Alberta’s election has morphed from a battle of ideologies into a war of the megaphones.

It’s all about which candidate can yell the loudest against Prime Minister Justin Trudeau or Bill C-69 or Bill C-48 or the government of British Columbia, to name just four of the people or policies perceived as enemies of Alberta’s future.

The party leaders — most notably the NDP’s Rachel Notley and the United Conservative Party’s Jason Kenney — are still happy to rail against each other, but are saving some of their best bluster for outsiders.

That’s because many Albertans are feeling angry and alienated. They believe the federal government has failed to help Alberta during its recession, has unfairly taken more money from Alberta in taxes than it has given back in transfer payments, hasn’t done enough to get a new pipeline to tidewater, and has introduced legislation, such as Bill C-69, that will make it more difficult, if not impossible, to ever get environmental approval for a new pipeline.

Yes, Trudeau may have bought the Trans Mountain pipeline company for $4.5 billion last year but what has he done for us lately, they ask, to get the pipeline expansion underway?

Then there’s B.C.

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“Within an hour of being sworn in, we will hold a cabinet meeting, and the first item on the agenda will be to proclaim into law Bill 12, the ‘turn off the taps’ legislation,” proclaimed Kenney on Monday. “Unless (B.C. Premier) John Horgan ends his unconstitutional fight against Alberta energy exports, the people of B.C. will need to get used to paying well over $1.70 a litre for gas as the result of (B.C.) NDP anti-pipeline obstructionism.”

Not to be outdone on the clenched-fist-waving front, Notley spent part of Tuesday thundering against Bill C-48 — the federal Oil Tanker Moratorium Act — when she appeared before a Senate committee studying the legislation that would ban tankers from loading oil and gas products along the northern coast of B.C.

“Toss C-48 in the garbage, it’s where it belongs,” she told the Ottawa-based committee via video link from Calgary. “This is not a tanker ban, it is an Alberta ban.”

Alberta’s election fight has become a campaign of anger, frustration, fear and retaliation.

That is a serious problem for Notley, who, according to opinion polls, has a higher personal approval rating than Kenney — but that’s because she’s seen as being affable, optimistic and hopeful, things that helped her win the 2015 election.

She does not do anger well.

Then there’s Kenney, who is pretty much a one-man anger machine. He has spent the past two years helping stoke a sense of frustration and alienation in Alberta until it’s white hot.

He’s careful not to attack Notley personally because she is well-liked.

Instead, he likes to lump her with Trudeau, who is arguably the most loathed politician in Alberta. He routinely refers to “Notley’s good friend and ally Trudeau” or, more recently, “the Notley-Trudeau alliance.”

That’s another problem for Notley — she was indeed a good friend and ally to Trudeau when he gave conditional approval to the Trans Mountain expansion project.

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“Let me say this definitively, we could not have approved this project without the leadership of Premier Notley and Alberta’s climate leadership plan,” said Trudeau on Nov. 29, 2016, in Ottawa as a beaming Notley looked on. “Alberta’s climate plan is a vital contributor to our national strategy.”

But the pipeline expansion has been stalled repeatedly, most recently by a court ruling. Even though Notley insists, yet again, it will begin in a matter of weeks, she needed at least part of it in the ground before this campaign began as an example of a “mission accomplished.”

Nowadays Notley is trying to put so much distance between herself and Trudeau that she should be campaigning from Earth’s orbit.

And every day, Kenney gleefully keeps tying the two politicians together.

When Notley appeared before the Senate committee this week to attack C-48, Kenney was twisting the knife, accusing her of hypocrisy.

“Premier Notley was meeting with Justin Trudeau on Nov. 29, 2016, the very day he announced his intent to impose a tanker ban on the West Coast (with Bill C-48),” said Kenney. “She was mugging for the cameras and did not raise one syllable of protest.”

That’s an astonishingly misleading comment. Notley was meeting with Trudeau on Nov. 29, 2016, to celebrate the conditional approval of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, not to debate Bill C-48.

At the time, Notley rightly felt she had made a major breakthrough for Alberta on the pipeline front and Bill C-48 wouldn’t have interfered with Trans Mountain. But now, with no new pipeline in the ground, Notley has to demonstrate she’s as angry as Kenney and just as willing to shake her fists at the skies.

Because that, in effect, is what Kenney is promising to do: Yell at the clouds.

He has promised to hold a referendum in Alberta against the federal equalization program, join several other provinces in their fight against the federal carbon tax, begin a constitutional challenge against C-69, and turn off the taps to B.C.

A litany of constitutional experts says Kenney will lose every one of his fights.

But if the opinion polls that have Kenney leading in the election campaign are correct, many Albertans don’t believe the experts. Or, they simply want someone as loud and as angry as Kenney picking up a megaphone and broadcasting Alberta’s angst to the rest of the country.

Graham Thomson is an Edmonton-based political commentator and a freelance contributor for the Star. Reach him on email: gthomson2016@gmail.com

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