Or: Jason Kenny and UCP may never have wanted a successful energy industry
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2021/02/08/opinion/fall-of-jason-kenney
This article was going around quite a bit recently; reading it gave me some unsettling notions about the path that Kenney and the UCP have charted.
Specifically, if you look at his political trajectory and his ‘us versus them’ style of politics… it occurs to me that Kenney may know very well that no ‘War Room’ or report on ‘anti-energy foreign interests’ are going to change anything about our economic situation.
Commodities don’t care if you love them; corporations don’t build and invest if the prices aren’t right.
Fighting a battle that he knows can’t be won with these tactics nonetheless allows him to maintain a ‘them’ to fight against. It keeps the situation dire and allows him to point the blame elsewhere. And anyone who criticizes the plan just doesn’t love Alberta enough.
It might have been a perfect feedback loop to keep a voter base angry and disenfranchised to either win another election or boost a federal run.
But then the pandemic.
This is a non-evidence-based, entirely narrative approach. And just as commodity prices don’t care if you love them, COVID-19 doesn’t care about how you feel regarding lockdowns and masks. Which meant that this choose-your-own reality approach broke down, and changing that style of governing took too long. Which led to a lot of suffering and loss for Albertans caught in the middle of that approach.
I can only hope that our memories are long enough in the next election cycle.
Mehmelblog 