Kenneyism up close and angry
An interview with Jeremy Appel about his new book aout Jason Kenney
Jeremy Appel doesn’t love Jason Kenney. He just loves writing about Jason Kenney. Or that’s what I surmised from this interview with him. Appel’s first book, Kenneyism, comes out this week and it dives into the political legacy of Jason Kenney.
Based in Edmonton, Jeremy has been writing about Alberta politics since 2017. He writes for mainstream and independent media, and has a great substack you should check out here:
. I asked him about why he chose to focus on such an irritating political figure and he convincingly explains that Jason Kenney matters. You’ll see why in this interview.Excited for the next one Jeremy, Kenneyism versus Spenneyism.
NL: Hey. So … Jason Kenney eh?
JA: I'd been thinking to myself that 2022 was going to be the year that I submit a book proposal, but I wasn't sure on what topic. When Kenney got turfed in May that year, which I honestly never thought would actually happen, a lightbulb went off in my head
I've been covering Alberta politics since I moved to a small town called Whitecourt in February 2017, when I got a job at the local Postmedia rag. This was relatively early in Kenney's process of uniting the PCs and Wildrose. Soon after I arrived, he won the PC leadership race on an explicit promise to disband the party and merge it with the Wildrose.
I covered the unity debate at the paper in Whitecourt. There was a local Wildrose guy who was totally against a merger. He ended up being a vast vast minority.
Not long after I moved to Medicine Hat, a small city in the southeast corner of the province, in September 2017, Kenney won the UCP leadership race, which fun fact, is still under RCMP investigation for fraud 7 years later.
So, tldr, I covered his rise and fall in Alberta politics
Nobody doubted once the UCP was formed and he led it that Kenney would become the next premier, which I assumed would be for however long he wanted
You dont seem like a masochist but you decided to spend a sizable chunk of time diving into Kenney's life. What about that life do you think warrants the book you wrote?
I think he was without a doubt one of the most consequential conservative politicians in Canada in my lifetime. Save for Stephen Harper or Mike Harris, I can’t think of another person who influenced the rightward drift of Canadian politics more than Kenney, from his days cheering on Chrétien and Martin’s austerity with the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, while also constantly pushing them to go further still to his time as Alberta premier.
There’s also a certain shroud of mystery surrounding the man, whose entire life, at least until 2023, appears revolve around pursuing his political agenda.
I found it somewhat remarkable that there hasn’t been a biography on him yet, despite 30 years at the forefront of Canadian politics, so I figured I would take the opportunity to do so before some access journalist hack writes something authorized.
People's memories are short. In the fewest words possible, tell us about Jason Kenney's political career.
Jason Kenney's pro-life student activism at the University of San Francisco drew the attention of Canadian Taxpayer Federation (CTF) founder Kevin Avram. Instead of graduating, Kenney returned to Canada and not long after served as the CTF's representative in Edmonton, eventually worming his way up to be the organizations executive director in Ottawa, where he became a prominent voice in Canadian media aggressively advocating for brutal austerity.
Growing tired of constantly beating the 'cut taxes, cut government spending, reduce the deficit' drum, he ran for the Reform Party in 1997 at the tender age of 24, which allowed him to pursue his other passions, such as controlling women's reproductive decisions, restricting immigration and proclaiming the virtues of U.S. militarism. He was easily elected to his Calgary riding and soon after became a key player in the party's effort to create a "United Alternative" to perpetual Liberal rule, which resulted in the rebranding of Reform as the Canadian Alliance and then the eventual merger with the PCs.
The process of building an electable coalition of reactionary forces taught Kenney to temper his most extreme instincts for electoral gain. When Stephen Harper became prime minister in 2006, Kenney was dispatched to cultivate ties to right-wing elements in various ethnocultural communities. His caucusmate at the time, Raheem Jaffer, dubbed him the "Minister for Curry in a Hurry." This strategy paid off greatly when Harper achieved a majority government in 2011.
People outside Alberta most likely remember Kenney as the minister of citizenship and immigration. While he was welcoming elements of various ethnocultural and immigrant communities into the Conservative fold for the first time, he weaponized this veneer of inclusivity to pursue policies that were fundamentally exclusionary towards asylum seekers, whom he vilified as "bogus refugee claimants." New immigrants continued to be welcomed to Canada in increasing numbers, but policies were increasingly tailored to ensure that they were from a particular educated, upwardly mobile class. Harper's defeat in 2015 came months after the Alberta NDP formed government for the first time in the province as a result of a partisan right-wing divide between the long-ruling urban-based PCs and the rural populist Wildrose that appeared to resemble the one that kept the federal Liberals in power from 1993 to 2006. So Kenney made a decision, which was an ultimately fatal miscalculation, to return to Alberta and replicate his success in merging two conservative parties federally.
His efforts were initially successfully, riding a wave of anger against the Alberta NDP to win the 2019 election in a landslide with his Frankenstein United Conservative Party. He was able to maintain unity within the UCP ranks by pursuing an agenda of harsh austerity that both factions could agree on. But that unity all came apart during the pandemic
Hmm that wasn't very short. Can you describe Kenney in five words?
A pseudo-populist pragmatic ideologue
And what do you think is his legacy? His biggest impact? Why does he matter?
I think his legacy is the central role he played in pushing politics that were once regarded as far right into the respectful mainstream establishment, shifting the entire conversation rightwards.
You can see this most recently with the campaign the Alberta NDP ran last year, in which they boasted about how they got more pipelines built than Kenney while the province was on fire, promised to eliminate small business taxes, freeze income taxes and ensure corporate taxes remained the lowest in the country, and wouldn’t commit to reversing any of Kenney’s vicious cuts to post-secondary education.
If New Labour was Margaret Thatcher’s greatest accomplishment, you could make a stronghold case that turning the Alberta NDP into a centre-right party was Kenney’s.
Who do you think best embodies Kennyism today?
In federal politics, I think Melissa Lantsman mirrors Kenney’s outreach to communities that have been historically been outside the Conservative fold. You see this with her efforts to cultivate ties with elements of the Iranian community who are against the Islamic Republic. She spoke at many of their rallies after the killing of Mahsa Amini, where she took the opportunity to say that “real patriarchy” exists in Iran, implying it doesn’t here. Being an out member of the 2SLGBTQ+ community, she’s able to court that demographic in a way Kenney couldn’t have, with his outspoken opposition to gay marriage.
In Alberta, I’d suggest it’s none other than Danielle Smith. With the tumult of the COVID response behind us, I can’t see how she’s governed all that different from how a re-elected Kenney would have. The Alberta Sovereignty Act, which Kenney denounced as a “cockamamie” scheme, is essentially just theatrics. While it’s supposed to empower Alberta to ignore federal laws the government dislikes, it was used for the first time against the feds’ clean energy regulation, with legislation that specifically said not to break the law. Smith has tamped down on the austerity a bit, spending more with the price of oil being high, but that was also the case in the last Kenney budget in February 2022.
You can buy Kennyism yourself at your favourite local bookstore. And remember that most will ship books too, so if you don’t have a local bookstore, either start one yourself or order from anyone that ships! For more information about the book, you can check out the publisher’s website.