"[Kenney's] happy to play host to federal cabinet ministers. If they come with cheques in hand, he’ll be even happier. But the federal Liberals should realize Kenney will never be their friend or ally. He has too much invested in making them his enemy."

Premier Jason Kenney during the Throne Speech at the Alberta Legislature Building in Edmonton, Alberta, on Wednesday, May 22, 2019. (Codie McLachlan/Star Edmonton)

It is a cessation of hostilities, not the beginning of a honeymoon.

When Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland met Premier Jason Kenney in Edmonton on Monday she arrived under a flag of truce. She was not there to sign a peace treaty. She was there to see what it will take to sign an armistice.

They smiled, shook hands, put on a friendly face for the news media.

“Chrystia’s originally an Alberta girl, and while she represents Toronto now, she understands the whole country,” said Kenney, trying to be folksy and warm but also sounding a tad condescending by referring to the deputy prime minister as a “girl.”

“The premier’s right that there are challenges in the relationship,” said Freeland in what must be the political understatement of the year. “I am here to look for common ground.”

They will not find common ground. Oh, they will find areas they can agree on such as the need for energy pipelines. Ottawa might send money Alberta’s way to help clean up orphaned oil wells. Ottawa might even send more money to Alberta under the federal Fiscal Stabilization Fund that was designed to help provinces deal with a sudden drop in revenue.

But there is no common ground between Alberta and Ottawa because there is no common ground between Kenney and Prime Minister Trudeau. The ground between them is riddled with political fault lines and bone-shaking earthquakes, most of them generated by Kenney.

In 2018, Kenney declared Trudeau had the “political depth of a finger bowl.”

During Alberta’s spring election campaign, Kenney attacked Trudeau as often as he attacked his actual opponent, NDP leader Rachel Notley.

READ MORE: Has Kenney torched any hopes of returning to federal politics?

During the federal election, Kenney campaigned for the federal Conservatives: “I ran on a commitment to Albertans to do everything we can to defeat the Trudeau government because of its attacks on Alberta.”

Kenney has promoted a ridiculous narrative that Trudeau is deliberately trying to destroy Alberta’s economy. He has stoked anger toward the Liberal government and helped make sure not one federal Liberal was elected in Alberta.

Kenney has blamed the federal government for delays in expanding the Trans Mountain pipeline when in fact the hold ups were caused by the courts listening to complaints by Indigenous peoples.

Kenney expressed doubt the expansion would ever go ahead. Now that construction has begun with more than 2,000 workers, Kenney is expressing doubt that the Trans Mountain expansion will actually be finished and is demanding a fixed completion date.

Kenney is still fighting against the federal carbon tax in court and continues to demand the government rewrite or scrap federal Bills C-48 and C-69 (the west coast tanker ban and what Kenney has dubbed the “no more pipelines bill”).

Kenney simply does not want to be friends with Trudeau or an ally with the federal Liberals.

This goes beyond Kenney’s ideological differences with Trudeau. It even goes beyond Kenney’s personal disdain for Trudeau.

For Kenney, Trudeau is a convenient scapegoat and a valuable foil.

Just as Kenney won the Alberta election by simplistically blaming the Notley government for all the ills befalling the province, Kenney hopes to deflect criticism by blaming the Trudeau government for Alberta’s continuing problems with jobs, the economy, and balancing the books.

And by pointing the finger at Ottawa, Kenney stokes the flames of Western alienation and gives himself cover for a resurgence of Alberta’s “firewall letter” movement from two decades ago to loosen ties with Ottawa by having Alberta form its own police force, set up its own tax collection system, and create an Alberta Pension Plan.

The “firewall” idea was dismissed by then-premier Ralph Klein as expensive, divisive and unnecessary. But it has been revived by Kenney as a weapon to demand more from Ottawa. And possibly not stop there.

It is a road map for a more independent, more conservative, Alberta as envisioned by one of the people who wrote the original “firewall letter’: Stephen Harper. That was before Harper became prime minister and before he became a political mentor to Kenney.

Since becoming premier last spring, Kenney has embarked on a significant restructuring of Alberta politics and government. Besides fulfilling promises to scrap the Alberta carbon tax and cut corporate taxes, he has initiated or proposed sweeping changes that include rolling back public sector wages, ripping up a contract with the province’s physicians, removing joint governance of public sector pensions, and firing the province’s election commissioner (who was investigating the 2017 United Conservative Party leadership race that Kenney won and had, up until his dismissal, issued more than $200,000 in fines against UCP members).

Kenney has faced howls of outrage from critics that include the Opposition NDP, public sector unions, physicians, and the mayors of large cities. But he doesn’t care.

He won a majority government last April and feels invulnerable now.

He’s happy to play host to federal cabinet ministers. If they come with cheques in hand, he’ll be even happier.

But the federal Liberals should realize Kenney will never be their friend or ally.

He has too much invested in making them his enemy.

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