Alberta Premier Jason Kenney is not just Jason Kenney. He is a political type.

This type, Stone-faced Ideologue, is ubiquitous, often winning election in the American Midwest and Rust Belt to everyone’s ultimate sorrow. Kenney’s first provincial budget, with huge spending cuts that will expose Albertans to extreme pain — yet cut corporate tax by $4.5 billion over the next four years — is an experiment.

One hopes it will not resemble the budget disaster that hit Kansas after ex-governor Sam Brownback lived his dream in 2012 and cut taxes so severely that life in the state was devastated for nearly a decade. What’s the matter with Kansas? It demonized taxes to the point of self-destruction and may not recover.

Kenney is a different kind of ideologue: Deficit-Hater. He is raising taxes by stealth, by increasing tuition, raising fees for services, and ending indexing on personal tax. Alberta could not have picked a worse time to elect a deficit demon bent on cutting education, health and social services, you know, the soft stuff.

It is not clear how its cities will cope with municipal grants cut by up to 50 per cent, given that they were already sunk in unemployment misery. Edmonton needs that new hospital, now delayed to 2030. What an astonishing thing to do to a province hooked on oil as oil prices lie in a puddle.

The budget predicates Alberta’s success on rising oil prices, no global recession and three pipeline expansions, and who else but Kenney would bet on that?

It also predicates Kenney’s own popularity on Albertans blaming Ottawa, an easy spin right now but increasingly implausible to Canadians — including Albertans — who know that climate change will be fought and the fight might even be profitable.

“I won’t miss that new hospital as long as that deficit’s gone by 2023,” I predict Edmontonians will not say. That’s the year Kenney’s up for re-election. Ontario Premier Doug Ford is a service-cutting anti-deficit ideologue (who has raised the deficit, imagine that). Look at his popularity, so damaged that it helped re-elect Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

There are actual Conservatives in Ontario who strategically voted Liberal, so much is Ford despised. Watch and learn, Premier Kenney.

As for Kenney’s claim that this is “the most important Alberta budget in 25 years,” deficit ideologues always grandstand. “Wow, that budget didn’t make things worse at all!” I predict hungry students and Calgarians without transit will not say.

Again, Kenney reminds me of another ideologue, Scott Walker, former governor of Wisconsin, who waged war against unions for eight years to kill the state deficit. In the end, it was education cuts that destroyed him. In Wisconsin as in Alberta, voters really care about education.

Kenney is not an achiever like Rachel Notley or Peter Lougheed. He is a complainer. No one complains as much as Kenney. He’s even worse than Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe, a former bankrupt farmer whom nothing pleases. Farmers’ eternal frustration is that they can’t control the weather — ill-timed and implacable — so they complain to the federal government, which doesn’t control the weather either.

Beware politicians whose message is based on feelings, not thought. Ask voters what they think, not what they feel. “Many Albertans feel betrayed,” Kenney says. Because the rest of Canada didn’t vote Conservative? It happens.

If Kenney planned an ambitious green energy program that offered long-term jobs in a hot future, there would be hope for tens of thousands of desperate unemployed Albertans, many from other provinces. Instead his budget explicitly discourages innovation by ending support for startups.

Kenney sent the PM a five-page list of complaints, the main one being federal carbon pricing, which he says Trudeau should suspend. It’s not going to happen, as well he knows.

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Equally, B.C. doesn’t want great clots of bitumen, however adulterated, thickening its waters and glued to its coastline. Trudeau can’t change that, nor can he raise oil prices. It may well be that unemployed Albertans were secretly writing to Kenney complaining about the deficit but I remain unaware of this grassroots movement.

What they want is jobs. You raised the cost of their car registration, a rather poor reward.

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