When Jason Kenney and his colleagues smashed up the Alberta NDP government in the recent election with a 55 percent to 33 percent win – a 22-point spread – and 63 of 87 seats, they did so despite much media attention on everything except what Albertans told pollsters they were concerned about: pipelines, jobs, and federal-provincial policy that killed both.

While Albertans were focused on the province’s hemorrhaging economic situation, many in the media ignored the hard numbers, accepted fake numbers as real, and in some cases complained when offered up the most substantive platform in any election in recent history.

I know, because I had a lead role in designing the United Conservative Party platform. It was a role – and a privilege – which allowed me to follow the arc of media reporting and commentary over the year before, during and after it was released. What I saw reinforced my view that some (but not all) media lack understanding of numbers and a grasp on history, which, despite their best efforts, handicaps their ability to report and analyze what matters.

I will return to this, but first let me explain why I (temporarily) left the policy world to plunge into partisan politics.

When in March 2018 Jason Kenney asked me to help design the election policy platform for the United Conservative Party, I paused.

Political parties are necessary creatures and serve the laudable purpose of brokering vastly different public interests to effect peaceful transitions of power – no small virtue given that for much of human history most transfer of power involved blood, either literally with regicide and revolutions, or through monarchical family succession.

Still, that brokerage reality is why I avoided crossing into partisan territory for decades: great policy is usually better incubated outside of political parties. The need to win votes can easily derail sensible policy. No politician is immune from the temptation to claim the sky is blazing blue even while rain drops are falling on their head.

Still, I said “yes” to Kenney, for four reasons.

Avoiding an NDP economic apocalypse

First, I had witnessed the hollowing out of the biggest and most important free enterprise party in the world as Donald Trump’s candidacy and then election undermined the Republican Party’s historic commitment to free trade, among other sensible policy. Republicans have been free enterprisers at their core since at least Barry Goldwater’s run for president in 1964 and it crescendoed in Ronald Reagan’s successful win in 1980. That latter victory allowed free trade to flourish worldwide – Reagan and Prime Minister Brian Mulroney made it a continental priority post-1984 – and with it a dramatic reduction in poverty caused by expanding markets. Trump ran in opposition to that and in so doing damaged the traditional Republican bias for opportunity-based policy.

Second, as the American conservative writer George Will pointed out vis-à-vis Trump’s ascension and the Republican Party’ descent, ideas without a vehicle – a political party – to transport them into government policy are stillborn.

Third, Kenney, whom I’ve known since 1997 (I became Alberta director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation that year, a year after Kenney left that organization to enter politics), told me he wanted a robust platform, one anchored in sound policy ideas. In addition, the-then opposition leader was clear that he wanted the “straight goods” on policy, what makes sense. I could deliver that, he said, and leave the “politics” of policy – selling it to the public or watering down pure policy “wine” with political “water” – to him. That was fine given my congenital inability to offer anything other than a frank opinion on what constitutes good policy. (And anyone who reads the platform closely will also observe where wine and water were mixed.)

Fourth, after 20 years public policy research and reports and advocacy on everything from Alberta’s flat tax to property rights to why taxing the next generation through new government debt is immoral (including policy favouring job creation and opportunity for the poor), it was alarmingly clear to me that the Rachel Notley’s NDP government was systematically shredding smart, opportunity-based policy. Despite their virtuous protestations to the contrary, the NDP’s grossly interventionist policy ignored economic experience and reality and harmed the poor first and then everyone else through the destruction of opportunity.

In other words, I had both a personal and a public interest incentive to defend my past work and that of others. That included the vastly superior policy enacted by the Ralph Klein government which, despite occasional lapses which I criticized while at the CTF, got it right more often than not. Klein-era decisions are the main reason 660,000 jobs were created in Alberta between late 1992 and 2006 when he retired, far topping any other province relative to population.

