All posts in Jason Kenney

The trouble with A-Bombs: if the blast doesn’t get you, the fallout just might

by David Climenhaga on June 21, 2012 in Alison Redford, Danielle Smith, Fred Horne, Jason Kenney, Mike Harris, Preston Manning, Rob Anderson, Stephen Harper, Thomas Lukaszuk with No comments
A typical Canadian reads the news from the Ottawa Press Gallery while Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney sends another email in the background. Below: Wildrose Party House Leader Rob Anderson; former federal PC leaders Joe Clark and Peter MacKay discuss the interesting pod marked “Return to Preston Manning” they found outside a party meeting in 2002.

Dodging political fallout from his much publicized “A-Bomb” attack on Alberta’s deputy premier, Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney was trying to persuade his credulous compatriots yesterday the relationship between Alberta’s many Conservative MPs and its similarly numerous Progressive Conservative MLAs is “phenomenally positive.”

Good one!

This just ain’t so, as everyone understands who is in the loop – a group that is quite large, although apparently not so big it includes the crème de la crème of the national media in Ottawa.

For this reason, we shouldn’t be astonished by scuttlebutt that several of the grandees of the Parliamentary Press Gallery for several days sat on Mr. Kenney’s A-Bomb email expressing his frank opinion of Deputy Premier Thomas Lukaszuk while they debated whether or not he had actually intended to click “reply-all.”

Our national media doesn’t do a very good job of explaining the various parts of this country to one another, and from the perspective of some members of the Ottawa press gallery, this may not have seemed like such a big deal. Others, of course, are in on the conspiracy.

But – trust me, people – the deep and growing gulf between Premier Alison Redford’s PCs and Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party is a big deal – big enough, at any rate, to have some implications for the rest of the country.

Airdrie-Chestermere MLA Rob Anderson, House leader of the rightward-tilting Wildrose Party, summed up reality most succinctly yesterday: “It’s clear that there aren’t great relations between Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s team and Premier Redford’s team,” he told the Edmonton Journal.

From Mr. Anderson’s perspective, this is knock on the Redford PCs. After all, from the Wildrose point of view, Mr. Harper’s grim ideological puritans have it right, and Ms. Redford’s idea that you can put a human face on capitalism is a shocking heresy.

But whether or not we accept the Wildrose viewpoint, Mr. Anderson called it bang on when he advised the Journal: “There are very, very few federal MPs that are supportive of the provincial Tories. … The vast majority are supportive of the Wildrose.”

Indeed, he accurately stated, “the provincial wing of the federal Conservative Party is the Wildrose, there is no doubt.”

Maybe it wasn’t wise of him to admit that the Wildrose Party is nothing more than a branch office of the federal Conservatives – increasingly dominated, as the federal branch is, by Mike Harris loyalists and other dead-enders from Ontario. After all, aren’t Albertans supposed to have a maverick streak of Western independent-mindedness?

But it is reality. Indeed, as was said in this space during the recent Alberta provincial election campaign, the Harper Government’s open support for the Wildrose Party was the elephant in the room. “A case can be made that at the strategic and technical levels, the federal and provincial neo-Con parties are virtually interchangeable,” I wrote on March 21. “This is a big change from the not-so-distant past when it was Alberta Conservatives at the provincial and federal levels who were essentially the same people.”

Mr. Harper’s party lent seasoned campaign staff and expertise to Wildrose Leader Danielle Smith and contributed candidates and workers from the ranks of federal Tory MPs’ staffs. Tory MPs endorsed individual Wildrose candidates and, in the closing days of the campaign when a Wildrose victory really seemed possible, Mr. Harper let loose his Alberta caucus to campaign openly on behalf of Ms. Smith’s party.

It is said here that this means we will increasingly see divergent approaches on many issues taken by the Redford Tories and the Harper Neo-Cons.

For example, beholden as they are to the Lake of Fire set, I doubt you ever would have seen the A typical Canadian reads the news from the Ottawa Press Gallery while Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney sends another email in the background. Below: Wildrose Party Deputy Leader Rob Anderson; former federal PC leaders Joe Clark and Peter MacKay discuss the interesting pod marked “Return to Preston Manning” they found outside a party meeting in 2002.Wildrose Party or their Harper Tory head office admitting, as Ms. Redford’s health minister did this week, that it was “derogatory and insulting” for Alberta Health to classify homosexuality as a mental illness in the province’s health care billing code. The code was changed at the end of last month, Fred Horne told the Whitecourt Star.

