Don’t cry for me, Alberta, I was leaving anyway.
It's Premier Jason Kenney’s swan song message as he prepares to depart the province's top job, forced out by the very United Conservative Party he willed into existence.
The former Calgary member of Parliament dismasted Rachel Notley’s NDP using an audacious blueprint that united two warring conservative factions. Kenney, said Wesley, spelled it out in his maiden speech as UCP leader in 2017 by reminding supporters that “in order to be a compassionate and generous society, you must be a prosperous one first.”
“Government needs to represent the public interest and not a single economic sector to the cost of everything else.” Quebec was an ingrate, fighting pipelines with one hand while accepting Alberta equalization money with the other. A U.S. governor challenging a cross-border pipeline was “brain-dead.” No quarter was given, even in good times. When Trudeau came to Edmonton to announce a joint $10-a-day child-care program, Kenney, from the podium, said the money was recycled provincial funds anyway and Quebec got a better deal.
Kenney’s government was lauded in the first wave of COVID-19, invoking rules and closures to keep gatherings down, hold the illness at bay and keep hospitals operating. Within months, COVID-19 had overwhelmed Alberta’s hospitals so catastrophically that triage rules were imminent and the Armed Forces called in.