Busted in June 2021 by a mystery photographer as he boozed it up with a group of cronies in defiance of COVID-19 restrictions on a government building’s controversial rooftop patio in Edmonton, premier Jason Kenney announced his fatuous anti-equalization “referendum” at a news conference a week later in hopes of saving his foundering political career.
As we all know now, his sad bid to turn the page on the notorious Sky Palace pandemic patio party didn’t work.
At the June 7 news conference, Mr. Kenney touted the referendum as a way for Albertans to “finally get a chance to tell the federal government that they’ve had enough of the unfair equalization program.” For some reason, he forgot to mention he was part of the Conservative federal cabinet that cooked up and passed the equalization formula he was complaining about.
Constitutional experts at the time rated the scheme as having zero chance of effecting constitutional change. They were right, as experts so often are.
Mr. Kenney’s political career continued to circle the drain.
Originally conceived as a way to motivate low-information Conservative voters to turn up for the October 2021 municipal election and vote against Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi, that didn’t really work either. Mr. Nenshi decided not to seek a fourth term and another progressive politician, Jyoti Gondek, was elected instead to the abiding fury of the Conservative commentariat.
Mr. Nenshi is now the leader of the Alberta New Democrats.
Alas for Mr. Kenney, despite his efforts to spin the 62-per-cent yes vote as the biggest victory in the history of bigness, the low-turnout referendum has gone down in history as dishonestly worded and constitutionally meaningless.
Nevertheless, in a reassuring proof there is intelligent life on the Great Plains, a majority of voters in Alberta’s capital city, Edmonton, voted no to the premier’s lame stunt.
The judgment of history has now been confirmed.
University of Alberta political scientist Jared Wesley and PhD candidate Gala Palavicini reminded tout le monde political Alberta on Monday that the clock had run out on the notion you could change the Canadian constitution by passing a dubious referendum on a municipal voting day.
This was a good thing, because tout le monde political Alberta had forgotten all about it – just as Alberta has pretty well forgotten about Mr. Kenney.
“Three years have passed since Jason Kenney’s government held a referendum on removing the equalization principle from the Constitution Act,” the pair wrote in The Globe and Mail. “The ‘yes’ side won, and the subsequent motion in the Alberta Legislature on Nov. 18, 2021, officially started the clock, creating a three-year window to make a formal constitutional amendment.”
That window has now quietly been closed. Nothing ever came of it. Mr. Kenney’s silly constitutional gambit, like Mr. Kenney’s career in Alberta politics, is over.
The matter may now be as dead as the proverbial mackerel, but thanks to Mr. Kenney’s self-interested effort to exploit the separatist sentiments of a faction of the UCP base, the very people who eventually kicked him to the curb are now running the province to the detriment of all.
Mr. Kenny, who rode triumphantly into Alberta behind the wheel of a blue Dodge Ram, a hero to the province’s Conservatives who had been thrown into despair by a single-term NDP government, turned out to be seriously overrated.
Credit where credit is due – he engineered the double reverse hostile takeover of the Progressive Conservative Party by the Wildrose Party and the United Conservative Party emerged.
Mind you, the PCs were so depressed by their 2015 election loss they were practically begging for political assistance in disappearing (PAID).
In office, though, Mr. Kenney was all performance and little substance. He couldn’t cope with the COVID emergency. He couldn’t even outmanoeuvre what should have been an easy-to-squash rebellion by a small group of “lunatics,” as he described them.
Their candidate, conspiracy theorist, quack COVID cure enthusiast, and separatism-inclined Danielle Smith, is now his replacement as UCP premier.
Thanks, Kenney!
I wonder if Kenney is in a dark room, having a glass of wine or more and listening to Peggy Lee sadly sing Is That All There Is, to commemorate the political expiration of his equalization distraction?
If that thought is not depressing enough, let’s think about what has now come after Kenney, who desperately tried to be and appear to be a serious politician. We now have Alberta Firsters who don’t even bother with referendums or Kenney’s carefully managed but at least public consultations and just pass laws to expand their powers at the expense of everyone else.
