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The province has also suffered job losses in recent months, shedding 18,000 jobs in November and posting an unemployment rate of 20 per cent among young men.

Kenney and his “team Alberta” of eight minister and 11 deputy ministers returned Wednesday to Alberta after a trip to Ottawa to lobby for a long list of issues concerning the province. Kenney met with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Tuesday, asking for a boost to provincial transfer payments and a projected date of completion for the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, among other things.

The UCP leader may also be suffering from the political fallout of the decision to fire the election commissioner, a move that led to Alberta NDP leader Rachel Notley making an extraordinary call to the Lieutenant-Governor to block the legislation.

Notley accused Kenney’s government of “breaking the rule of law” by firing the commissioner, who had issued more than $200,000 in fines relating to the UCP leadership race in 2017. In question period last month, Kenney said Notley is simply upset that her party lost the spring election which handed the UCP government a majority.

The poll shows Legault is still the most popular provincial leader in the country with an approval rating of 60 per cent and Moe is in second place with a 56 per cent approval rating.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford is in last place with 28 per cent approval, although that’s two percentage points higher than his approval rating in September.

The poll was conducted among a randomly selected panel of 5,035 Canadians who have signed up to receive polling surveys and is accurate to within 1.6 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

Prince Edward Island, Nunavut and both the Yukon and Northwest Territories were excluded from the survey due to extremely small sample sizes.

• Email: sxthomson@postmedia.com | Twitter: stuartxthomson