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Kenneyism: Reckoning with what Alberta's ultimate political weirdo has done to us
1.1k Plays9 months ago
Jeremy Appel joins the pod to talk about his newly published book, Kenneyism: Jason Kenney's Pursuit of Power. We discuss how Jason Kenney's ghost continues to haunt us still and the effects his time in politics have wrought at the federal and provincial level.
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Transcript
Introduction to Jeremy Appel and 'Kennyism'
00:00:13
Speaker
friends and enemies, welcome to The Progress Report. I am your host, Duncan Kinney, recording here today in Muskegon, Muskegon, otherwise known as Edmonton, Alberta, here in Treaty 6 territory on the banks of the mighty Kasiska-Sawanissippi, or the North Saskatchewan River.
00:00:27
Speaker
Joining us today is a friend of the show and staff writer at the progress report, Jeremy Appel. Jeremy has written a new book and is a published author, which you should all buy and read called Kennyism, Jason Kenny's pursuit of power published by Dundern Press. Jeremy, congratulations on writing a whole ass book and being a published author. And he's here to talk about not only the stuff in the book, but also why you should buy it. So Jeremy, how are you doing? I'm doing pretty well.
00:00:55
Speaker
You know, all things considered, a bit nervous about, you know, the book actually coming out and sort of seeing how much attention it's gonna get.
Importance of 'Kennyism' in understanding Alberta politics
00:01:09
Speaker
Yeah, now you've written the book. That's the easy part. Now you just have to go out and sell it, right? That seems to be a bit harder. Early indications have been encouraging. For example, last week it was the top-selling book in Edmonton.
00:01:26
Speaker
according to the Alberta Book Publishers Association. So that's exciting. I beat out Naomi Klein's Doppelganger in Jean Vellant's Fire Weather. Both very good books, much better than mine. But yeah, I mean, that's just an Edmonton, right? And
Jason Kenney's political influence and 'second draft of history'
00:01:52
Speaker
Well, with the help of this podcast, you'll be going number one, every local city across, let's say the prairies, but I mean, it's a scary thing to write a book. You know, everyone gets to read it. Everyone gets to either say, golly gee, this guy's super fucking smart or he's, you know, a huge fucking idiot. But you know, I am obviously biased. You know, we work together, your colleagues, but yeah.
00:02:14
Speaker
The issue of Jason Kenney is, and Jason Kenney as a figure is someone who we have both written about kind of extensively over the years, given our kind of status as independent, Alberta political journalists. And, you know, you have this book, I think, fills an important place. It does a lot of important work. And the reason why I think it's worth reading and the reason why I think it's like worth doing in the first place is something that you mentioned kind of early on in your book, which is
00:02:47
Speaker
You're up front with the reader that you're not writing some insider account. This isn't some kind of hack biography. You're writing a second draft of history, which, again, useful. You want to try and understand and explain the outsized impact that this very strange
00:03:05
Speaker
and powerful politician has in Alberta and across this country. But there's a line in there about his ghost continuing to haunt us that I think is true. Jason Kenny's ghost is going to continue to haunt us, even though he's dropped out of sight for the time being. You and I and my kids and everyone else in our lives are going to have to reckon with this guy's impact. And I think this book does a good job of reckoning with that.
Top five worst actions of Jason Kenney
00:03:33
Speaker
So to that end, I've kind of asked you to come up with the top five worst things that Jason Kenney has done kind of in his life as a politician. I've come up with my own list. You've got your own list. We're going to go back and forth until the podcast is done. So, you know, do you feel that's a good preamble and do you want to go first? Is there anything else? Actually, I should say, is there anything else you want to say about the book before we get into all the terrible things that Kenney has done?
