King of the mountain no more

How a fumbled pandemic response and party infighting saw Kenney lose his own battle of Alberta

The mood at Spruce Meadows, the world-class show-jumping facility just outside of Calgary, was almost jovial as supporters of Jason Kenney picked at appetizers, sipped drinks and chatted to fellow members of the United Conservative Party, some of whom were proudly sporting hockey jerseys.

That night, hours before the puck dropped in the opening game of the NHL playoffs’ Battle of Alberta, most in attendance seemed happily unsuspecting of what was about to transpire.

Another battle that had been raging for months was about to end — this one in a startling defeat for the Alberta premier, and begin a new, uncertain chapter in a political story that has been nothing less than chaotic for this province’s conservatives over the past decade and a half.

Since 2004, Alberta has seen seven premiers and only the NDP’s Rachel Notley has completed a full, uninterrupted term as an elected leader.

Staff who had supported Kenney during his month-long campaign to stay on as leader of the political party he’d founded in 2017 had been invited to the event Wednesday night, where the results of the United Conservatives’ leadership review would be released. Cabinet ministers and MLAs were also among those in attendance.

As Kenney huddled with his inner circle in a room away from the crowd, the votes from more than 34,000 party members were tallied.

The night would go on to be “the definition of an emotional rollercoaster,” said a party insider, who was in the plush main room in Canada House overlooking a perfectly manicured riding ring at Spruce Meadows.

“From the highest high to the lowest low in a matter of, like, one minute.”

It had always seemed unlikely that Kenney would emerge unscathed from this leadership review, which began on April 9 and accepted mail-in ballots until May 11. But those close to him didn’t expect him to lose. Technically, they were right. At one point as people milled about, Jason Nixon, the premier’s right-hand man and minister of the environment, came into view to tell a longtime Kenney staffer something. The staffer started to look upset. But as soon as the results were announced by the party: 51.4 per cent support for Kenney (17,638 votes in his favour and 16,660 against), the room — and the staffer — erupted with joy. Kenney had won, barely.

The premier had suggested all along that 50-plus-one per cent would be enough to hang on to his job, despite the precedent set by past leadership reviews and the skepticism of critics.

Minutes later, Kenney appeared before the crowd and admitted he knew better.

The staffer had a “meltdown,” the insider said.

“It shocked everybody.” Kenney, who had spent most of his adult life in politics and who had never lost an election, announced that he was done and would be handing over the keys to both the premier’s office and a deeply divided political party.

“I’m sorry but, friends, I truly believe that we need to move forward united,” said Kenney amid groans in the room. “We need to put the past behind us and our members, a large number of our members, have asked for an opportunity to clear the air through a leadership election.”

After his brief remarks, Kenney shook hands with a few people, then quickly left.

And like that, it was over. Five years after returning to Alberta to unite the province’s conservative political forces, Kenney’s time at the top of the mountain was done. His own battle of Alberta seemingly ended.

There have been moments, both before and after his arrival in Alberta politics, when political observers had speculated he would one day lead the federal Conservatives and run to become prime minister.

Such speculation now feels far away.

On this night, in a room that felt like the air had been let out of it, the question hung, unasked.

Where had it all gone wrong?

Jason Kenney’s political legacy is a storied one, with no shortage of controversy.

In San Francisco, where he lived in the 1980s, he campaigned against hospital visitation rights for samesex couples during the AIDS crisis. In 1997, he was elected as a Reform Party MP at the age of 29. He went on to become a cabinet minister under Stephen Harper, serving as national defence minister as well as minister of immigration.

His founding of the United Conservative Party in 2017 was an impressive feat for many reasons. He successfully merged two bitter foes, in the Progressive Conservative and Wildrose parties, then won the leadership race to successfully captain the right-wing coalition against Notley’s NDP in 2019, earning a huge majority government.

While forming the UCP, he managed to harness conservative factions in the province.

A longtime social conservative, Kenney was backed by that contingent of voters in Alberta, where they wield significant political power thanks to their organizational abilities.

But he also managed to bring in the populist wing of conservatism. In the province, they represent 15 to 20 per cent of potential UCP voters, according to party insiders with years of campaigning under their belts. These voters are historically a rural contingent that includes libertarian-minded folks who have in the past voted for parties trumpeting separatism, the Wildrose Party, Social Credit Party and Freedom Conservative party.

