CALGARY—Kevin Gagnon didn’t just vote for the United Conservatives in the Alberta election, he also cast his ballot to protest a pervasive attitude he sees in federal government leaders.

It goes something like this: “I don’t care about those rich, spoiled, entitled Albertans.”

Gagnon, who lives in Grande Prairie, is one of many angry people who ticked a box next to one of 63 UCP MLAs who will cement a majority government when they are sworn in on Tuesday.

As operations manager of AVA Energy Inc., a trucking company working in the oilsands, Gagnon has watched his life and finances deteriorate significantly since business started drying up in 2015. He feels ignored by the federal Liberal government, which UCP Leader Jason Kenney spent a lot of time deriding in his successful campaign to become premier of Alberta.

“I had a home — lost it, can’t afford to pay for it. I’m living with friends now and it’s not because I’m not educated,” he said, pushing back against the bandied-about notion that oilsands workers fritter away their money with no backup plan.

“I have no credit, not because I wasn’t working and paying my bills properly — because I can’t afford to any more.”

At 40, Gagnon is in one of the demographic groups hardest hit by the downturn in Alberta’s economy when global crude oil prices fell off a cliff in 2014. Innovations in U.S. shale production, combined with the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries refusal to cut oil output, caused the precipitous decline.

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According to University of Calgary economics professor Trevor Tombe, employment rates for Albertan men aged 25 to 44 fell significantly and have yet to recover from the recession. In April, statistics showed about 172,000 Albertans were out of work, with the employment rate hovering around 66 per cent — the same as it was during the depths of the recession in 2016.

Kenney spent most of his campaign speaking directly to this demographic. He capitalized on their anger over negative attitudes about the Alberta energy industry, their dire employment situation and a federal government that is seen as anti-oil due to the carbon tax, the Oil Tanker Moratorium Act and the Impact Assessment Act, which would change the rules for the energy-project approvals and create a new federal energy regulator.

Kenney also campaigned against the “Notley-Trudeau Alliance,” targeting both the provincial and federal governments. It struck a chord with voters.

Now Kenney has to live up to the expectations attached to many of the one million votes cast in his favour, which ushered in a UCP majority government and booted out Premier Rachel Notley and the NDP.

Kenney kept his focus on three main planks: the economy, jobs and pipelines. He faces tough challenges on all three fronts with the Trans Mountain pipeline approval facing obstacles in court, disagreements with the federal government over the carbon tax and tough economic times in Alberta.

Now, as premier, Kenney will have to find some solutions — and fast.

Trevor Marr, a 56-year-old unemployed civil engineer who lives in Calgary, spent a dozen years in the oilpatch and once worked on the Mildred Lake mine replacement project. In 2015, while on a holiday to Fiji and New Zealand, free-falling global prices hammered Alberta’s oil and gas industry. He returned to the province expecting to line up another project as he’d always done. Instead, layoffs and uncertainty in Alberta’s oil industry awaited him.

“It was like a ghost town,” he said.

For Marr, voting UCP was the obvious choice. He believes the NDP’s policies lowered investor confidence and drove the oil-and-gas industry away from Alberta. He also doesn’t believe Premier Rachel Notley fought hard enough for the industry, describing her threat to pull out of the federal climate plan over lack of progress on the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion as “smoke and mirrors.”

By contrast, Marr said, Kenney’s pledge to focus on the economy will encourage major oil companies like Syncrude and ExxonMobil and Imperial Oil to invest in new projects, which, in turn, would mean jobs for workers.

He also said the NDP was fear-mongering when it warned about climate change during office, particularly because Marr believes the false theory that the sun — and not carbon dioxide emissions — is the underlying cause. Under the UCP, he hopes that a sense of balance between environmental and economic concerns will be restored.

“I see Jason Kenney as a realist. He wants to stand up for Alberta, he wants to get things done, and I’m going to cut him slack to get things done — because I have more faith in Jason Kenney than I will ever have in Rachel Notley,” Marr said.