As it happened, when Kenney asked me to help design the United Conservative platform, I was already working on a book comparing Ralph Klein and Rachel Notley governments, so my 1990s memory was refreshed by research. From that work, it was clear to me that under the NDP – if they won a second term – Alberta would soon be headed for the economic ash-heap of history, akin to the experience of post-war Saskatchewan: economically stagnant for generations due to an anti-free enterprise ideology.

So, I said “yes” to Kenney’s offer and got to work.

A serious platform for a severe economic situation

I’ll spare readers a long analysis of how the UCP platform came together, except to note that we took in several hundred document submissions by email, met hundreds if not thousands of people (not me personally but others involved in the process including the now-Premier designate, other opposition MLAs and official stakeholder relations staff), and had a hopper full of solid policy directives endorsed by party members at the 2018 founding convention.

Not all the party resolutions made it into the platform; the flat tax, for example. But as I remind people who long for its return, Ralph Klein first cut spending (in 1993), then balanced the books and began to pay down debt (starting in 1995), then began to cut taxes (in 1997), and finally introduced the flat tax in 2001 – eight years after the first election he contested as premier. Recall that we pledged to axe the carbon tax and reduce taxes on business by one-third (both of which would be partly paid for by cancelling carbon tax spending in the first instance and through a partial feedback effect – higher economic growth and higher revenues – in the second.) Thus, it would have been fiscally irresponsible to promise to immediately restore the flat tax. Careful observers will note that restoring that flat tax was never taken off the table by Kenney. We simply could not restore all elements of the Alberta advantage overnight.

Other help: last year and into early 2019, roundtables were also set up that allowed Kenney and others to gather ideas from a wide array of Albertans. The feedback ranged from predictable self-interested lobbying to original, insightful, unselfish proposals including many from a former Liberal staffer, Lennie Kaplan, who served in the early to mid-1990s under then-Alberta Liberal Leader Laurence Decore and his excellent Finance Critic, Mike Percy.

For an example of the self-interested variety though, one fellow wanted his carbon tax-funded green energy subsidies to continue. He was oblivious to the plight of Albertans at the other end of the redistributionist chain, like the Slave Lake sawmill that pays $500,000 annually in carbon taxes on its mill alone, never mind additional carbon tax costs for fuel. That’s ten $50,000 jobs that could not be created because of the carbon tax.

This gentleman’s economic myopia was undoubtedly media-influenced. News stories lamenting how ending a taxpayer subsidy will kill jobs are a dime a dozen, but reporters rarely note the substitution effect, where taxes taken from non-subsidized job creators hamper their ability to hire new staff. No wonder readers served a steady diet of scary headlines on stories lacking rudimentary analysis fail to grasp the obvious truth that subsidized jobs are not sustainable.

Many in the media missed that obvious point pre- and even post-election. All that some reporters and columnists could see were the subsidized jobs created by the NDP and not the ones annihilated by higher taxes and costs imposed on Alberta’s job creators in the midst of the province’s longest economic downturn since at least the early to mid-1980s if not the Great Depression.

This is why, when CTV’s Don Martin asked me whether any premier “really” could have done anything differently in the last four years, my answer should have been an emphatic “yes”: if the government had not piled on 20 percent increases in business taxes and other costs Alberta would not have endured so many private sector job losses. (My actual answer was that Notley’s one-month boycott of B.C. wine was useless, and if she really wanted to pressure her NDP friends on the left coast to drop their blockade of Alberta oil, she should have promised to campaign for the opposition Liberals in the next B.C. election.)

“Snake oil” and other media myths

I’ve written at least a thousand columns in my career, a few dozen peer-reviewed studies, and five books. But whether in my capacity as a research director, senior fellow or author, I stick to my areas of expertise. It’s why I never write on the inner life of bats but on taxes, provincial budgets, corporate welfare, transfer payments including equalization, property rights, Alberta’s Heritage Fund, and so on

Not everyone is so careful.

Exhibit A: When Jen Gerson wrote in Maclean’s that the UCP promise to hold a referendum on equalization was “one of the most misleading and idiotic vats of snake oil ever peddled to an angry and vulnerable population on the campaign trail,” Gerson was not only hyper-ventilating but wrong.