Jason Kenney, the most indomitable force in Canadian conservative politics, came to a sudden end this week. Jason Kenney has never lost anything before, not even close. Not the PC leadership race, not the Wildrose merger, not his UCP leadership bid, and not the 2019 Alberta election that some crowned him premier. In all of those contests, his opponents were lucky to get close enough to taste the dust from his heels.
00:00:00.000The most indomitable force in Canadian conservative politics came to a sudden end this week.
00:00:05.600Jason Kenney has never lost anything before, not even close.
00:00:09.680None of his seven elections as a federal conservative MP or their accompanying nominations.
00:00:14.860Not the PC leadership race, not the Wild Rose PC merger war, not the UCP leadership race, not his by-election, not the 2019 Alberta election that some crowned premier.
00:00:26.560In all of those contests, his opponents were lucky to get close enough to taste the dust from his heels.
00:00:33.240Many of his supporters believed he would win the leadership review vote because, well, he always wins.
00:00:39.000It's a logical fallacy that could be made of the Roman Empire, until it couldn't.
00:00:44.000Most puddings didn't really take notice that there was anything amiss in Tory land until roughly nine months ago.
00:00:50.320But the seeds of Jason Kenney's undoing were planted much earlier.
00:00:54.020And those seeds were not simply libertarian and populist outrage at his lockdowns and mandatory mask orders and vaccine mandates.
00:01:06.120Soon after winning the UCP leadership, Kenney showed early signs that loyalty was a one-way street for him.
00:01:11.980Those that would fight for him would be rewarded, but only so long as they were useful at the moment.
00:01:16.500Over the first two years of his leadership, he made a growing list of enemies out of those who had been his friends.
00:01:24.200Those dissidents were not sore losers from the defeated Bryan Jean camp, although the Jean team certainly kept the embers of their fight burning in belief that their man was cheated in 2017.
00:01:34.260Much of this would be manifest in Take Back Alberta, an organization made up mostly of former Kenney allies.
00:01:42.600By the fall of 2021, those two camps would form an alliance that would eventually topple the premier.
00:01:50.780Kenney is a political creature of Stephen Harper's Federal Conservative Party.
00:01:55.100Despite the Alberta and Reform roots of some parts of that party, Alberta politics and Alberta itself are fundamentally different creatures.
00:02:06.380For most of its history, the base or right flank of the Reform Party and Federal Conservative Party have been social conservatives.
00:02:14.400Kenney was born of this part of the conservative coalition and made himself its darling.
00:02:17.860But federal social conservatives are a remarkably easy group to pacify.
00:02:23.500With such low expectations of their own political party, most social conservatives are willing to accept a policy statement that can be surmised as,
00:02:32.140don't make it any worse than it already is now.
00:02:34.940A little rhetorical respect and a few token policy wins at the margins are normally enough to keep them happy in voting and oftentimes donating and volunteering.
00:02:43.420When Kenney returned to Alberta to forge and lead the United Conservative Party, he believed that the Alberta Conservative Coalition was not fundamentally different than the national one.
00:02:55.520Maybe a few degrees right of it, but still configured much the same.
00:03:01.460Jason Kenney and I argued about this several times, and I clearly lost it.
00:03:05.620The Alberta Conservative Coalition contains the moderate, urban, and transactional political elements that define the former federal and Alberta progressive conservative parties.
00:03:16.760But on the other side, the Wild Rose side was much more complex and less of a straightforward parallel with the Reform Party.
00:03:26.580Like the Reform Party, the Wild Rose contained social conservatives, but it was hardly the only large and passionate force in it.
00:03:33.760It contained autonomists, many of whom are now full-fledged sovereigntists and libertarians.
00:03:39.800Kenney tapped into all of these groups in his unity campaign and subsequent elections as UCP Premier.
00:03:46.420But as Premier, he struck a significantly more centrist approach.
00:03:52.040He believed rhetoric and a few token policy actions were enough to appease these groups,
00:03:57.500as social conservatives are normally willing to accept at the federal level.
00:04:01.260But when the Wexit movement exploded in the days following the 2019 federal election that saw Justin Trudeau re-elected,
00:04:10.280Kenney recognized the discontent and struck up the Fair Deal panel.
00:04:14.040It signaled that under Kenney's leadership, Alberta would launch a campaign to achieve maximum autonomy in Canada,
00:04:20.900short of independence, much as Quebec has done.
00:04:22.840But the report fell short, advocating some distance from Ottawa, but far short of many's expectations.
00:04:30.360In the rest of Kenney's time as Premier, he would only implement a few token items in it.
00:04:35.880He appointed an Alberta Chief Firearms Officer, which has the potential to do good, if they actually do anything with that job,
00:04:42.660and he called a referendum to remove equalization from the Constitution.
00:04:46.100But from the beginning, Kenney undercut the leverage of this action by saying that the vote wasn't really about abolishing equalization,
00:04:54.780but about obtaining leverage to obtain a few minor tweaks on the formula.
00:04:59.340It left little negotiating leverage to be had with Ottawa when Albertans voted overwhelmingly to scrap it.
00:05:04.680The Alberta Firsters in his party and voter base expected him to jump on a plane the next day to Ottawa
00:05:10.780and browbeat Trudeau until he got them the Fair Deal that he promised them.