48 Hrs In Alberta Politics

 The last couple of days in Alberta have been interesting ... not good, but interesting.  

It all starts with a bunch of rural UCP MLAs putting out a joint letter complaining loudly about the return to a much stricter set of restrictions to control the spread of COVID-19. 

In public, Kenney tried to paper this over as "legitimate debate", saying that his party supports differences of opinion.  Then there's what happened behind closed doors.  Not only did Kenney threaten to call a snap election in caucus, but he also threatened to boot out MLAs who violated public health orders - a non-subtle reference to the Christmas travel scandal a few months ago. 

All of this paints a very interesting political picture.

First, let's dispense with the utterly silly notion that there is "legitimate debate" over COVID-19. This is utter nonsense. As noted here, regions of Canada that played about with a more limited restrictions are on this roller coaster of viral outbreaks increasing every time we start to "open things up".  Further, we have 3 variants of the original virus rolling about now that are enormously more contagious than the original - and they are rapidly becoming the dominant strains.

The only "legitimate debate" here is how you interpret the data. Further, the letter they published was basically a big whine that said "we complied with all the rules you set out, and now you're changing them - you're breaking a promise!".  It had absolutely no grounding in science, did not recognize the emergence of not one, but 3, variants all of which are considerably more contagious, and generally ignored the fact that even in rural zones, Alberta's case numbers have been climbing since February. 

I get it, the rural MLAs are all looking and saying "well, we have relatively few cases, so we should be allowed to do more".  Except that's like declaring a "no pee zone" in a swimming pool.  They might like to wish that the virus won't visit them, and restrict itself to "the big cities" ... except it won't, and we know it won't.  If they don't think that people from Calgary will come to Strathmore when Calgary's closed down, they're missing the point - controlling a pandemic like this is a matter of _EVERYBODY_ pulling together towards the same goal. Not just some of us.

The only "legitimate" debate I see here is "what do we have to do to get to COVID Zero, and stay there?". Arguments about "but the EcOnOmY" are nothing more than a privileged way of saying "but I wanna have fun too!".  

Politically, this is much more interesting. There are two dominant theories about this letter floating around.  The first is that it is a reflection of an emerging rebellion in the UCP caucus, apparently led by people mostly aligned with the old Wildrose Party.  The second theory is that this is all being orchestrated by the Premier's office for some particular political goal. 

Kenney came along yesterday and started talking about a "regional model" for restrictions to appease the upstarts. This tells us that Kenney is far more concerned about the solidarity of the UCP than he is letting on. His comments in the legislature about "we support debate" are little more than the usual deflection tactics he uses when challenged publicly about anything.

What came out of the caucus meeting yesterday strongly suggests that Kenney is also pissed.  He wouldn't be saying those things unless he was prepared to act on them.  Although 17 MLAs is a significant portion of the UCP caucus, it would still leave Kenney with effective control of the legislature. Calling a snap election is a bit harder to interpret, but it basically boils down to "I have to sign off on your nomination papers ... how do you think that's going to go?".  

Whether this is political theatre or not, we have to recognize that this "caucus revolt" isn't happening in a vacuum.  UCP polling numbers have been plummeting for some time now, and the party stands to lose a lot more than 17 seats if an election were held today.  Every one of Kenney's major policy initiatives has backfired in a very messy way.

Here's my read on this.  This is at least 50% theatrics.  Some of it is a little too coordinated, a bit too "slick" not to have had coordination from within the party apparatus. Kenney's proposing of a "regional" approach to restrictions strikes me more as priming the public for a "stage 2" that opens up rural Alberta much faster than urban.  (This will not end well, IMO).  

More interesting is Kenney's threats to his caucus. We already know that he governs more by threats and coercion than he does by collaboration and developing consensus. On that front, one can suspect that Kenney is deeply worried about having the hastily assembled 'coalition' which brought the UCP into being is on the verge of collapsing. 

Why would Kenney be worried about this? It's unlikely that most of the caucus would leave prior to an election. The short answer here, I suspect, is a bit uglier. Kenney got to where he is with a very well-funded machine behind him. We already know that there was "pay to play" politics going on, where large donations to his campaign orgs were given in exchange for promises of various regulatory or legislative changes being done.

Enough of Kenney's initiatives have backfired now that some of those large $ donors have to be looking at him and saying "nice Premier's Office you got here, be a shame if anything happened to it".  Remember, like tends to end up with like.  We already know Kenney is nasty and coercive, it's not unreasonable to suspect that his backers are similar in temperament. He owes a lot of people a lot of favours, and he has to figure out how to deliver on them, and he can't do that while he's fighting a caucus revolt.