Gagnon isn’t under any illusion that oilsands boom times will return, but for him, it isn’t about the price of oil. It’s about where Canadians get their oil.

Atlantic Canada ships it in from places like Saudi Arabia, and Gagnon cited the failure to get a pipeline from Alberta eastward to New Brunswick as a big issue that still needs to be addressed.

About 12 per cent of all imported oil in 2017 came from the Middle Eastern nation, according to Natural Resources Canada, although the largest source of foreign oil by far was the United States at 61 per cent. Still, Gagnon is dismayed that consumers who pit themselves against Alberta oilsands on environmental grounds aren’t concerned about filling up with fuel from Saudi Arabia, a country with significant human-rights issues.

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In his 20 years working all over the world, Gagnon has never come across an oil industry with environmental and safety standards as strict as Alberta’s.

Albertans like him are suffering, and he feels it’s a big reason why the voter turnout was so high — 64 per cent — in the provincial election. They are desperate for a stronger economy, but many of them aren’t working and had the time to actually go and vote.

“We are angry and we are losing our livelihoods,” Gagnon said.

Fiona Feuerhelm, 40, has done every job imaginable during her decade in the oilpatch: vac truck, nitrogen operator, coil tubing operator, fluid pumping. Despite the recession, she’s never been unemployed.

“I’ve always done something,” she said. “It hasn’t always been that grand, big oilpatch money, but I’ve always had a job and always paid my bills.”

Nonetheless, the recession wasn’t kind to many of her former employers. Her hard hat is covered with the stickers of dead companies. Many smaller companies went under during the recession, while some were gobbled up by bigger players.

“When I started in the oilpatch 10 years ago, in a 30-kilometre stretch, I counted over 100 derricks in the air. At night, it was lit up like candles. It was amazing,” Feuerhelm said. “And now, to see a derrick lit up at night in the sky is like seeing a dinosaur.”

Bringing the oilpatch back means having some business sense, and Feuerhelm didn’t believe the NDP were up to the task. She read the platforms of both parties and found the UCP had a more inviting plan for the oil-and-gas industry. But she knows the UCP’s proposals won’t change the economy overnight.

“We know it’s going to take time. We have to reverse a lot of stuff. We still want clean energy,” Feuerhelm said. “We just don’t want to lose all our jobs over it.”

Critics have warned the rise of automation in the oil-and-gas sector that followed the global oil-price collapse will mean fewer jobs, no matter how well Alberta’s energy sector fares or what the UCP promises. Workers understand what automation means, Feuerhelm said. But it doesn’t mean all oilpatch jobs will disappear. Machines still can’t collect oil from a pumpjack or maintain a pipeline.

“You can automate so many things in the oilpatch,” Feuerhelm said. “But if something’s going wrong on-lease and an alarm goes off, you have to send a guy to look.”

In 2015, Mike Vickers, 30, was working as an equipment operator up north in the oilsands. When Notley and the NDP took power that year, he became more optimistic as time went on, “which is hard for me to say.”

“She became a little bit more oil and gas friendly,” he said of Notley’s tenure.

But the Sherwood Park, Alta., resident said support for the government in the oilpatch soured and, eventually, the lack of confidence was overwhelming.

“The doubt that really was resonating with all these people in Alberta, and especially in oil and gas in general, it was scary,” said Vickers, who lost his job in 2016 and has since founded a couple of job-search websites aimed at oil and gas workers. “When you start to see a whole province doubting the government, it’s just a scary thought to live with.”

For him, Kenney’s road will be simple but difficult in the first year or so: Get rid of the carbon tax — admittedly Kenney’s first order of business, and likely to result in a federal carbon tax being imposed. But Vickers also wants a pipeline built.

“At the end of the day, my vote lies where Albertans can see the best value, that’s again why I voted UCP this year,” he said. “But in four years from now, if these promises don’t get fulfilled, then I’m optimistic and my vote goes to the next party at that time I believe can make the biggest change.”

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