You can expect increasingly divergent positions on a variety of other funding and policy questions where in the past the Alberta Tories would have played ball – to the prime minister’s great distress. Indeed, they may even no longer be singing from the same hymnbook on pipeline development!

The upcoming nomination fight in the federal riding of Calgary Centre may also become the scene of a rumble between Redford and Harper Conservatives.

During the Alberta election campaign, Mr. Harper’s strategists clearly hoped to engineer a reverse takeover of the big-tent Alberta Tories, just as the far-right Reform Party under Preston Manning used the mechanism of the Canadian Alliance to colonize and destroy the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada during the Invasion of the Party Snatchers in 2003.

That they failed means Ms. Redford is likely to be premier until well after the next federal election, and with Mr. Kenney’s help the elephant in the room has undeniably materialized – large, betusked, red eyes glaring with hostility and quite possibly of a mind to stand by while a few more federal non-Conservatives are elected in Alberta.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Alberta Silly Season starts with fallout from Jason Kenney’s A-Bomb blast

by David Climenhaga on June 20, 2012 in Alison Redford, Blaine Calkins, Candice Malcolm, Danielle Smith, Ezra Levant, Graham Thomson, Jason Kenney, Peggy Anderson, Stephen Harper, Thomas Lukaszuk, Thomas Mulcair with 7 Comments
Federal Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, centre, with Public Safety Minister Victor Toews, left, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper, right, get ready to assure members of their party’s Alberta caucus they’ll be protected from a*****e visitors from their home province. Actual federal Tory ministers may not appear exactly as illustrated. Below: The real Mr. Kenney, sort of, Thomas Lukaszuk and MP Blaine Calkins.

Here in Alberta, summer Silly Season arrived a few hours early with the revelation moments past midnight yesterday that federal Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney had dropped the A-Bomb on Thomas Lukaszuk, the province’s deputy premier.

“The A-Bomb,” of course, is a prissy euphemism for a seven-letter word beginning with A and ending with E that aptly describes the attitude of those federal Conservatives like Mr. Kenney who are working hard to bring the level of political discourse in Canada to historic new lows.

So “A-Bomb” is just the sort of squeamish circumlocution you’d expect from a fastidious old-timer who would try to “censor” Sun News Network commentator Ezra Levant’s foul-mouthed on-air eruptions or take exception to Mr. Kenney’s charmlessly frank assessment of Mr. Lukaszuk.

But there you go. Your blogger will now try to be up-to-date and in tune with the new neo-Conned Canada of Prime Minister Stephen Harper and tell readers exactly what was said by Mr. Kenney, who in addition to fulfilling the dual roles of Canada’s Chief Censor and Commissar of Ideological Purity is at 44 the country’s only known self-proclaimed 40-Year-Old Virgin.

To wit, apparently misunderstanding the purpose of the “reply all” button on his computer’s email application, Mr. Kenney sent to all the world the information that he thinks Mr. Lukaszuk is “a complete and utter asshole.”

According to Edmonton Journal political columnist Graham Thomson, who owns the scoop, Mr. Kenney was explaining in the email to the office of Wetaskawin MP Blaine Calkins, chairperson of the federal Conservatives’ Alberta caucus, why the distinguished federal minister wasn’t about to break bread with Mr. Lukaszuk when he visited Ottawa as part of Alberta Premier Alison Redford’s ongoing charm offensive.

This is a pity, because Mr. Lukaszuk had a short meeting with Opposition Leader Thomas Mulcair during the New Democrat’s recent bitumen sands tour, after which he claimed after not to have been impressed with the NDP leader’s observations. Lunch with Mr. Kenney could have given him some Conservative intellectual firepower to compare and contrast with Mr. Mulcair’s. Plus, unlike his visit with Mr. Mulcair, they could have guiltlessly gone Dutch.

But Mr. Kenney’s response, sent to everyone in the Tories’ leaky federal caucus and all of their assistants, read: “I say a definite ‘no’ to Lukaszyk. (sic) I don’t think it makes sense to create a precedent to do a special caucus meeting for every visiting minister from the provincial government. Plus he is a complete and utter asshole.”

