Alberta Premier Jason Kenney took to the airwaves yesterday with the first episode of his weekly Corus Entertainment call-in radio program, Your Province, Your Premier.
If you have a hankering to hear our increasingly unpopular premier doing his irritating Perfesser Kenney schtick live on the airwaves, though, my advice is to try to catch the show as soon as you can.
Seriously, I’m pretty sure that one way or another this effort won’t last.
Never mind the perilous straits in which Mr. Kenney finds his political career, Your Province, Your Premier is plain bad: Premier Kenney is annoying, he uses an awful lot of words to say almost nothing, the show is filled with irritating commercial ads, and the format is designed to make it hard for callers to press their point and create a little on-air drama.
To be blunt, it’s a bore.
Political commentator Dave Cournoyer noted that “as expected this is a format that Kenney is comfortable with. It’s an audio version of the hours-long Facebook Lives that he’s been doing.” That sounds about right.
Legacy media – which nowadays includes radio – simply can’t afford to run with a formula this dull even if Corus wants to somehow help Mr. Kenney survive his political travails, which are scheduled to come to a climax on April 9 when he faces a leadership review by members of his United Conservative Party in Red Deer.
Face it, radio may have been the coming propaganda tool in 1927 when Bible Bill Aberhart started broadcasting from the Calgary Prophetic Bible Institute, quite possibly kick-starting a political career that would put him in the premier’s office by 1935, but it’s just background noise now.
What’s more, since most of the people who called in, whether they were on the right or the left, didn’t seem to be all that keen on Mr. Kenney – it doesn’t seem likely the premier find this a rewarding way to spend his time.
The Progress Report’s Duncan Kinney kindly live-tweeted it, saving most politically engaged Albertans the need to suffer through an underwhelming performance.
Mr. Kinney counted six phone questions and five text questions permitted by host Wayne Nelson, who made sure listeners understood he was the decider about who got to talk to Mr. Kenney. Mr. Nelson also asked three soft-ball questions of his own.
Things heated up momentarily when caller Angela Grace asked a critical question about the controversial UCP rewrite of the K-12 curriculum.
The psychologist and educator wondered: “Why have you budgeted $191 million taxpayer dollars on implementing a draft curriculum that over 40,000 parents, 95 per cent of teachers, the deans of education and educational experts, school trustees and school boards, First Nations, Metis and Inuit oppose and say is racist, whitewashed, regressive, and will cause children significant harm?”
She also asked, presumably rhetorically, if the premier would be attending a province-wide protest on April 2 demanding the government ditch the draft curriculum
In response, Mr. Kenney predictably accused the NDP of trying to introduce a “highly politicized curriculum” – a process actually started by a previous Progressive Conservative government – and rambled on at length about how the UCP wanted “a solid, balanced, revised curriculum that would provide for especially better outcomes on areas like literacy and numeracy …”
“I don’t accept a lot of the premises in your question there,” the premier wrapped up, a phrase he uses so frequently in news conferences it’s become something of an Alberta joke. Humiliatingly, Dr. Grace could be heard chuckling at his response.
Later, another questioner tried to take the premier to task for his government’s takeover of the Alberta teachers’ pension plan.
Mr. Kenney responded with a baseless claim the “money was being wasted.” In fact, the teachers’ pension got better results than other public sector pensions managed by the Alberta Investment Management Corp., better known as AIMCo, the historically underperforming Crown corporation the government wants to manage all public pensions.
“It is very rich for this premier, who lost $1.3 billion taxpayer dollars betting on Donald Trump … to talk about money being wasted,” NDP Finance Critic Shannon Phillips observed later in a news release.
Alas, those were was about it for interesting moments in the premier’s radio debut.
So even if Mr. Kenney manages to hang onto his job on April 9 and Corus can avoid a fight over whether this amounts to a political contribution to Mr. Kenney, it seems likely Your Province, Your Premier will be radio history soon.
It’s been said that of Jason Kenney is a man of his times … his times happen to be the 1930s, however.
Doing a radio show, where you can hear Kenney talk but not have to put up with the annoying visual of his throughly punchable face, may be considered something of a relief to many of the listeners who strayed into his gabfest.
