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“(If) they can’t support us, we can’t hire their students,” Kiss wrote in the post.

“If you are a student of these schools you need to let the leadership know that you won’t be getting a job in Alberta and why,” he said.

Then he added: “If you are an employer in Alberta I encourage you to change your hiring practices,” then signs off “Eat Cows, Drill Oil, Be Albertan.”

NDP opposition energy critic Adrian Dix was among those to take notice of the LinkedIn post, which he found hypocritical, since Kiss’s firm is earning money from a publicly funded B.C. infrastructure project, and is not particularly “Albertan.”

In July, Morgan Construction was awarded a contract to build a seven-kilometre access road, clear 55 hectares of land on the north bank of the Peace River and other excavation work related to Site C.

“What he was saying is he was actively discriminating against UBC students because he didn’t like their expression of free speech, which I think is probably illegal,” Dix said in an interview.

The UBC student body and its faculty association voted in 2015 in favour of pressuring the university’s board of governors to divest some $100 million of its $1.2 billion endowment out of direct investments in fossil fuel stocks and bonds.

Dix, on Tuesday, wrote a letter to Kiss, copied to BC Hydro CEO Jessica McDonald and Energy and Mines Minister Bill Bennett, calling on him to retract the “ill-considered, discriminatory and hypocritical attack.”