EDMONTON—It’s not campaign season yet, but the election rhetoric took a leap forward with the NDP launching a new website on Thursday that lays out the party’s view of its biggest opponent’s political record.

The website, thetruthaboutjasonkenney.ca, opens to readers by stating: “The best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour,” and the site is filled with information about Jason Kenney’s past political actions, including before he became leader of the United Conservative Party.

One piece reads: Kenney “led a cruel and dehumanizing campaign against LGBTQ Canadians,” and gets into Kenney’s record as a politician. It’s filled with citations to news articles from the past as hyperlinks.

“Mr. Kenney has been in public life a long time — he was in Ottawa for 20 years. And over that time, he’s established a long record that Albertans can look to, to judge what kind of premier he might be,” said Transportation Minister Brian Mason, who made the announcement on Thursday.

The announcement kicked off with a promotional video for the site with people reading passages from the website. The NDP says they aren’t actors.

“Why would they have a man, a man like Jason Kenney, telling us women what our health-care needs are?” asks one person in the video while dramatic music plays in the background.

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Reporters who attended the announcement did not have a chance to review the website before asking questions, but Mason said everything was based on facts and sources.

“It doesn’t merely allege, it documents in detail,” said Mason. “His record on LGBTQ rights, his record on women’s rights, his record on inclusion, his record in positions on health care and education, and his record in Ottawa.”

Kenney has said recently that a potential UCP government would not legislate on abortion, and the UCP has also previously said his views have “evolved” since his past stances on social issues.

When asked about Kenney’s evolved views, Mason said, “That’s not really an accurate position.”

“What’s happened is, in some cases, some of his views have become politically inconvenient, and there’s a big difference.”

At a separate event in Edmonton on Thursday, Kenney called the move “politics of personal destruction.”

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“They can’t run on their economic record, they’re desperate to talk about anything but the carbon tax, their failure on the economy. So it’s going to be politics of personal destruction from them, but my commitment is not to reciprocate,” Kenney said.

“(The UCP will be) developing a campaign of a positive focus on ideas. There will be disagreements on policy, I hope, but we will not descend to that level.”

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