The best part was hearing Kenney take calls that were clearly meant to criticize his policies, which he quickly denounced as “loaded”, before trotting out that old nugget “I reject the premise of your question”, and then waxing pompously on and on about some kind of word salad/hot air concoction of nonsense, while the caller laughed hysterically. Yes, Kenney has struck comedy-radio gold.
I mean the very least Kenney could do to make his show more entertaining and tolerable is spin some golden oldies. Maybe some of those Mart Kenney classics?
As a deputy minister in the Duplessis cabinet?
I really don’t see what the point of this call in radio show featuring the head honcho of the UCP is. What is it supposed to accomplish, given that his approval rating and that of the UCP is in the gutter?
When doing nothing is not an option but there is nothing to do that will fix the problem, even reasonable adults sometimes take absurd actions, and Mr. Kenney is neither reasonable, nor adult.
Bless your heart for enduring the hour, David. You are made of sterner stuff than me.
.. I had high hopes Jason Kenney would be asked to explain
his role & indeed his complete silence..
He engineered the purchase of Majority Equity Control
with a South Korean Pension Plan entity
and thus Albertan Pension holders
became the driving force owners behind
The Coastal GasLink Pipeline to Kitimat !
Not a single word on this from Trudeau,
John Horgan, Jason Kenney, TC Energy
Even the Wet’suwet’en seem unaware
Mainstream Media are unaware ? !
It’s fun watching this fool try to save his ass when we know he can’t. Another Don Trump trying to prove how stupid he really is. The teachers in our family are sick and tired of them trying to ram their fake curriculum down our throats without including the expertise of the teachers, wasting all this money , but they don’t care.
It reminds us of their pal Stephen Harper as prime minister. At least Eastern Canadians have been a lot smarter keeping Reformers Andrew Scheer and Erin O’Toole out of that position. Too bad Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba aren’t that smart. As my late father would say “They are voting for the Conservative name and don’t care who the fool is hiding behind it.”
A recent survey in Medicine hat news proved what fools Albertans are. Fifty percent say they will vote for Pierre Poilievre another Calgary trained Reformer who is famous for at the age of 16 selling Reform Party memberships in Calgary to to help his buddy Jason Kenney get elected and was an assistant to Stockwell Day in the Alliance Party . Just another Reformer to be voted out, as the former MLAs from the Lougheed era taught me.
ALAN K. SPILLER: There are teachers in my family too, as well as nurses and others in the medical profession. I don’t think they are happy with the UCP. Any of them who were in these professions when Ralph Klein was premier, know what he was like with his cuts. None of this was good, and it was avoidable, had Peter Lougheed’s ideals remained. But no, Albertans were duped by a Liberal turned Reformer, and they are being duped by another Liberal turned Reformer, and other pretend conservatives, like we see in the UCP, and with Pierre Poliveire. What a shame.
Anonymous. Our family members lost their nursing and teaching jobs under Klein and dad almost lost his life because of Klein’s health care cuts after he had donated around $30,000 to the Alberta Conservative party with Lougheed’s energy minister Bill Dickie being a brother in-law of one of my uncles. What was so upsetting to us is the fact that we had known his family since the early 1960s and knew what a jerk Klein was. It didn’t surprise any of us that his father Phil and daughter Angie tried to help us vote him out.
I hope your are right that this radio show will be history soon as well as the premier himself.
Jason Kenney is living in 1927 or earlier and has no idea how ridiculous anything he says sounds like.
With the pandemic, the possibility of a third world war in the air and this premier’s sick mind, it is no wonder so many of us are having mental issues. This man needs to go as fast as possible.
That blue sweater vest: did he borrow it from Stephen Harper?
Do kids these days know what AM radio is?
Why didn’t he spend all that wasted money on something useful, like public universities? Why defund them?
My first two questions might be the only ones he’d answer.
Perhaps I’m dense, but I don’t understand how this doesn’t constitute free advertising for Kenney and the UCP, and I don’t understand why more people aren’t up in arms about this. Can anyone explain?
I’m sure it costs less than $30M a year, or the cost of Alberta’s War Room. It also costs significantly less than the $1.3B tossed to the wind on a failed pipeline. However,
no matter the *undisclosed* dollar value, it’s money that could be better spent on things like restoring funds cut from public university budgets.
I think it’s the firehouse effect. We get such a flood of garbage ideas and policies that we don’t have the time and energy to respond to all of them.
