hear a lot of talk now from the usual suspects about how Mr. Kenney’s shattered party needs to reunite behind a new saviour to carry on its vital work. Having had a close look at that work, the moderate, sensible majority of Albertans may well conclude that this is the last thing they need or want.

They know that Alberta needs to manage an extremely complex and tricky transition in order to maintain its calling as an energy powerhouse – energy is going to look very different in our lifetimes. They know that dumbing down their schools is the very last thing their children need. And they want access to a doctor and good public health care – not to chaos, disruption, profit-seeking, and ham-fisted political governance that drives doctors and nurses out of the province.

Contributing writer Brian Topp is a partner at GT & Company, chair of the Broadbent Institute and teaches at the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University. He is a former national president of the NDP and was chief of staff to Alberta Premier Rachel Notley.