Don Braid: Jason Kenney refutes Alberta's 'fringe' separatists, says Carney has 'clean slate' with province
Prime Minister Mark Carney's Liberals are back in power. It's great news for Alberta separatists.
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Various independence-boosting groups can now continue to farm rage and raise money. A Conservative victory would have been bad for business.
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Former premier Jason Kenney took a run at the new Republican Party of Alberta, formerly the Buffalo Party.
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'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.
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He challenged the carbon tax, Bill C-69, the plastics ban and application of the Emergencies Act, winning as often as he lost.
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He launched a referendum on reforming equalization that carried but was ignored by Ottawa, despite their constitutional duty to take it seriously.
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No Alberta premier, including Danielle Smith, has done more to check Ottawa's powers since Peter Lougheed in the 1980s.
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'Resentment and anxiety in Alberta are a very real thing,' Kenney said in an interview.
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'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.
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'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.
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'But when it comes to separation, I think the so-called separatist movement in Alberta has never been a serious enterprise.
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'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.'
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