I don’t understand why the UCP isn’t paying for this blatant propaganda. Are there no rules around this sort of thing especially with a leadership review in a few weeks?
Why should Albertans have to pay to listen to Kenney’s lies? At least if the UCP was paying the bill it wouldn’t be quite so offensive.
Scared people are going to listen to him without the narrative huh?
I agree the Notley gang should be scared.
Sure, Brett (Wilson?)
With 22% support provincially, a hefty chunk of the ultra right ready to remove him in Red Deer in less than a month and an equally significant amount of what should be derisively channelled as “somewhat progressive UCP members” trying to do the same, Kenney is toast.
He can waffle on forever in his attempt to emulate Bible Bill but, other than the most obtuse, prejudiced and stubbornly stupid among the varied Albertan populace, no one will vote for him or his odious party.
Thats why they have elections, I guess we will see.
From my point of view, “Not Propaganda” is much better than the alternative.
I agree with you Brett. Notley should be scared. She’s scared of the day she wins the next election and has a look at the real books and what the Alberta Auditor General reported.
She is scared to see for herself how the Kenney mafia plundered the Albert treasury, and the mess she will have to clean up afterwards.
The closeted teenager has been having a 4-year party while mom was away, and now the house (aka Alberta) is trashed. Yep, that’s what she’s scared of, as all of adults are.
I don’t have much to add on this one. Kenny has proven to be very skilled at irritating the maximum number of people on most issues. My working theory is that he is actually an energy vampire at which he is wildly successful.
While the question about why Jason Kenney is getting free air time is a good one, i feel like folks should be thinking about this in larger terms than simple corruption.
What we are seeing is a dangerously close to fascism. The abandonment wholesale by the ruling party of the rule of law. An active attempt to court an openly insurrectionist, armed, far right movement. And now, seemingly from nowhere an organized campaign by legacy media and deep pocketed dark money “donors” to push their narrative into as many homes as possible. If these folks aren’t working together I’m Foghorn Leghorn, son.
This is what happens when capitalism is in crisis, and we’ve been limping from crisis to crisis since at least ‘08. These folks are desperate to hang on to their ill gotten gains (we are living through a neo gilded age) and they aren’t at all shy about breaking laws, fingers, etc, to get what they want.
Totally agree. Not only can Fascism happen here, there are people actively trying to bring it about.
As someone who has supported Global for years it makes me furious that they would become the mouth piece to help him try to stay in power. It was the radio station in Calgary who finally dumped Danielle Smith let’s all tell global how we feel and maybe they will dump Kenney.
I’m not sure why anyone would “support” global, corus, postmedia, etc, but yes this is who they are. No one should really be surprised by this.
My first thought is why Corus is doing this? Do they want something from the Alberta government. If so, perhaps it is a bit of a stretch to expect Kenney to be around in the long run, so perhaps it is something short term and so may become apparent soon
My second thought is I can understand why Kenney is jumping at this. He has an ego and no doubt believes he is a good communicator. However, in reality he is no Lougheed or Klein. So those that tune in will get to endure lectures from Professor Kenney and listen to him evade or dismiss legitimate questions and concerns.
Part of Kenney’s problem is he is at heart a career politician and not a very convincing populist. Let’s him drone on and this will only convince everyone of that. His pompous speaking style can be quite irritating to those on the populist right.
Yeah this show will probably quietly end once Kenney’s gang figures out it isn’t helping, or after Corus gets whatever it wants, whichever happens first.
Given the choice of listening in to the Premier’s radio show or going to the dentist for a tooth extraction I would select the latter. Less painful, better use of my time.
In personality, Donald tRump and Jason Kenney differ more than they do politically: their respective bombast differ largely in degree, but “grab ‘em by the pussy”—typical of tRump’s crudity—is just not something we’d ever imagine Kenney doing. Politically they should be mutually distinctive: Kenney’s been an elected politician since he was 29 years-old—for some 25 years ago— and hasn’t failed to win re-election several times over whereas tRump had no political experience whatsoever until he was pushing 70, served a single term as presidunce of the USA, and has never been re-elected.