00:04:02
Speaker
Yeah, no, well, I appreciate that its message resonated with you. I do think that not just in Alberta, but in Canada, I mean, we're living in the political reality that Jason Kenney helped shape. And that, yeah, I mean, what we're seeing now with this
00:04:28
Speaker
brutal assault on the rights of transgender Albertans under the guise of parental rights, even though the proposed policy constrains parental rights if they want their kids
00:04:43
Speaker
if they want to support their children's gender transition is, I mean, very much something that I would imagine has Jason Kenney's approval and is something he would have done if he
Kenney's beliefs and their political impact
00:04:59
Speaker
was still in power. I think he would have taken it to the next step, which is, I mean, right. I mean, he made it harder for
00:05:10
Speaker
students to create and be in GSAs. And that, I mean, you can draw a direct line from that to the policies in Saskatchewan in New Brunswick, as I've written in my newsletter. And
00:05:31
Speaker
Danielle Smith's parental rights policies, right? And I think unlike Smith, who I don't think actually believes any of this stuff, she just is surrounded by people who do, who have put pressure on her to bring forward this legislation, which in her mind is like a compromise between what Take Back Alberta wants, which is to just,
00:05:59
Speaker
like eliminate transgender people completely and what most people want, which is for trans people to be supported and treated with dignity. I think Kenny actually would believe believes in this in this stuff because of his deeply held
00:06:26
Speaker
religious and political beliefs that there's a natural hierarchy in order to things that can't be upset. Yeah, I mean, the thing with Smith following in the footsteps of Kenny Wright is that like, you know, every shitbag fascist politician is kind of enabled by the fascist shitbag politician that came before it.
00:06:55
Speaker
and the slow degradation of rights, already rights, of standard of living, of just attacking marginalized and vulnerable people. What Kenny did five years ago with GSAs is just like the next iteration of that is just going after trans kids.
00:07:14
Speaker
Yeah. Would Kenny have done it? Absolutely. Does he even believe it? I mean, he's certainly much more of a religious fundamentalist than Daniel Smith is. And your book goes into all sorts of weird shit that Jason Kenny believes and was taught and his own kind of self-radicalization, being a culture warrior for the Pope and all that shit.
00:07:39
Speaker
The one thing about Jason Kenney is that he is a weirdo. He is a strange person. And the fact that this fucking weirdo was so politically influential is bad. And it sucks that we have
Writing 'Kennyism' and exploring Kenney's background
00:07:50
Speaker
to live in his shadow. But here we are, we get to kind of reckon with it and examine how we got to the place that we're in. And no, I don't think this attack on trans kids from the UCP and the back of our identity is what happens without Jason Kenney as premier first.
00:08:08
Speaker
What were the weirdest corners that you went down reading this book? Well, just Kenny's conversion to Catholicism, that was really weird. He was baptized Anglican. His family, as so far as I could tell, wasn't particularly religious.
00:08:35
Speaker
But he was sort of always enamored by the Vatican, which I think is important as the sort of empty symbol of authority that you can sort of place whatever sort of values you want in it. Of course, the Catholic Church has its own teachings, but I mean, Kenny is more Catholic certainly than the current Pope, right?
00:09:06
Speaker
His former roommate at St. Michael's University School in Victoria, this sort of posh prep school that his parents sent him to and where he spent the first two years of high school,
00:09:27
Speaker
his former roommate told me he remembers vividly Kenny getting up in the middle of the night to actually go see the Queen. It wasn't the Pope, although the Pope also visited later and he was super hyped about that, but he woke up in the middle of the night to sort of get a good spot to see the Queen at the legislature in Victoria.
00:09:55
Speaker
So this sort of crown fetishism I thought is really weird and then of course it comes full circle at the end of his political career when he fucks off to the UK
00:10:15
Speaker
to pay his respects to the Queen to stand in line. And he's doing like news interviews from the queue, right? And you could tell, I think it was an interview on Global or CTV, but you could tell the host was like really,
00:10:36
Speaker
like practically laughing at him, right? Like, what are you doing here? And Kenny was like, well, you know, I'm doing my job as premier, but I thought I should pay my respects to the queen because it's like losing a relative, right? And then in terms with the Vatican, so when in his first year at University of San Francisco,
00:11:06
Speaker
which is a private Catholic university, right? San Francisco State is the public one. He writes this op-ed in the student paper there, the foghorn, after the Pope's visit there, that as a non-Catholic, this is before he'd converted, he was appalled
00:11:35
Speaker
that there are Catholics on campus, or people who call themselves Catholic who don't take the Vatican's teachings seriously, and that this offends him as someone who's not Catholic, but admires the Catholic.
