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Kenney had a remarkable year in 2017 and he is poised to shake Alberta politics to its core in 2018. But I’m not sure the UCP should be playing with Biblical allusions to Kenney’s political successes. It doesn’t seem very, you know, humble.

Both the UCP and Kenney might also want to take things down a notch when it comes to their hyperbolic attacks on the NDP.

In one of his holiday videos that targets the carbon tax, Kenney claimed the NDP promised during the 2015 election campaign it would not introduce such a tax.

“This is the carbon tax they claimed they had no intention of imposing in the last provincial election,” Kenney said as he filled up his truck on New Year’s Eve in advance of the tax hike.

It’s an effective way to call the NDP hypocrites. It’d be much more effective if it was true. It’s not.

The NDP didn’t mention a carbon tax during the 2015 campaign.

Journalists did ask NDP Leader Rachel Notley at the start of the campaign to see her party’s climate change plan. She avoided the issue by saying: “We probably deserve a month or two” to come up with a plan if the NDP won the election.

At that point nobody, including Notley, expected the NDP to win.

And nobody had a climate change plan, not the NDP or the Wildrose or the Progressive Conservatives. Nobody was talking about a carbon tax.

The UCP says I’m splitting hairs, that the NDP “lied by omission” by not mentioning a carbon tax during the campaign.

NDP surprised by win

That’s to believe the NDP thought it was going to win the election and had a hidden agenda. The reality is that the NDP was as surprised as anybody it won, and it began scrambling to make up policy on the fly.