Laying It Out: Unity like this was never going to last

By Medicine Hat News Opinion on May 15, 2021.

Medicine Hat News

The formality of kicking two MLAs out of caucus simply makes official what all of Alberta has known for some time. There is nothing united about the United Conservative Party.

When Todd Loewen resigned his position as caucus chair and asked Jason Kenney to resign his as premier, the news of dissent came weeks after the Central Peace-Notley MLA was one of 17 to publicly oppose newly imposed health orders. Reports since suggested the premier can’t even be in the same room with that group, nor they him, and that — not rising COVID cases — is what led to a legislature suspension of three weeks (and counting).

Clearly, no one needed to leave the party for Albertans to know at least a third of Kenney’s caucus doesn’t like him, and he doesn’t like them back.

As for Cypress-Medicine Hat MLA Drew Barnes, his disgruntled behaviour has been a problem for the UCP for a while. Barnes long ago made it clear that anything less than a Wildrose Party platform would threaten his loyalty under the merger with the Progressive Conservatives.

People may forget now, but Barnes jumped on board with Kenney right away and vehemently endorsed him for leadership. But there is little doubt their relationship strained once Kenney realized Albertans are a lot less into individualism when it means losing their stuff AND risking disease, and once Barnes realized the boss would start to let that affect his actions.

What I always found interesting is had Barnes beat Brian Jean for the Wildrose leadership in 2015, Barnes would have been the kamikaze campaign victim — not Jean — and Barnes would be right where Jean is now. Out of politics.

That always made me feel like Kenney might be using Barnes for his endorsement in an area of the province where the budding premier sought unconditional support. Barnes was an established and popular MLA who’d yet to expose himself as an anti-science spectacle who thinks COVID is a crisis that should only be battled with doses of strong and free.

But as adamant as both men were when campaign eyes were on them, I never really bought a friendship and it didn’t take long to see potential strain on their so-called unity. And so, while we are all now acutely aware of the caucus divide — and also that at the end of the day the UCP is still Kenney’s group — the removal of dissenting MLAs does nothing more than lift the thinly-veiled smokescreen of a unity that was never really there.

The merger of the Wildrose and PCs had nothing to do with what Albertans want in a government aside from a desire to defeat the NDP. That desire was so strong that a large number of voters were willing to ignore the fact the result would be party-wide implementation of policies they had resoundingly rejected in 2012 when they gave Alison Redford a record majority in response to Danielle Smith’s Wildrose.

That’s why it was so obvious so early that Albertans wouldn’t actually like the United Conservatives once they were in government, and precisely why Kenney’s poll numbers have done nothing but fall since day one on the job.

This is exactly what a Wildrose government would have looked like, and when Albertans aren’t focused on thinking the very centrist NDP is a socialist “kudatah” of some kind, a strong majority knows they didn’t want this.

But there’s a big difference between implementing policies that are bad for people when people think “staggering debt” is their worst problem, and when you’re the face of a government still doing it when “dying of disease” rolls around. That pressure is why Kenney spent a year in a consequence-filled attempt at balancing the health needs of Albertans with the demands of the ideology, and it’s why a significant chunk of his caucus turned on him.

In general, it seems the UCP has two groups. One is loyal to Kenney no matter what, and will implement or retract his ideology as he commands. The other is loyal to the ideology no matter what, and will judge the premier only on his ability to stick with it.

Barnes and Loewen are (or were) in the latter, and on the surface it might even seem like admirable resolve. In southeast Alberta, it could result in soaring popularity since Barnes is left to do the only thing he’s known, which is oppose the government at every turn.

But before you attach your wagon to whatever Barnes does next, remember the failures of the UCP stem from his ideology, and that his disappointment in Kenney has come only when the premier abandons it. And remember that during this pandemic, the only times Kenney has even sidestepped the ideology is when health officials tell him he has to or a lot of people will die.

Kenney has blown the pandemic response in oh so many ways and his half measures only worked at pissing people off, but we might prefer it to Barnes, whose YouTube PhD in PCR testing says the best response is none.

It can be fun to be part of a crusade against the government, I’m sure, and Barnes and Loewen will no doubt have their fans through all this. But just because they stand in opposition of a bad premier doesn’t mean they do it for the right reasons.

And we need to remember that they stayed loyal to this bad premier right up until he tried to save lives.