Is Poilievre making the same mistakes as Kenney?

Had a general election been held in Alberta this spring, chances are Premier Jason Kenney would have led his party back to the opposition benches after just one term in office.

For months, polls in the province had found Kenney’s government to be out of step with a critical mass of voters. His approval rating placed him close to the bottom of the premiers’ list.

Had Kenney been leading Rachel Notley’s New Democrats in voting intention instead of trailing badly, he might have eked out a confidence vote more robust than 51.4 per cent this week. It is hard to stick with a leader who seems poised to lead one’s party to the slaughterhouse.

But the fact that friendly fire from the right rather than pushback from his progressive foes precipitated Kenney’s demise still sent shock waves throughout the conservative movement.

After all, it was not so long ago that Kenney was seen as the provincial leading light of the Canadian right, a seasoned political operator with a strong ideological backbone and plenty of experience on the national scene.

If Kenney was not conservative enough for so many members of the party’s base, who would be? And could a person who met their ideological standards ever manage to both unite the right and appeal to enough voters to form a viable national government?

Those are valid question. They cannot be dismissed by simply saying Kenney’s political management of his party turned out to be too polarizing or that the patterns observed within it are unique to Alberta. The fact is that many of the ingredients that led to Kenney’s demise are — at least so far — winning staples of the ongoing federal leadership campaign. Here are some of those.

Perhaps because it had — until recently — a relatively unchallenged monopoly on power, Alberta’s Conservative family seems to have internalized the adversarial dynamics that normally attend a competitive political scene.

That trend preceded Kenney’s appearance. As premiers, Ralph Klein, Ed Stelmach, Alison Redford and Jim Prentice all had a section of the party turn on them. Over that same period, the disconnect between the party base and a growing number of voters expanded — making the two increasingly difficult to reconcile.

On that score, the pattern in Alberta conservative politics is reminiscent of the Parti Québécois. After the 1995 referendum, Quebec’s once leading sovereigntist party ended up caught between a base that was dead set on pursuing its independence project and an electorate that had no pressing desire to revisit the issue.

Far from reversing the latter trend by catering to its base and insisting on pursuing its cause, the PQ drove itself into a wall. These days, it is no longer a contender for government, and it is possible that the party’s caucus will be reduced to single digits in next fall’s Quebec election.

At the federal level, a similar disconnect has been seen within the CPC. Over the past decade, that disconnect has mostly but not exclusively hinged on climate change and the refusal of a significant section of the party base to face up to the reality that it has fallen well behind voters on one of the existential issues of the era. For many Conservatives, that’s a point of pride.

As a result, in the current leadership campaign, the contenders have mostly been engaged in a contest as to who has the least to say about addressing climate change.

It is impossible to uncouple the standing of Canada’s current premiers from their management of the pandemic. It is no accident that Kenney — who most resisted the imposition of COVID-related restrictions — lost the most points over the course of the crisis. Yet, the pandemic has not been a plague on all Conservative houses.

The upcoming Ontario election would likely not be Premier Doug Ford’s to lose had he taken his pandemic cues from his Alberta counterpart rather than opt for a more restrictive approach.

And yet, faced with the contrasting post-pandemic standings of the Conservative premiers of Ontario and Alberta, CPC front-runner Pierre Poilievre — with the support of a significant number of his caucus mates — is singing from the Kenney pandemic hymn book.

On his way to the premier’s office, Kenney ran an incendiary campaign against Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. To listen to his rhetoric, Trudeau was proactively trying to ruin Alberta.

Inconvenient evidence to the contrary — in the shape of the federal purchase of the Trans Mountain pipeline or the pursuit by Ottawa of an equalization formula designed by Stephen Harper’s government — was casually swept under the rug.

Once in office, Kenney brought the same take-no-prisoners approach to some of his dealings with his own caucus.

If either of the above sounds familiar, it may be because you are paying attention to Poilievre’s lighton-facts, over-the-top attacks on the Bank of Canada or to his contemptuous treatment of the fellow Conservatives who are his leadership rivals.

Many of the ingredients that led to Jason Kenney’s political demise are winning staples of the ongoing federal leadership campaign