Braid: Former UCP premier Jason Kenney refutes separatists, says Carney has chance to right wrongs

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberals are back in power. It’s great news for Alberta separatists. Various independence-boosting groups can now continue to farm rage and raise money.

A Conservative victory would have been bad for business. Former premier Jason Kenney took a run at the new Republican Party of Alberta, formerly the Buffalo Party. “One of many cynical fundraising grifts that will seek to monetize people’s frustration,” he said on X .



“These guys have learned from the MAGA industry how to do this. It’s big business in the U.S.

“Don’t be one of their marks,” wrote Kenney, who is now a director of Herald owner Postmedia. Kenney is no friend of Liberal Ottawa. As the first UCP premier, he constantly battled the feds in the courts.

He challenged the carbon tax, Bill C-69, the plastics ban and application of the Emergencies Act, winning as often as he lost. He launched a referendum on reforming equalization that carried but was ignored by Ottawa, despite their constitutional duty to take it seriously. No Alberta premier, including Danielle Smith, has done more to check Ottawa’s powers since Peter Lougheed in the 1980s.

But Kenney draws the line at fomenting support for separating Alberta from Canada. He doesn’t mention Smith, although her stance on that line isn’t quite so clear. “Resentment and anxiety in Alberta are a very real thing,” Kenney said in an interview.

“Alberta and the resource-producing parts of western Canada have totally legitimate grievances about the direction of policy under the Trudeau government, and totally legitimate anxieties about where this will go under Carney. “It’s the job of the provincial government to defend Alberta’s interests in the federation . .

. it’s the job of any premier to raise those issues. “But when it comes to separation, I think the so-called separatist movement in Alberta has never been a serious enterprise.

“It’s always been a fringe movement that I think is counterproductive. “Over about a dozen federal and provincial elections, they have only managed to elect a candidate in one riding. That was Gordon Kessler in 1982, as a Western Canada Concept candidate in a byelection — at the height of the National Energy Program, in the heart of rural Alberta.

” RelatedPremier Danielle Smith calls on PM Mark Carney to 'reset' Ottawa-Alberta relationship'Assembly' will consider West's options, including 'independence-oriented proposals': Manning I was there the night Kessler shocked the country by winning Olds-Didsbury. He was the first and last separatist ever elected outside Quebec. Months later, he lost the seat in a general election.

Western Canada Concept ran candidates in every provincial riding but won only 11.8 per cent of the vote. Today’s separatist movement is nowhere near as organized as it was in those days.

Albertans were even angrier then, to a point that a rally packed 2,500 people into Edmonton’s Jubilee Auditorium, where provincial Liberal leader Nick Taylor’s very life seemed to be at risk. But even that movement went nowhere at the polls and faded away in a few years. Kenney says: “If the Canadian federation is nothing more than a ledger exercise about fiscal transfers, then it doesn’t make a heck of a lot of sense for Alberta.

But a country is so much more than that. “There are deeper, more enduring commitments and shared values, a common history, that for me, are more important than the almighty dollar. I think we lose voice in central Canada if we constantly allow this tail to wag the dog.

“Carney’s got an amazing opportunity to start with a clean slate. “I’m obviously a big conservative. I voted for Pierre Poilievre.

“Carney has said he wants Canada to be an energy superpower, a line borrowed from Stephen Harper. He has said he wants to get oil and gas to global markets and advance major projects — build, build, build. Those things are all music to my ears.

” Preston Manning, the Reform Party founder, has said he believes western Canada will move inexorably to separation if the Liberals won. One of these Alberta conservative veterans is plain wrong. I don’t think it’s Jason Kenney.

Don Braid’s column appears regularly in the Herald X and Bluesky : @DonBraid.