The legacy media in Alberta were completely wrong about Premier Jason Kenney. They told us that he was finished, that his base hated him. But the recent convention, the recent United Conservative Convention, proved them completely wrong. So why did the media tell us otherwise? Well, I want to bring in a political insider in Alberta to help us sort of understand the landscape in Alberta and why there is a divide between what the media are telling us and what seems to be the reality on the ground.
00:08:20.580I've done some volunteer work for him on things related to his current nomination up in Fort McMurray.
00:08:26.660People are positioning and they're getting ready because they look at those polling numbers
00:08:30.740and they look at the fundamentals and they see a government that's in trouble.
00:08:38.360And you would, governments in trouble usually start changing what they're doing to try to get a better result.
00:08:47.940And we haven't seen that from Jason Kenney.
00:08:49.480Jason's at risk of falling into Einstein's definition of insanity, which is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
00:08:59.840There's been very little innovation or change in approach on the part of the Kenney government.
00:09:05.920They're very much banking on the economy bouncing back and that's solving all problems.
00:09:11.540And I think their problems run a little deeper than COVID and the economy.
00:09:18.700I think their problems kind of have a little bit to do with style and approach and presentation to Albertans with the Albertans feeling like they maybe didn't get the government they were expecting.
00:09:30.140And so normally you'd want to change a few things.
00:09:33.360You'd want to show signs that you're getting stuff.
00:09:41.740So what do you think, Vitor, then about this idea that, you know, we had this great merger, right?
00:09:45.960Jason Kenney came from federal politics to provincial politics in Alberta.
00:09:50.920He had this really ambitious goal of uniting these two fractious parties.
00:09:55.940And he sort of did the impossible, which was that he not only managed to win the progressive conservative nomination in a party that was really kind of closed and not interested in what he was doing.
00:10:07.220Then having these two parties vote to merge and then running for the leader of that merged party.
00:10:13.560I mean, it was a tremendous accomplishment at the time.
00:10:16.540It seemed like Kenney was unstoppable.
00:10:17.980But, you know, now with his sort of poor governance record and some major issues that he's had, do you think these two parties are bound to stick together even after, say, if hypothetically Jason Kenney didn't survive?
00:10:31.360Or even with him, do you see those fault lines coming apart?
00:10:35.460If Jason leaves, if Jason is removed by the membership and leadership review, I think the party holds together.
00:10:41.660Because I think the members want it to hold together.
00:10:48.020I think there's actually a strong demand for unity and a strong willingness on the part of lots of the volunteers and lots of the grassroots to find ways to hold the party together.
00:10:56.880But there's a risk that if Jason holds on, it holds on the way he's been holding on so far, which is lots of effort with the lobbyists, outsider money, you know, people who make their living from government propping him up.
00:11:15.500A lot of this sort of anti-grassroots stuff that's bubbling up through the channels, then you're going to see an awful lot of sort of the wild rosers, that reform side of wild rose that we need to do politics differently.
00:11:32.560The old part of the PCs that didn't like all of the insiders and the lobbying and what, you know, Rick Bell calls Tory land also will get upset.
00:11:49.660There's an awful lot of people, and I consider myself in this category, that wanted this party to be the non-crazy side of wild rose and the non-crooked side of the PCs.
00:12:02.020And right now, Jason Kenney is being propped up by the crooked side of the PCs and the crazy side of wild rose.
00:12:07.800And the funny part is the crazy side of wild rose was always this tiny minority in wild rose that all got all the media attention.
00:12:14.200You know, the coup d'etat people and sort of weird, but they're all in for Jason.
00:12:22.320And Jason's losing his connection with sort of, you know, the guy who gives $40 and the guy who puts up the lawn signs and the guy who volunteers to be a writing association treasurer, you know, all of which are jobs that have like, there's no glory attached to it.
00:12:37.460You do it because you do it out of a commitment to the cause.
00:12:40.980Those are the people that are mad at Jason.
00:12:43.960And, you know, they won't spend $350 on a convention until it really matters, but then they might show up and spend $350 on a convention.
00:12:56.180Well, I want to switch gears just a little, Vitor, because one of the things that I noticed about the UCP convention was the absence of someone rather important to conservative politics in the country.
00:13:08.220And that is Aaron O'Toole, the leader of the conservative party.
00:13:10.720Typically, a provincial conservative convention is great stomping grounds for a leader, especially a leader like Aaron O'Toole, who sort of struggled to connect with the base.
00:13:20.620And he's dealing with something like a little mini revolt in his own caucus about whether or not he has legitimacy after losing that election.