Now, I have met and interviewed both Mr. Lukaszuk and Mr. Kenney over the years and I can assure readers that Mr. Lukaszuk is not what Mr. Kenney described him to be. Indeed, the deputy premier’s measured and diplomatic response to the revelation illustrates this.

On a more serious level, though, Mr. Kenney’s unexpectedly public ejaculation and his perfunctory apology late yesterday illustrates just how deep and broad the rift has become between Prime Minister Harper’s Tea Party of Canada and Ms. Redford’s Alberta Progressive Conservatives.

Indeed, Mr. Kenney’s tepid apology came only after a full day of unexpected political fallout from his outburst, and, by the sound of it, a talking-to from the prime minister.

Not to put too fine a point on it, the Harperites despise Ms. Redford and her supporters – all the more so because of their embarrassing failure to push the neo-Con Wildrose Party under former Fraser Institute apparatchik Danielle Smith into power in the April 23 Alberta election.

Blogger Dave Cournoyer reminds us of Mr. Kenney’s connections to the Wildrose campaign. Mr. Kenney’s former spokesperson, Candice Malcolm, returned to Alberta to work for the Wildrose Party during the campaign. In addition, his Regional Affairs Director is Peggy Anderson, who was allied with Ms. Smith on the dysfunctional Calgary Board of Education from 1998 before then learning minister Lyle Oberg dissolved it in 1999.

Clearly, with Mr. Kenney firmly entrenched on the banks of the Rideau thanks to the inattentive voters of Calgary-Southeast, where he is actively working against Ms. Redford, the ambitious Alberta premier will need her Ottawa lobbying office to “advocate Alberta’s perspective on important federal and provincial matters,” as it was put in her government’s Throne Speech on May 24.

The fact a Conservative provincial government feels the need to create and staff an “ambassadorial” office in the Alberta-Tory-packed national capital brightly illuminates just what a bad job this province’s wall-to-wall Conservative MPs do for the Albertans they are elected to represent.

Alberta’s premier will no doubt breathe a private sigh of relief when Mr. Harper no longer heads the government of Canada, although she may leave the lobbying office in place for a spell to ensure better relations with whatever party replaces Mr. Harper’s potty-mouthed ideological puritans.

Indeed, Ms. Redford may then even give some thought to going to Ottawa herself – though not necessarily as the head of a mere lobbying group. Remember where you heard that first.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Sun News Network’s vulgar response reveals CBSC as toothless, demonstrates need for meaningful rules

by David Climenhaga on June 19, 2012 in Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, CRTC, Ezra Levant, Jason Kenney, Kory Teneycke, Lawrence Martin, Pierre Karl Péladeau, Stephen Harper, Sun News Network with 3 Comments
This Sun News Network truck has now moved on, obviously the result of your blogger’s bullying. Below: Ezra Levant assails the CSBC. Below that: Ezra Levant comments on the passing of NDP leader Jack Layton. Below that: Well, actually, it’s pretty hard to go any lower than that.

Radio and television network owners join groups like the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council to inoculate themselves against the possibility of actual regulation being enforced in the interests of Canadians, who own the airwaves from which these companies generate such handsome profits.

So the response by Sun News Network and its on-air commentator Ezra Levant to a ruling of the CBSC on June 13 censuring them for using on the air a Spanish profanity universally understood to mean “f**k your mother,” and for clearly identifying the individual at whom he directed this and other insults, is illuminating.

It is said here that Mr. Levant’s disrespectful response to the CBSC ruling, which was broadcast by Sun News Network the same day and which gleefully repeated the offensive phrase, clearly illustrates the confidence Canadian businesses generally have in their freedom from any regulation or enforcement by the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper in Ottawa.

Moreover, it is said here that the Sun TV commentator’s vulgar response – which it is difficult to conclude did not have the full support and approval of the Sun News Network – indicates the absolute freedom this right-wing broadcasting network enjoys from the rules that apply to others, and indeed from normal standards of discourse and decency, as a result of its close connection with and support for Prime Minister Harper and his government.

It is a short and clear line, after all, that connects Mr. Harper to Sun News Network and its potty-mouthed commentator, who is well known for over-the-top commentary and grandstanding on the air and in print.

