John Ivison: The downfall of Jason Kenney will reverberate beyond Alberta

The tragic Shakespearean hero is generally undone by a character flaw that is responsible for his own destruction. Think: Hamlet’s procrastination, Macbeth’s ambition and Othello’s insecurity.

In Jason Kenney’s case it would be his idiosyncrasies. He is, after Thursday, the former premier of Alberta, in part because he is such an unconventional guy — a professional politician with 25 years frontline experience, who has a profound understanding of policy, and whose career has been on a constant upward trajectory, until his recent downfall.

But he is also someone who is a bit of a loner, a private man who has never married, with a strong Catholic faith, who finds it hard to truly connect with those from more typical backgrounds. Friends say he suffered from the smartest-man-in-the-room syndrome and had a hard time compensating in areas where he had less skill, like caucus management and employing senior staff.

He was one of the strongest federal ministers of his generation, making important reforms to immigration and refugee policy, and deploying Canadian military trainers to Ukraine in 2015.

Yet as premier, his leadership skills were found lacking; he failed to listen or to persuade his own caucus to support the government’s agenda.

In part, that was because of another fatal character flaw for any political leader: integrity.

1. John Ivison: With war in Ukraine at a perilous point, now is not time for Joly to go off-script

2. John Ivison: Surely nothing could go horribly wrong with Trudeau’s hastily cobbled-together dental-care plan

A more conventional politician would have grasped that COVID restrictions and vaccine policies were stoking feelings of hostility — what Kenney has called “populism with a snarl” — and would have milked the malevolence. Kenney did not do so. His critics have portrayed him as an ideologue, but in a province with the largest anti-lockdown cohort in the country — many of whom were his party’s supporters — he attempted to steer a responsible middle course between restrictions and liberty.

Even before COVID, Kenney was struggling to hold together the electoral coalition that he had fused to win a majority government in 2019. As Ted Morton, the province’s former finance minister, noted, Kenney always risked losing moderate Albertans if he moved too fast; but risked the rise of separatist and other groups if he went too slow.

As Kenney put it in an interview with National Post on Wednesday, the pandemic proved to be “a crisis almost purpose-built to divide a coalition like ours,” as he was obliged to introduce restrictions against his own better judgment and the will of many in the governing party.

A radicalization took place among some UCP members that saw Kenney only narrowly win a leadership review last May, with 51.4 per cent of the vote. In his opinion, it was not a mandate to govern, and he decided to step down. “When they gave me the number… my first response was surprise. We thought we were doing much better. But my second response was relief and a sense of pending freedom.”

Kenney was portrayed by sections of his own party as a sellout to Ottawa, despite winning concessions on carbon regulation and COVID relief. “The folks who were angry were not looking for solutions, they were just looking to burn things down, starting with the federation itself. I’m sorry, if I’m not their candidate, not sorry,” said Kenney.

He said his commitment to federalism is unconditional.

“I was trying, consciously and unapologetically, to make a populist appeal to the frustration about Ottawa, but to channel that in a constructive direction.”

He defended his record during the pandemic, saying the per capita fatality rate in Alberta was lower than the Canadian average and that of three other provinces, despite having some of the lightest restrictions in the country. “Was the response perfect? Absolutely not. But, unlike other provinces, we never had to ship an ICU patient out of the province.”

He said the COVID reaction that surprised him most was the emergence of the anti-vaccine movement. “I’m skeptical about elite opinion on a number of questions, which gives me a populist edge. But never about basic medical science,” he said.

The soon-to-be ex-premier said he hopes that as COVID recedes, the UCP can reconstitute as a big-tent coalition under a new leader. “But not if one of the central themes becomes recrimination over COVID policies… or by pursuing de facto separatist policies,” he said, a clear shot at frontrunner Danielle Smith’s Alberta “sovereignty act” proposal, which appears to suggest the province should have the ability to ignore federal legislation. “If the party wants to get re-elected, it should stay in touch with the broader mainstream,” Kenney advised.

At the federal level, he said he was worried about the appeal to more extreme elements by his former intern, Pierre Poilievre, during the Conservative leadership race.

“I’ll be honest, I had some concerns about that…. But I think he (Poilievre) has allayed those concerns since, by being laser-focused on bread-and-butter, kitchen-table issues that the broad Canadian middle class are focused on,” he said.

For all the analogies with tragic heroes, Kenney is not, like Othello, calling on the Fates to roast him in sulphur or wash him in liquid fire because of any regrets.

“I’ve paid my dues, and then some. I have nothing left to prove,” he said.

After he serves out his time as an MLA, he said he wants to take up challenges in the private sector, including writing on public policy issues he is passionate about, including free trade in Canada, immigration policy, foreign policy and Indigenous reconciliation.

The tragedy of Kenney’s downfall is not his alone. The loss of his experience, energy and integrity from public life will be felt across the country. Albertans may be about to discover the truth of Mark Twain’s assertion that honesty in politics shines more there than elsewhere.

jivison@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/IvisonJ

Get the latest from John Ivison straight to your inbox