00:13:28.160So were you surprised at all that Aaron O'Toole didn't bother to show up or do you know anything about why he wasn't there?
00:13:33.940I don't know anything in particular, but I can only speculate that he looked at the news stories and said, oh, I don't want to be in the room of a bun fight.
00:13:58.240I think Aaron's been missing an awful lot of opportunities to connect with people, and he needs to fix that pretty quickly.
00:14:07.620I think he's getting a little bit of a break from his caucus.
00:14:10.220The organized revolt against him is pretty minor and relatively gentle, but I also think that there's an awful lot of members of his caucus and an awful lot of members of the party that are looking to see a change in approach from him.
00:14:26.600And so far, they haven't seen it, and that's a risk for him going forward.
00:14:32.660If he doesn't sort of change how he does things, change how his inner circle works, change how he reaches out, there's a risk he's going to end up in sort of Jason Kenney territory with lots of caucus revolts and lots of grassroots revolts happening at the same time.
00:14:47.360What did you think of a statement that he made on election night where he said that conservatives have to have the courage to change?
00:14:53.240I know that Alberta MP Shannon Stubbs was particularly irritated because she talked about to the media how she didn't know what that meant, and she didn't like it.
00:15:02.220What do you think of this idea that Aaron O'Toole is sort of taking the party in a more sort of progressive, Toronto-friendly direction,
00:15:09.120and he's happy to sacrifice the more libertarian and sort of Western Canadian elements that make up the base of the party?
00:15:17.480Well, listen, he undertook that strategy. It was a dangerous strategy. It did not seem to work because pretty much there were very few ridings where we picked up votes.
00:15:30.740In an awful lot of places, we lost votes, and if we'd held on to the same number of votes we had with Andrew Scheer in every riding, we would have won more seats.
00:15:38.320So the strategy that the addition by subtraction thing, that wasn't working.
00:15:47.160If you're going to invite conservatives to embrace change, you've got to frame that change in a positive, interesting way that has a long-run positivity, optimism to it.
00:16:04.000You know, his political poetry isn't very good.
00:16:07.320His adjustments to policy matters that might have been things, you know, that would have been reminiscent, say, of some of the clever things that Trump did, some of the very clever things that Boris Johnson did.
00:16:22.560When Aaron O'Toole did them, they came across as lacking sincerity.
00:16:26.580They looked like a caricature of what Boris did.
00:16:29.980You've got to go out and do these things and then talk about them in a way that's convincing.
00:16:38.300And I could see how some of the elements of the strategy that he's trying to do have the potential to work.
00:16:46.840But it's not, you have to commit to them.
00:17:12.000Somehow, Aaron O'Toole went in that direction, but it looked like, sounded like, and the way the policy was written, he was talking to the union bosses.
00:17:40.860Boris figured it out when he breached the, you know, the red wall in the north.
00:17:45.680Aaron O'Toole did a caricature of it, rather than thinking about what are the things you need to say and how do you need to say it to win over key voters in different parts of the country.
00:17:58.200It was like he didn't so much do it as he just talked about how he was doing it.
00:18:02.320He told the media that his strategy was to go after blue-collar working-class voters, so the media wrote about it in, like, an intellectual, academic way.
00:18:10.020But then when it came to the actual policies that would appeal to them, it was like O'Toole was afraid of that because he didn't want the negative press that would come from the elites in Toronto and how they would interpret him doing that kind of thing.
00:18:22.220So, yeah, I totally get what you're saying.
00:18:32.140And it's the intentional divisions that you create.
00:18:36.560And you actually have to go out and create divisions.
00:18:38.260You have to talk about the fact that, you know, a unionized worker in Sudbury is not the same thing as a public sector worker in downtown Toronto.
00:18:49.600They're both unionized, but it's a very different thing.
00:18:51.960And you can appeal to them, and you can, you know, you can speak against anything.
00:18:56.260I think if you're going to practice the politics of addition by subtraction, then I think the subtraction needs to be that you give up on Toronto proper, Vancouver proper, Montreal proper.
00:19:07.560You give up on Edmonton Centre and Calgary Centre.
00:19:10.720And you start talking in ways that say, yeah, we'll never win there.
00:19:14.740But we can win every seat that's in the north, and we can win every seat that's rural, and we can win every seat that's resource-based.
00:19:21.100And there's an awful lot of those seats that are available to be picked up.
00:19:24.380And then as you pick up those seats, the nature of the fight in the suburbs, which is where the majorities are won and lost, they change.