‘I can tell you in our own polling, it was like, shocking. I was even shocked,’ Kenney said
At an Alberta New Democratic Party event in Calgary one early March day, anxious parents and children flanked Premier Rachel Notley as she waxed apocalyptic.
Slashing the corporate tax rate from 12 per cent to eight per cent, giving the province the lowest rate in Canada, became the focal point of the UCP campaign — and, after the official swearing-in on April 30, it will become the focus of Alberta’s new government. When Albertans talk about their economy these days their focus is on getting pipelines built, and Kenney certainly agrees with them on that. But the UCP’s plan for governing is vaulting in its ambition, looking beyond the dominant resource sector towards the long-elusive Albertan grail of economic diversification.
The amount of work already put into the policy side has been prodigious. The UCP released a hundred-page campaign platform, a document that Kenney touted at every stop — “375 positive ideas for Alberta,” is how he described it. The platform will be a roadmap as the government embarks on a frenzied first session of the legislature, but it’s a mere pamphlet compared to the behind-the-scenes tome that is about double the size.
Knight Legg is delighted Kenney went two points further, and thinks it will pay off handsomely for Alberta. The transition team chief told the Post that he and Kenney have already taken more than a dozen calls from CEOs whose interest was piqued by the tax cut in the UCP platform, asking how serious the party is about the proposal and how it will be rolled out.
As he sat on a black couch outside the conference hall, Knight Legg reeled off half a dozen ways that AI could one day make dramatic improvements to government operations. Most of these tech guys at the conference, he said, have never been asked to help solve public policy problems and once they get over their initial suspicion they’re excited by the opportunity.
Kenney was hoping to bring to Alberta some version of former U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron’s “Life Chances” platform, which sought to provide advantages to society’s poorest and most vulnerable people. Although conservatives will tell you they favour equality of opportunity over equality of outcome, Cameron’s conservatism married that idea with the growing scientific consensus about the importance of the first few years of a child’s life.
Kenney realized that all of the problems he was worried about, the ones that have disrupted the social and political order in the U.S. and elsewhere, hadn’t yet arrived in Alberta — but that if the oilsands continued to struggle, it wouldn’t be long before they did. Kenney said he thinks a similar phenomenon occurs in Alberta politics, where the online activists are highly concerned with social issues, while the rest of the province is seized by economic issues.
Kenney said his civil libertarian instincts make him uneasy about the idea of media regulation, but added, “having said that, it’s not a legit media outlet.”
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