Well perhaps the UCP has at least figured out high profile symbolic referendums don’t work other than to soon hilight the ineffectiveness of their sponsors. Smith is more clever in how she goes about appearance over substance.
I have to wonder about the somewhat related sad apparent end to Kenney’s once promising political career, which came to Alberta to die. Is that all there is for him?
Unlike Harper, he is not now being enticed with a seemingly prestigious appointment to run a large provincial financial organization. So perhaps for Kenney, that’s all there is.
So perhaps for Kenney, that’s all there is.
Let’s hope so. This is one instance in which Schadenfreude incurs no moral penalty.
I am old and on my way out so all this is very entertaining. Enjoy your shithole, suckers.
From one horrific mess to another. These phony Conservatives and Reformers took the outstanding oil and corporate tax rates of Peter Lougheed, and robbed us of them, and did the most priciest shenanigans, which cost us around $1 trillion. Then they have to lie and say that Alberta gave the money to the other provinces, or to Ottawa. Easy to fool people were misled by this, and Ralph Klein started that lie. Here is how people are easily fooled, and they end up paying for it.
https://edmonton.ctvnews.ca/scammers-have-stolen-more-than-37m-in-edmonton-this-year-here-s-how-1.7115898
2 years and 7 months until Ditzy Dani can be punted & then forgotten. Or add 1 year if she ignores her own fixed election date law.
This little ditty from Max Fawcett for the information of those who still believe the UCP is god’s gift to Alberta now and into the future: In Alberta, Danielle Smith’s UCP spent $71.2 billion in its most recent budget, or 20 per cent more than predecessor Jason Kenney did before he left office in 2022. And when it comes to the previous NDP government that was routinely criticized by Smith and other Conservatives for failing to balance the budget, the contrast is even more striking. As the CBC’s Jason Markusoff noted earlier this year, “Smith hiked provincial spending in two years by more than the Notley government did in four years, between her final $56.2-billion budget in 2018 and the last one by the PCs. It’s a similar story in Saskatchewan, where the province’s debt has nearly tripled to $21.1 billion since 2015 under the Saskatchewan Party government. Even the Canadian Taxpayers Federation’s Gage Haubrich argued in a recent op-ed, “since becoming premier in 2018, Moe has balanced exactly one provincial budget. And that one balanced budget wasn’t the result of some newfound financial genius or a reduction in spending, but rather a huge increase in resource prices that drove provincial revenues to record-highs.”
It should never be forgotten that Danielle Smith and her fellow travellers are Jason Kenney’s legacy to us all.
The lasting memory I have of
Kenney is when he “officially” went and stood in line to pay respects to his beloved Queen, and no one, on either side of the pond gave a single damn he was there.
It’s a pleasure to retro muse Kenney. It’s rife with opportunity for lambasting once again the odious little bottom feeder’s use of the reformers’ ‘Watch Me Do My Self Serving Sleight of Hand’ playbook. Too stupid to ever become a seasoned politician. Too greedy to give a damn that people are sorely affected, even die, by their conniving decisions. Good riddance. When they’re this crooked and sleazy, the sarcasm writes itself into their epitaph. However, your skill is well noted. I’m certain this subtlety: ‘political assistance in disappearing (PAID)’ must be original. Thanks for the poignant reminiscence of his demise.
Thank you, Chance. I think of stuff like PAID, because I like to watch. DJC
So Dani spends 10s of our millions on Mehmet Oz’s family scam “Tylenot”. What’s the chance she meets him in Washington? What’s the over under on our intrepid reporters actually putting the story together? Really? Jeepers! We deserve every reaming they give us!
Well, in a couple months “Dr Oz” will be in charge of US Medicare (for seniors) and Medicaid (for low- income Americans). Maybe he’ll send out pallets full of “Tylenot” for Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries.