Alberta Prime Minister Jason Kenny spoke in response to the results of a May 18 review of the United Conservative Party leadership in Calgary. Dave Chidley / The Canadian Press
It wasn’t long before United Conservative Party volunteers began counting ballots on the floor of the office near the top of the Manulife Place building in Edmonton, and Rick Orman knew the Alberta prime minister would not achieve the desired result.
The piles of “yes” and “no” votes for the review of the leadership of many of the counting tables were virtually indistinguishable from each other. “The dogs were even,” said Mr Orman, a senior official in the province’s ruling party and a former cabinet minister.
“It was quite obvious then.”
In the end, only 51.4% of UCP members expressed confidence in Jason Kenny’s leadership. Party President Cynthia Moore called the count in Calgary on Wednesday night, and “after informing the prime minister of the results, he needed some time to absorb them,” she said.
Mr Kenny, who has led the Canadian Conservative movement for many years, stunned supporters and critics when he announced that evening that he would resign. The Harper-era cabinet minister clung to Alberta’s top political work even in the worst days of the pandemic – and while fractures in his party or his government’s wrongdoing piled up last year.
Economically, in 2022 the province turned and Mr. Kenny hoped that this spring would allow the party to leave behind the division of COVID-19. He and his supporters expected the prime minister to receive at least 60 percent support in the leadership review.
But it didn’t have to be – there wasn’t enough time or space to allow the party to recover in opinion polls or quell the OKP’s open criticism of both its policies and its leadership. This is the result of both the divisions in Alberta’s conservative movement and Mr Kenny’s famous militant, sometimes isolated, political style.
Even his relatives say he too often took his own advice instead of turning to band members or other supporters.
Mr Kenny’s exit from Alberta’s politics will take some time in the coming months after his party elects a new leader.
“One day he swings for the ‘best summer ever’ of freedom fences, and the next day he swings for restrictions blocking fences. Whatever the rationale for any of them, the public has called for a foul, “said Conservative strategist Ken Boesencoll.
“He just swung at the fences all the time.”
Mr Kenny, he said, had tried to advance his agenda while criticizing his opponents, pursuing his priorities “with religious fervor” – and then the pandemic struck.
There is no doubt that the last two or more years have been a difficult period for governance. Supporters of Mr Kenny say his contribution to the province has been overshadowed by the COVID upheavals. He directed the province through a potentially disastrous economic moment – a negative oil price. His government’s corporate tax cuts, fiscal cuts and his constant drumming for big investment in Alberta will pay dividends this year and next.
Anna Kuric, who was Mr Kenny’s chief of staff when he was in the federal cabinet, said responsibility for his administration was heavy and she found him working nights and weekends.
“He will almost feel guilty when he takes a break,” Ms Kuric said. “He’s not good at stopping and resting himself.”
Longtime Conservative organizer Dan Knowlan, who has known Mr Kenny since his early days as an elected MP when the right was divided at the federal level in Canada, said the Alberta prime minister “is one of the strongest conservative voices we probably have. ever seen. “
“It’s just a pity it came to this.”
But the type of conservatism that Kenny maintains does not always become a working place in Alberta. Mr Kenny’s adherence to the campaign’s promises, despite the pandemic, means moving too quickly through difficult and complex coal policies or primary school curricula. His attempts to reach a “fair deal” for Alberta with the federal government through equalization referendums and legal challenges have had mixed results.
His zealous efforts to declare Alberta free of pandemic restrictions will forever be part of his legacy.
“It’s time for the media to stop encouraging fear when it comes to COVID-19 and start actually looking at where we are. With great protection with vaccines, we crushed this third peak, “he said in July 2021, before the cases almost overwhelmed hospitals in Alberta.
On the other hand, there are now those who claim that Mr Kenny was in fact too permissive of his own party dissidents. On Friday, Howard Anglin, Mr Kenny’s former senior aide, told a CBC column that part of the blame lay with the actual conduct of the leadership review or the non-freezing of member lists prior to the leadership review. (This allowed thousands of people who have never been members of the party to have a say in the outcome).
He also said Mr Kenny had not expelled members of the group who openly challenged the pandemic rules or his leadership, and even endorsed Brian Jean’s candidacy for by-elections, despite “Jean’s open declaration of war against him”. .
But the prime minister did so to reassure party members who did not believe he was fighting Ottawa fiercely enough, or did not believe in any of the COVID-19 measures the prime minister was forced to take.
On the other hand, part of Mr. Kenny’s leadership review campaign led him to present himself as a major conservative support against the party’s extreme, anti-vaccine units.
“All I can do for you, frankly, is recommend that you switch to decaffeinated products, spend less time online, go for a walk, breathe fresh air,” Mr. Kenny told someone. who accuses him of allying with the World Economic Forum during a live Facebook page last month.
“There are no black helicopters.”
But much more was happening. Mr Kenny underestimated the strength of rural discontent, even as the province became increasingly urbanized. The UCP leadership race in 2017 fueled mistrust, which continues with the RCMP’s ongoing investigation into behavior during the process. And Mr. Kenny has always promised to rule with ordinary people, and he has ignored that effort in favor of a more traditional top-down structure.
“The United Conservative Party is really united at first glance,” said Gary Keller, a former adviser and chief of staff at the party, which was formed by the merger of the old Progressive Conservative and Wildrose parties. “He didn’t really merge into one.”
These challenges were combined with the fact that Mr Kenny “obviously did not understand him properly all along”, Mr Keller said. The impact of self-induced contradictions should not be underestimated, he added. For example, government officials went on vacation in December 2020, when ordinary citizens were told not to do so.
And then there was dinner at Sky Palace, when Mr. Kenny and several cabinet ministers were photographed having dinner and drinking in the courtyard of a government office, in clear violation of COVID rules.
These mistakes, Mr Keller said, conveyed “rules for you, but not culture for me, among some in the party”.
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