Dispatch Lite: Kenney Compounds Conservative COVID Competency Crisis
Is the problem in Alberta conservatism or Kenney himself? How do you separate the ideology from the man?
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Please enjoy this video of Line editors Jen Gerson and Matt Gurney discussing what to include in this week’s full version of the dispatch.
In our characteristically undiplomatic fashion, we at The Line had no kind predictions to make about Jason Kenney’s future political career. There are very few bets we will make about the outcome of this election, but we feel pretty safe about this one: as Alberta is veering closer every day to invoking its Critical Care Triage Protocol — a move that would see people with a low probability of survival unable to access ICU beds — Kenney will eat the political consequences. We don’t think he can survive another election campaign.
What uncertainty remains is this; what is the impact of Kenney’s humiliating open-for-summer flip flop on the federal campaign? This is a harder question to answer.
Firstly, the Liberals have been making hay on Kenney’s failure, running ad showing Erin O’Toole endorsing Alberta’s approach. Kenney is now so politically toxic that the act of merely showing pictures of the two men together is thought to bring voters around to the clear-headed, rational pandemic approach of the, uh, Liberals.
On the other hand, we’re not sure this is actually going to swing votes outside of Alberta. Kenney’s COVID collapse came so late in this campaign that everybody’s minds may be made up about the issue.
We mentioned in Jen Gerson’s Friday column that Alberta’s crisis does raise serious questions about how conservatism as an ideology is equipped to manage a big-government problem like COVID. We’re still torn on that one, if we’re being honest. We’re inclined to think that the outcomes can be traced more easily to the personal failures of the premiers in question than in the ideology that they share — if they can be said to share any real ideology at all. Kenney makes the same mistakes over and over again; he sets his electorate up with grandiose hopes about things like pipelines, war rooms, referenda, the economy — and then absolutely shits the bed. Open for Summer was the latest example of this pattern: he remains so politically committed to an idea that he doesn’t build himself escape hatches, and then fails to identify when a course of action is failing.
Kenney’s rigidity and insularity, his iron-clad ideological commitments may blind his ability to assess the true nature of the problems he faces, and thus nudge him towards offering the wrong solutions to the crises he’s incorrectly diagnosed. Would a more intellectually nimble conservative premier behave differently? Is the problem, here, conservatism, or is it with Kenney himself? How do you separate the ideology from the man?
Meanwhile, Doug Ford may share the conservative mantle, but his handling of COVID presents a different set of problems entirely: indecisiveness, panic and a general sense of someone who fell into a leadership role totally unfit for purpose. Again, where do we distinguish between the failures of the individual from the failures of the ideology ostensibly underpinning the party he chose to run for?
We at TheLine are grappling with those questions, and we don’t have any pat answers. We also don’t know whether or not Kenney’s failures infect the CPC brand, or to what extent, so we leave it here with “wait and see.”
Roundup:
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