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Wildrose has criticized this particular carbon tax, too, but party leader Brian Jean has not ruled out replacing it with a different version. “I can’t tell you that the Wildrose wouldn’t bring in a carbon tax in the future,” Jean said after Notley rolled hers out, “but I can tell you this particular carbon tax would be eliminated.” In March, he said he would cancel the tax “until a full economic impact analysis is conducted.”

Kenney’s road to a united Albertan right may prove tricky, but if he makes it…we could be treated to another campaign fought over carbon taxes

But Kenney has so far offered no such hedges. In an interview with the Calgary Sun this week, he lambasted the very concept of carbon prices as “a massive tax on everything, the perfect illustration of socialist ideology” and “a massive wealth distribution scheme requiring a massive bureaucracy to administer.”

And back in 2008, Kenney was the federal Conservatives’ fiercest attack dog against Dion’s “Green Shift,” insisting the only “green shift” would be “the shifting of money out of people’s wallets into Mr. Dion’s coffers.” He called it “half-baked.” Said it would “destroy jobs” and “drive up” prices of virtually everything. It was “discredited, old, beggar-thy-neighbour class-warfare politics.” And none of it would do anything to reduce emissions anyway.

In promising also to cancel the NDP’s phase-out of coal power, Kenney may be one of the few public figures left in Canada, besides Saskatchewan’s Brad Wall, still willing to repudiate the politically polite anti-carbon orthodoxy. Predictably, Notley’s NDP is already attacking him as a “climate denier,” insisting he “would rather that Alberta go back to the same climate-denying approach that didn’t build a single pipeline to tidewater in the ten years he was in government in Ottawa.”

But in the seven months since Notley unveiled her carbon tax, Alberta has seen its pipeline hopes dashed only further. After the rejection of Keystone XL, the reversal of Ottawa’s Northern Gateway approval, a federal tanker ban in northwest B.C., and endless delays and discord over Energy East, Albertans are likely unconvinced the NDP’s extra tax hit has bought their oil the “social licence” that Notley promised it would. If Notley really thinks she can win an election defending her carbon tax, it would be a remarkable first.