Laying It Out: What could be worse than Jason Kenney?

By Scott Schmidt on May 21, 2022.

Whether he is leaving for good, and despite staying on as premier until a new boss is chosen, it seems safe to say a majority of Albertans approved of Jason Kenney’s decision to step down as leader of the United Conservatives.

He may have received 51.4% support in his members-only leadership review, but polling for Kenney has been on the decline pretty much since he was sworn in, and in the most recent stages of the pandemic, he’s consistently shown to be the least popular premier in the country — by a long shot.

Even in rural Alberta, where he garnered his most passionate support in the lead-up to the 2019 election, it seems Kenney has fallen out of favour for many. But while Albertans now seem even more united in dislike for Kenney than they were in giving his party 55% of the vote in 2019, the similarities for why will no doubt end at, “He did a bad job.”

And considering names of the vultures already circling the wagon, jockeying for position to be Kenney’s replacement, Albertans should be concerned.

From Brian Jean, to Danielle Smith, to local MLA Drew Barnes and his independent sidekick Todd Loewen, to all those in the UCP caucus who have openly called for Kenney to quit, they all have one thing in common. They all think he handled the pandemic poorly — not because thousands of Albertans died and his government’s policies only added to the tally, but because he did something (half-assed or not) to handle it at all. And of the 16,660 UCP members who just voted for Kenney to step down, how many do we really think did so because he lifted restrictions too early, too often?

Unfortunately, the bulk of those who pushed for an end to his UCP leadership assuredly did so because he did too much in the face of the pandemic — mask mandates, vaccine passports, limited gatherings, etc.

Kenney isn’t being punished because 4,500 Albertans are dead after two years of the province responding too late and lifting restrictions too early. He’s being punished for responding too harshly and not lifting restrictions fast enough. And the people pushing him out for it are not only choosing who the next leader is, they’re choosing from a pool of themselves.

Smith, for example, announced Thursday her intention to run for the job, and had she been in charge when COVID got here she’d have told us all to take hydroxychloroquine and be done with it. Barnes and Loewen, who will no doubt be seeking to have their caucus exiles ended, have been singing the same anti-response tune over COVID for so long, it’s a wonder they don’t have an accompanist on piano.

With Jason Kenney at the helm, the UCP battled doctors, nurses and educators. They gave billions to corporations, which then gave it to shareholders. They’re ushering in curriculum with near universal opposition after being proven to have been lazy, plagiaristic and downright inaccurate during its development. They invested in a pipeline anyone with a pulse could have known wouldn’t be finished. They wrote laws to limit opposition and protest. They walked back LGBTQ2S+ rights in schools, took cost-of-living increases away from AISH patients and moved to gamble public pensions on a higher-risk, lower-performance investment strategy. They’ve downloaded costs onto municipalities and taken local governing rights away, they’ve written laws to make room for their bad-faith practices while launching full-scale attacks on those they negotiate with, and they’ve picked fights around Canada and the world to such a degree, almost no other jurisdiction on Earth takes them seriously. They take on guaranteed losses in court in order to win cheap political points at home. They launch panels and reviews to either tell them what they want to hear, or fail to show us what they want us to see. And they turned our post-secondary schools into labourer factories.

Oh yeah… and they started that ridiculous, wasteful butt-of-the-joke war room.

But of all the caucus and party members, or failed politicians who are now showing him the door, how many took issue with any of the UCP’s harmful policy decisions on this list? None, and that’s the scary point.

It’s not like I was the only Albertan crying foul over UCP policy direction, as each bad decision has been met with widespread pushback. And it’s not like I was the only Albertan suggesting UCP policy choices during the pandemic led to preventable deaths, as everyone remembers, if nothing else, the #BestSummerEver.

But it should never be forgotten that each and every person trying to oust Kenney from the top job would have done everything he has done exactly the same way, just minus his already abysmal approach to curbing the spread of a deadly virus. Of all the things Kenney has done or pushed since coming to Alberta, the fact his exit would boil down to a pandemic reaction being too restricting, is terrifying.

The world may have decided to move on from COVID, even as 60-70 Albertans still die every week (about the number of an entire flu season in our pre-pandemic lives), but it is still here and it is still threatening lives. In May alone, Medicine Hat has had five LTC facilities, the remand centre and now the hospital appear on AHS’s outbreak list.

Since lifting all health measures on March 1, 540 more Albertans have died from COVID. And this is the reality of a province where the premier is being sent packing for doing too much to slow it down.

If we replace him with one who has the exact same plans for austerity, corporate giveaways and privatization, coupled with even more resolve for ignoring COVID, the only thing we gain as a province is an answer to this question:

What could be worse than Jason Kenney?

Scott Schmidt is the layout editor for the Medicine Hat News. He can be reached by email at sschmidt@medicinehatnews.com

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