Yet they’ve been getting more alike all the time, especially since Kenney entered Alberta provincial politics about a half a year before Covid put every polity on the same playing field, and perhaps never more so alike as when the termini of their respective political careers came into view due to their conspicuously similar pandemic policies. However, their trajectories rather intersect high above a much broader and brooding demise of the partisan right. Here we’re talkin’ K-Boy imitating the Orange One who, in infamous self-absorption, probably couldn’t find Alberta on a labelled map, much less know who its premier is. But, given tRump’s presiduncy was an unmitigated disaster for the USA, it’s a wonder Kenney didn’t immediately seek distance from his malicious mendacity which only worsened the US Covid kill-rate by way of facetious denial, then feckless dismissal, then begrudging foot-dragging. Even K-Boy’s bromantic premier D’ohFo was quick to affect a rhetorical about-face—and reap a much needed popularity boost as a result. Kenney instead hung on, smugly tRump-like, tanking his own popularity, dragging his new party down with him and, just like “The Donald”, ripping it asunder.
Kenney and tRump are tasked with extending a discredited, four-decade, neo-right agenda which, before either became politicians, had begun to recruit increasingly reactionary elements to compensate for the loss of moderate, centre-right voters and the natural attrition of a generally geriatric demographic. Plainly, fomenting schism is the very worst that can happen to any party on the cusp of viability, but that’s what tRump has done to the GOP and K-Boy to the apparently misnamed “United” Conservative Party.
A determined political ignoramus like tRump never knew what a party is for anyway, rather viewing it as a reservoir of voters loyal to his sole, cogent policy of promoting Donald J tRump’s celebrity, not as a source of reasoned and vetted policy. But Kenney ought to know more about parties, having helped to smash a federal ProgCon party and reassemble its cherry-picked factions, and then doing the same to a provincial ProgCon party, this time with himself at the helm. The first impression of tRump is of an egotistical idiot, but nobody would underestimate Kenny’s intelligence—except in this curious aspect.
How much of Kenney’s current straits—and they are almost as dire as tRump’s—can be attributed to the general neo-right circumstance and how much to K-Boy’s puzzling lapses of judgement is what makes Alberta politics so fascinating.
And there’s no better place to keep track than at this excellent site.
And so it doesn’t get much better at flummoxing me, at least, as to why Kenney, water skis and snorkel in tow, seeks to broadcast the great white northern bull shark-jump on his new radio show when, at the same time, the whole world is laughing at tRump’s frustrated attempts to propagate his own bull via various public platforms. How can the K-Boy be so consistently dumb as to, yet again, follow tRump’s example of failure? Alberta had no Charlottesville, but Kenney made “very fine friends” with Soldiers as Odious nonetheless; although not quite as crude as tRump, K-Boy’s persistent Trudeau baiting, ad hominem and false accusations was indeed inspiring to former federal colleague and rookie leader of the CPC to endorse “United We Roll” which featured placards depicting the Prime Minister hung by the neck, dead, over blazons of “Traitor!” and “Treason!” (one of the reasons the CPC failed to beat the Trudeau’s Liberals in the subsequent election); the presidunce’s maudlin threats to leave NATO is affected in minutia by K-Boy’s barely-veiled threats to bail from another strategic alliance (Canadian federation); Kenney’s closely aped tRump’s Covid dismissals and blame-shifting (UCP polling tanked due to his Covid prevarication); although not yet facing his first UCP re-election campaign, a reputation for electoral shenanigans has seamlessly followed Kenney from his CPC days—given time, he may yet plead voter fraud; like the Orange Goo-tan, K-boy does the politics of threat and coercion by way of nominations; finally, Kenney hits the propaganda waves in the padded, soft-ball studios of QRenom. It’s like he doesn’t notice that tRump is despised by the majority of Americans (and near-unanimity of the whole world), and loved only by pathetic chauvinists (that the whole world is laughing at)?
Or is it typical of late-stage neo-rightism to be so preoccupied with getting power by any means that it can’t see the bigger picture required to map a way ahead through a veritable minefield of challenges?
Or maybe Kenney ain’t so smart after all.
It’s just impossible to look away. From a certain perspective, the great province of Alberta has only one direction to go: up! Soon come!
We have the freedom to chose whether or not to listen to his radio shows and also have the freedom to chose whether or not to financially support these radio stations’ sponsors.
Query: how do you know who were the sponsors if you don’t listen to the show?