Getting this group onside meant Kenney — called many things by political observers, but rarely a populist — appeared to have truly united the province’s conservative elements.

But as the unprecedented-in-modern-times threat of COVID-19 spread across the planet, it was this same contingent that seemed to turn against the premier, upset by vaccine mandates, lockdowns and vaccine passports that Kenney reluctantly brought in.

Some members of Kenney’s own caucus were angered by the restrictions. Others were upset he’d acted too slow to curb the spread of the virus, flip-flopping on policies and jumping the gun in 2021 by reopening the economy and declaring it the “best summer ever” only to have to shut everything down again as the pandemic ravaged the health-care system.

One government source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said COVID brought particular challenges for Kenney, a politician who is at his best in front of voters, in person. The nature of the pandemic separated him from voters, physically and, in the end, symbolically.

“He’s ... probably the hardestworking politician I’ve ever met, by a long stretch,” they said.

“If he’s doing that, I think that’s the best spot for him. If he’s sitting around twiddling his thumbs, reading Twitter, that’s not the best.”

And it showed. Kenney’s approval rating tanked, making him one of the few Canadian provincial leaders whom voters failed to rally behind during the pandemic.

Yet, it never seemed to worry his supporters. To them, Kenney has never been, necessarily, a “likeable” politician — that’s not his strength. He’d also never lost an election. So, when polls came out showing he had an approval problem when compared to his predecessor, Notley, no one blinked.

But Kenney wasn’t just being criticized over his handling of the pandemic. He was being slammed by critics as a hypocrite after getting photographed on the roof of what’s notoriously known as Sky Palace (an Edmonton building long a symbol of political entitlement) during the pandemic where he and his inner circle drank whiskey and conversed — even though his own government’s restrictions seemed to forbid that kind of gathering at the time.

Another government source said Kenney never took his foot off the gas, even when COVID was slamming the province. He insisted on passing bill after bill in the legislature at breakneck speed.

“That’s always been his track record: this guy is a hard worker who has no room for anything but just, like, work,” they said. “And that’s true. But people don’t like that.”

“For every major policy item you go for, you’re going to burn bridges, you’re going to tick off certain people,” they added. “Every time you do one of these things, you just get all this backlash and you just take a hit every time.”

It was a “slow burn” and there wasn’t any one moment that took the premier down, they said.

Insiders say Kenney has never been known for humility. It’s not his strong suit to show it, at least publicly. But the pandemic presented a challenge in that regard, given the all-encompassing grief and stress as people died, businesses closed and employees lost their jobs. People in government watched as Kenney tried to manage the situation as best he could, but for some, there was always a touch of empathy missing from the way he came across during press conferences.

In certain ways, the government source remarked, COVID-19 was the perfect storm for a politician like Kenney: clinical, calculated, hard-working, all business and someone with a deep conviction about people’s personal liberty. He couldn’t seem to convey his compassionate side or humility when it was most needed.

Flip-flops, own goals and anger among a section of his party eventually led to calls for an early leadership review and outright demands that he resign from some who used to support him.

Zane Novak is the CEO of Take Back Alberta, a group of organizers that worked together to unseat Kenney.

Some of the first meetings they held were at Novak’s kitchen table in downtown Calgary in early January.

Then, they hit the road, holding meetings all over Alberta — some with 300 people, some with 20 — on at least one potato farm, in homes ranging from multimilliondollar houses to small ones — trying

to get people signed up for memberships so they could vote in the leadership review scheduled for April 9.

“We covered thousands of people, particularly up to Saturday, the cutoff for purchasing UCP memberships, March 19,” he recalled. “We could make history, we could make a statement and we could mobilize people to hold our leaders accountable.”

He said some of the groups that stood out to him were mothers, some of whom had never voted before, in Calgary between the ages of 28 and 40 who were concerned about how COVID polices had affected their kids.

The other groups that resonated with him were from the Polish and Romanian communities in Alberta.

They’d “fought their way out of political circumstances that weren’t favourable to the populace, coming here because they loved what Canada had, the freedom we had and the opportunity we had,” said Novak.

Then, they saw “government overreach and government overinvolvement is impinging on the very freedoms that drew (them) to this country,” he added.

“They are far more sensitive to what was happening from their historical purview than many of us who have lived here all our lives, and they were so passionate.”

