India is not the place to go for political success if you’re a Canadian politician.

This week, Alberta United Conservative Party (UCP) leader Jason Kenney went to India. Like Justin Trudeau’s trip earlier this year, it could cost him politically.

The governing New Democrats are already making political hay; on 18 September the NDP Trade Minister Deron Bilous said there was need for Alberta government’s trade representative in India to coordinate follow-up meetings in order to perform “damage control.” This stems, in part, from confusion sown among Kenney’s Indian hosts – one cabinet minister wrote on social media that he had met with “Mr. Jason Kenney, Hon’ble Minister, Alberta, Canada.” India Today called him, in a headline, a “Canadian leader.”

Another pitfall for Kenney is Former Progressive Conservative Cabinet Minister Thomas Lukaszuk’s relentless monitoring and criticism of the trip (Lukaszuk himself ran into trouble on a foreign trip when his cell phone bill hit $20,000). He pointed out a potential funding catch-22 on Facebook, explaining that Kenney receives partisan funding and legislature funding; if he was in India using UCP funds, he could be in major trouble, because money raised in Alberta for political purposes cannot be used outside the province. Similarly, partisan money cannot fund Official Opposition activities. Kenney has said part of the funding for his trip is from the UCP coffers and the rest is personal.

As Transportation Minister Brian Mason put it: “(Kenney is) either there on an approved trip as the leader of the Official Opposition, in which case he’s not entitled to take outside money to be funded by partisan donations, or he’s going there as a private individual and not doing government business. But he can’t have it both ways.”

While Kenney’s trip may get him in trouble with Elections Alberta, it alludes to the bigger picture: Mr. Kenney is more concerned with being Prime Minister than Premier.

Some here in Alberta see Kenney’s plan like this: leave the federal Conservative Party so that he’s not tainted by what many people foresee as an inevitable loss in 2019 (rarely do first-term governments lose their first try at re-election); “rescue” the conservative movement in its Alberta heartland, by uniting warring tribes; “rescue” Alberta from the NDP; and finally, after bringing back the Alberta Advantage, balanced books and a thriving economy, become leader of the CPC and, finally, Prime Minister. That last step would come right around the 8-10 year mark of a Trudeau premiership, a timeframe at which almost all political leaders lose the faith of the electorate.

A trip to India shows that Kenney is still thinking about international issues, that he is still a globally-known statesman. It also doesn’t hurt that it will provide many photo-ops that can be used when micro-targeting ethnic communities — the Indian diaspora is one of Canada’s largest and most politically active.

I recently read Niall Ferguson’s massive biography of Henry Kissinger. For much of his pre-Nixon career, he was the foreign policy advisor of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller. It really made no sense on the surface that Rockefeller retained one of the premier thinkers on strategy and geopolitics, until, with the hindsight of history, we learn that he was continuously planning to run for president (he proved to be very poor at winning delegates at the conventions), despite continuously playing coy.

Kenney is as critical of Prime Minister Trudeau as he is of Alberta Premier Rachel Notley. And while that may be good electoral politics in Alberta — Trudeau is still a curse word here, and no Alberta politician lost running against Ottawa instead of their local opponents — it makes inter-provincial and federal-provincial relations more difficult than they need to be.

Kenney is setting the stage he sees himself stepping onto in the future. It makes intuitive sense that India was chosen as Kenney’s destination when he is setting himself up to be the anti-Trudeau. The Prime Minister travelled to India and made a fool of himself, but Kenney can go there and be a respectable statesman. If local retail politics is served, all the better. And the photo-ops that will soon be used to show Indian-Albertans that Kenney cares about them, will be equally useful in Toronto and Vancouver suburbs.

Like Rockefeller, Kenney is playing coy about his larger aspirations, but he’s very much acting as if he were running for prime minister, not premier.

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