Will Jason Kenney cost Erin O’Toole votes beyond Alberta?

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/08/2021 (1476 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

During the 2019 federal election campaign Alberta premier Jason Kenney could be found triumphantly touring Toronto suburbs urging voters to abandon the Trudeau Liberals and get on Andrew Scheer’s bandwagon.

He was in his element having dispatched Rachel Notley’s NDP government to the opposition benches six months earlier. Scheer himself seemed enthralled by Kenney. Other Conservative premiers, including Doug Ford, were happy to have him command the resistance to Trudeau.

It’s hard to believe that was only two years ago because so far Kenney seems to be in hiding for this campaign, even in Alberta, never mind other provinces.

Erin O’Toole was in Edmonton on Saturday but Kenney did not appear with him. This is doubly strange given that Kenney backed O’Toole over front-runner Peter MacKay during the Conservative leadership race and was instrumental in his eventual win.

Justin Trudeau came through Calgary earlier in the week and ripped into Kenney’s pandemic performance but Kenney did not respond.

The official line was that Kenney was on “vacation,” which seems preposterous given that Kenney lives for competitive politics. Besides, a politician can be anywhere in the world these days and quickly respond to whatever is happening at home. Brian Pallister, premier of Manitoba, became so adept at that he would spend up to eight weeks a year at his Costa Rica retreat.

But then he’s not so popular these days either. According to recent opinion polls Kenney and Pallister have the lowest approval ratings of all the premiers.

Pity poor O’Toole, who needs all the votes he can get in the Prairie provinces but is having to tiptoe around the two most unpopular premiers in the country; conservative premiers who should be bolstering not detracting from his credibility. He’s not getting much help from Doug Ford either.

There are other reasons O’Toole will likely not campaign much in Alberta. Conservatives here have split into so many factions it’s hard to keep up. There’s the Maverick Party, which seeks independence for the West if it doesn’t get a better deal from Ottawa. There’s Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada. And now Derek Sloan, the Ontario Conservative MP who was kicked out of the caucus because he accepted a donation from a neo-Nazi, is running as independent in a riding northwest of Calgary that includes Banff. He also intends to stake out another right-wing party.

And the day before O’Toole arrived last weekend, the Conservative constituency association in the Fort McMurray region publicly rebuked the party for parachuting in a UCP MLA as its candidate after the sitting MP unexpectedly resigned.

It’s a sure bet that most Conservative MPs here will not be campaigning on O’Toole’s change of mind when it comes to carbon taxes. After all, Kenney and Doug Ford campaigned long and hard against Trudeau’s carbon tax and now O’Toole is promising his own version. Kenney has yet to publicly respond to that flip-flop.

And Kenney can’t be too pleased with the part of the Conservative platform that promotes electric vehicles given that he recently went to great lengths to defend gas guzzling pickup trucks.

And there is yet another reason Kenney may be in hiding.

COVID-19 is still on the rampage, despite Kenney’s brag to Justin Trudeau in early July that Albertans were “crushing COVID” and ready to celebrate at the Calgary Stampede. Daily case counts are now higher than Ontario’s, which has three times Alberta’s population.

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Trudeau left town before the Stampede got underway but O’Toole joined the party and flipped pancakes for the crowds, just like Kenney. That is not a good look for him as he tries to project a serious take on combating the pandemic. And surely O’Toole can’t publicly support Kenney’s plan to cut nurses wages. Who wants to be seen with a premier who does that during a pandemic?

Kenney will cost the Conservatives some votes in Alberta although not likely enough to shake their dominance.

But the real danger for the Conservatives is that Kenney’s disastrous crash as premier will stick with voters in other parts of the country.

Seeking and getting national attention can cut both ways.

Gillian Steward is a Calgary-based writer and freelance contributing columnist for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @GillianSteward