Stalking Kenney politically during this vulnerable time was Brian Jean, who holds a personal grudge with the outgoing premier after losing to him in the 2017 UCP leadership race amid allegations of vote rigging.

Jean won a byelection in March to become a UCP MLA, primarily on a platform to oust Kenney as leader.

While some had knives out behind Kenney, Jean has always been upfront about his intentions.

“The members have spoken,” Jean said after Kenney announced his resignation.

“UCP members from all over Alberta have made it clear that they reject divisive and autocratic leadership.”

Jean, the former leader of the Wildrose Party before it merged with the PCs, has said he will run in a leadership election to replace Kenney.

So has Danielle Smith, another former Wildrose Party leader.

Early on in the leadership review, there were inauspicious signs for Kenney and his team.

Initially, the party had planned to hold the review in-person at a hotel in Red Deer, which is the standard procedure for such events. Typically, about 1,000 party members show up and vote.

But this time, things were different. The number of people willing to pay a fee to attend the special general meeting in-person on April 9 skyrocketed to 15,000 people.

The UCP board decided that, due to logistics, the vote would instead be held by mail-in ballot so that every member of the party — about 60,000 of them — could have a say.

Kenney’s opponents immediately cried foul. The high expected turnout in Red Deer had signalled to them that anger was simmering among party members who were ready to turf Kenney. The move to mail-in ballots outraged them, even as it brought a wave of calm to those campaigning for Kenney. Many of them assumed the allegations of cheating from the premier’s opponents meant they were simply seeing the writing on the wall: Kenney would win.

Confidence was high, but inside the Alberta legislature, there remained a level of paranoia about leaks to the media, according to government sources.

There was at least one meeting where staff were warned about speaking to the media — a warning that was immediately leaked to the media. The response was, in essence, “What the f--- guys? Can nothing f---ing not immediately get leaked from this place?” said a government source with knowledge of the situation.

The incident happened around the middle of the leadership review campaign and the source, confident Kenney would win with between 60 and 70 per cent support, said then that something being leaked was probably the biggest risk for the premier.

They weren’t alone in that confidence. People around the premier viewed the resistance to him as a small extremist group of malcontents, some of whom weren’t even really conservatives, and who had primarily been angered by COVID restrictions. This attitude was perhaps best displayed by Kenney himself on a leaked audio tape that was obtained by CBC in March.

There was “nothing normal” about the review he was facing, Kenney was recorded telling caucus staff. People set to show up to vote against him in Red Deer were those “who think I’m involved in a global conspiracy to traffic children” and “there’s more than a few bugs attracted to us, this party, right now.”

“These are just kooky people,” he said, before adding that “the lunatics are trying to take over the asylum.”

In the weeks and months ahead, people will begin to process the result of the leadership review and decide for themselves whether Kenney’s assessment of his opposition was correct.

The review saw what was likely a higher number of members vote than any other party leadership review in Alberta history, and it showed the grassroots members cleaved in half over his leadership.

Did they all fit Kenney’s description?

The UCP, meanwhile, is now staring down the barrel of a leadership race that may see any number of people run.

The race will likely be divisive, as such events notoriously are in Alberta politics. It will also come to define the party for years, says Matt Solberg, a director with New West Public Affairs.

“Like, are we a convoy party? An anti-vax party? Are we a big tent, fiscally conservative party, but, you know, that leans more libertarian on social issues? Which is where I think the party was in 2019,” he said.

“The culture wars are happening, right? They’re happening across North America.”

Kenney is a notoriously private person, rarely, if ever, revealing personal details. What those around him say is that he works, and he works harder than anyone else they’ve been near.

Burnout inside the Alberta legislature was not uncommon in the few years Kenney oversaw it and staff turnover was constant — a hint at the clip at which the leader ran the gauntlet.

It’s genuinely hard for many in the political world to imagine what he’d do if not politics.

A former colleague told the Globe and Mail back in 1999 that Kenney was a “very old young kid” who didn’t see a lot of grey in the world. In the article, Kenney, who was a young Reform MP at the time, said that he was more “drawn to guns than to peacemaking.”

After a tumultuous time in office, and finally losing in a political shootout, it appears he’ll have to make some sort of peace, at least for now.

‘‘ These are just kooky people … the lunatics are trying to take over the asylum.

JASON KENNEY ON HIS PARTY OPPONENTS IN MARCH