|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Over-dramatizing is an occupational hazard in my line of work, and you’re right, I’m not immune. A lot of the coverage about Jason Kenney’s election, and the situation it puts Justin Trudeau in, might suggest it’s some kind of unprecedented thing. No, it is amply precedented. Precedented in many ways.
At the most general level, prime ministers run into trouble. It’s why we try to make the job hard to get. Lester Pearson cannot have expected that when he implemented a great idea like public pensions, he’d have to deal with a Liberal government in Quebec that wouldn’t want any part of it. Pierre Trudeau didn’t expect terrorist kidnappings, the election of René Lévesque as Quebec premier, a global oil shock, all kinds of stuff that honestly, nobody else would have had an answer for either. Stephen Harper was not expecting his intergovernmental-affairs minister to quit. He didn’t think he’d get up one morning and join Barack Obama to buy a big chunk of General Motors. If you can’t improvise in this job, you shouldn’t have it.
More specifically, Kenney is not exactly an unknown quantity in Canadian politics. He worked in Ottawa for 19 years. Screwed up a few times, had some successes. Just about every opponent he’s ever faced has depicted him as a wild extremist, but in another life he could have served comfortably in the provincial cabinet of any Alberta Conservative premier since Peter Lougheed. His government is more of a reformation than a revolution.
And while Kenney’s opposition to Trudeau’s carbon-tax and rebate mechanism is a challenge for the Prime Minister, it too is multiply precedented. For Trudeau’s first four years as an MP, 2007 to 2011, Alberta had a premier, Ed Stelmach, who was ready to fight any federal government that tried to implement a national carbon-pricing scheme. And Stelmach didn’t much care that the government in question was Stephen Harper’s: He mused at one point about gumming up the federal equalization system (somehow; it wouldn’t have been easier then than now) if forced to accept a cap-and-trade scheme. And Stelmach was a step up from Ralph Klein, who wasn’t always sure climate change wasn’t caused by dinosaur farts.
[…]
See Also:
(1) Frustrated Albertans want to see Jason Kenney get very aggressive, very quickly
(2) P.E.I. voters send (yet another) message to politicians everywhere
(3) The extra carbon taxes the Liberals aren’t talking much about
(4) Headwinds and headaches on the road to Trudeau’s re-election
(6) Public service union staging ‘return to sender’ protest against Trudeau
(7) Massive Bruce Peninsula land claim headed to court
(8) Extremist groups in Alberta detailed in first-of-its-kind report