Kory Teneycke, once Mr. Harper’s spokesperson, later became “the point man for Quebecor’s Pierre Karl Péladeau in his effort to create a right-wing television network modelled along the lines of Fox News,” the Globe and Mail’s Lawrence Martin wrote in 2010. Today, of course, Quebecor is the parent company of both Sun News Network and the Sun Media national newspaper chain.

“The new network is a high priority for Mr. Harper, for whom controlling the message has always been – witness his government vetting program – of paramount importance,” Mr. Martin explained.

As for Mr. Levant, he is well known as a supporter of Mr. Harper’s Conservative Party. In 2002, he gave up the predecessor Canadian Alliance party’s nomination in the Calgary Southwest riding so that our esteemed prime minister could have a comfortable political home.

The June 13 ruling published by the CBSC’s four-member panel found the obscenity spoken on-air by Mr. Levant was a violation of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters’ Code of Ethics. Accordingly, under the rules it had agreed to as part of the voluntary organization, Sun News Network was required to read a statement on the air, twice, acknowledging that it had broken the organization’s rules.

Now, this may not seem like much of a punishment for Mr. Levant’s offensive commentary, but that after all is the point of organizations like the CBSC – to shield their members from the threat of meaningful enforcement of even minimum standards.

Nonetheless, this was apparently too much for Prime Minister Harper’s favourite network – whose commentator’s re-use of obscenity and open contempt for this industry self-regulation group was favourably touted in print and on-line stories by Sun Media’s newspaper division, complete with links to a recording of the broadcast.

This blog came in for particular vituperation on Mr. Levant’s program because it was acknowledged in this space that your blogger filed one of the 22 complaints received by the CBSC. This in turn was followed by a flurry of insults on various social media by some of Mr. Levant’s on-line supporters.

The substance of Mr. Levant’s broadside seemed in part to be that by accepting the CBSC’s invitation to make an on-line complaint about on-air behaviour and language I believed was inappropriate, I was a snitch and was attempting to “censor” Mr. Levant’s opinions, which no matter how ridiculous he has a right to express.

In addition – in a kind of backhanded compliment to the influence of this tiny, imperfect blog – Mr. Levant is accusing your 60-year-old blogger of being a bully. Readers are reminded that the person making this assertion is a political associate of our prime minister, well connected to the governing party and the star of a national TV program on which he is apparently able to toss insults and obscenities at people with whom he takes issue without restraint.

It should also be noted here that the complaint process used by the CBSC, as one might expect from an organization run voluntarily by broadcasters themselves, seems designed to discourage complaints. Certainly my first communications were deflected because they made reference to an on-line video, not an actual over-the-airwaves broadcast. I was subsequently asked if I was sure I wanted to make a formal complaint, and given every opportunity not to do so.

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, by the way, the federal agency that should deal with complaints and enforcement of this type, will not do so, referring complaints instead to the CBSC.

While I have formally complained again to the CBSC about Mr. Levant’s June 13 commentary and I am sure other Canadians will do so too, it is abundantly clear the organization is toothless and its sanctions meaningless – even if, as is clearly not the case with the well-connected Sun News Network, its member broadcasters make an effort to play along.

Which brings us to the point of this post. If we are going to have civil standards of discourse on the airwaves that are owned by all Canadians, those airwaves need to be properly regulated by the government of Canada and not by a powerless self-regulating entity, no matter how well intentioned it may be.

This is obviously not a call or censorship, but merely for the enforcement of minimal standards of civility on a publicly owned resource.

Of course there is no hope of even marginal standards of civility being encouraged let alone enforced under a Harper Government, which encourages the decline of public discourse in order to turn young people, seniors and others who might not support its neo-conservative ideology off of voting altogether. Immigration Minister Jason Kenney’s just revealed “complete and utter” A-bomb, illuminates this tendency quite nicely.

Canadians who believe the F-Word and its foreign equivalents do not belong on the air during the afternoon and early evening, or who simply think that the same rules ought to apply to everyone in a democratic society, need to keep this in mind the next time they are asked to choose a federal government.

Acting on that understanding in the polling booth and in Parliament would be a better response to Sun News Network’s ugly on-air excesses than leaving it to a toothless industry self-regulator and hoping for the best, or, worse yet, adopting Mr. Levant’s repellent language and conduct in response.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.