"You might have voted for Kenney for economic reasons but want him to make sure all GSAs in schools — public and private, secular and religious — have equal protection. Well, too bad, you can’t have both."

Alberta Premier Jason Kenney announces a panel with a mandate to find a way to balancing the budget without raising taxes at the Alberta Legislature Building in Edmonton, Alberta, on Tuesday, May 7, 2019. (Codie McLachlan/Star Edmonton)

Alberta Premier Jason Kenney couldn’t help himself.

At the start of Question Period on Tuesday, after being asked by NDP leader Rachel Notley about energy pipelines, Kenney interrupted himself to crow about his government scrapping Alberta’s carbon tax.

“First, allow me to inform the house that, very happily, Mr. Speaker, approximately two hours ago Her Honour the Lieutenant Governor gave royal assent to Bill 1, the Carbon Tax Repeal Act.”

Kenney looked so pleased you half expected balloons to fall from the ceiling of the legislative assembly as a marching band burst through the doors.

Kenney, after all, had made abolishing Notley’s “job-killing carbon tax” the cornerstone of his successful election campaign. He was so happy about his Bill 1 that he had planned a celebratory news conference last Thursday at an Edmonton gas station to announce that his government had already rolled back the 7-cent-a litre carbon tax on gasoline. However he cancelled the news conference after massive clouds of smoke from what has been a vicious forest fire season in northern Alberta drifted into Edmonton.

Kenney’s office merely said he was being briefed on the wildfire situation while Kenney himself has repeatedly refused to see any connection between an increase in the severity and length of Alberta’s forest fire season to climate change. Of course, anyone concerned about anthropogenic climate change and the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions could see the irony.

But last April’s election in Alberta wasn’t fought on the reality of man-made climate change. It was fought, and won, by the United Conservative Party touting jobs, the economy and pipelines. At the centre of the UCP platform was its opposition to the carbon tax that was introduced in 2017 by the NDP government as part of its Climate Leadership Plan.

Unfortunately for the NDP, as Alberta fell into a chronic recession the tax became the albatross around the government’s neck with Kenney helpfully turning it into a political garrotte as he blamed the tax for just about every economic ill that befell the province.

Kenney promised to kick start the economy by, among other things, scrapping the tax, lowering the corporate tax rate, cutting red tape on business and reducing wages for young people.

That has led to a blizzard of legislation introduced in a special session of the assembly dubbed the “summer of repeal” by Kenney.

Besides the carbon tax repeal act, there’s An Act to Make Alberta Open for Business, the Red Tape Reduction Act and the Job Creation Tax Cut.

As Kenney repeatedly says, “promise made, promise kept.”

Indeed, Kenney’s legislation might be based on simplistic solutions to complex problems but he was very clear about where he was going during the election campaign.

Critics upset by the rapidity of his changes should remember the last time we saw such an activist premier. It was 2015 when the newly elected Premier Rachel Notley launched something of a social justice revolution in Alberta that saw her government introduce a litany of reforms including the carbon tax, raise the corporate tax rate, modernize labour laws, protect the rights of paid farm workers and begin increasing the minimum wage to the highest in Canada.

Now, Kenney is reversing direction on many aspects of the Notley legacy. Not just economic, but also social.

On Thursday, for example, the UCP government introduced a new Education Act that the NDP says will weaken protection for gay-straight alliances in schools

“What Jason Kenney and (Education Minister) Adriana LaGrange are proposing is not only dangerous, it’s utterly unsympathetic to the needs of these students and their pleas for the UCP not to do this,” said Notley.

She is fighting him tooth and nail every step. Her argument is that even though nervous Albertans may have voted for the UCP on economic grounds, they do not support Kenney taking the province backwards on socially conservative issues.

Kenney’s default position on the other hand is to shrug and remind her who won the election: “The good news is that Albertans in their great common sense understand how to filter out the politics of fear and smear that emanate daily from the NDP. That is why the that party was so convincingly repudiated by Albertans just a few weeks ago.”

The problem with elections is they’re blunt instruments. They’re like omnibus bills. You don’t get to pick and choose individual planks from various campaign platforms to build your own individual government.

You might have voted for Kenney for economic reasons but want him to make sure all GSAs in schools — public and private, secular and religious — have equal protection. Well, too bad, you can’t have both.

The NDP may have lost the election but its strategy seems to be to hammer heavily and unapologetically at Kenney on social justice programs and policies he is trying to roll back, repeal or revoke.

If the economy doesn’t improve, Notley is hoping Kenney will be sent packing next election by disappointed voters.

If the economy does improve, she is betting Albertans will be less focused on fiscal issues and more focused on “NDP issues” such as minimum wages, workers’ protections, students’ rights, and climate change.

For Alberta politics, it’s going to be a long, divisive and probably exhausting four years.

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