00:11:53
Speaker
Yeah, he's just a weird guy with this like weird, you know, fundamentalist Catholicism and and monarchism kind of animating his politics kind of underneath all his politics and yeah like if you were a monarchist in 2024 you are a weird fucking person.
00:12:09
Speaker
and if you feel like you have a personal relationship with Queen Liz like yeah you're you're a little fucked up in the head and yeah he said that out loud to the fucking media to the public and uh just an unapologetic freak just an apologetic freak and just to even
Detailed coverage of Kenney's political journey
00:12:27
Speaker
pivot into more current events uh Kate Charles who hasn't even fucking appeared on our money yet or
00:12:32
Speaker
nor do we have any portraits of him hanging in our public buildings as Cancer and might die soon, so like, um, I guess maybe we're not gonna have a bunch of shit named after King Charles, but, uh, fuck, I dunno.
00:12:46
Speaker
All of this to say, Jason Kenney's a freak and a weirdo, and also has been incredibly influential. And I appreciate the psychic damage that you took on to write, you know, what is this? Like a 400, 300, 200 page book? 315 pages on the dot. But that includes like the index in footnotes. So yeah, I think the book itself is like,
00:13:14
Speaker
I don't know, 280 pages. Yeah, there's a prologue and a forward, which I had pointed out. Yeah, forward from Dave Klayman-Haga, who I think does a really good job saying explicitly that Jason Kenney is a weirdo.
00:13:33
Speaker
Yes, he does. He comes right out. I think he quotes Sean Speer. No, no, he doesn't quote Sean Speer, but I think he does. No, I quote Sean Speer. Sean Speer would never say Kenny's a weirdo. Because to a guy like Sean Speer, and you know what, that retrospective interview Kenny did with the Hub after Smith was elected
00:13:54
Speaker
leader of the UCP was very helpful because, of course, Kenny wouldn't talk to me for this book. So that was helpful very much in sort of having journalists who got access to him so I could get a sense of sort of what he thinks his legacy is. And I mean, Sean Speer,
00:14:24
Speaker
called him one of the most influential conservative politicians of the past 30 years. And I think that is spot on. I mean, Sean Speer would know, right? I mean, he is a total conservative insider hack, but I don't think he was engaging in hyperbole there.
00:14:43
Speaker
And then there are other two, right? You know, Steve Paken had a book in the early 2000s called The Life where he just interviews essentially like career politicians and talks about how cool they are and interesting they are. And yeah, of course, it's cringe.
00:15:04
Speaker
but there was some useful information in there from Kenny just about his like background in life that I kind of was able to weave into the narrative and of course
00:15:15
Speaker
In true, pagan form, Kenny, everything Kenny says, he just takes that face value and doesn't like critically interrogate it at all. But that allowed me to do so, right? Having that as a sort of primary source. And then, you know, like Paul Wells as well, in his book on Harper, there's some good stuff from Kenny in there about his...
00:15:44
Speaker
His sort of his strategy right in the Harper government. I'm sort of bringing immigrant communities into the fold Which was again very Informative for my purpose About how he made a conscious effort to like be in
00:16:09
Speaker
you know, sort of quote unquote ethnic media to be a constant presence there and sort of get the message out to conservative elements in these various ethno-cultural communities that the conservative party isn't anti-immigrant, that we actually share a lot of your values. And he was successful in doing that, right? I mean, the reason Harper got a majority
00:16:38
Speaker
was in large part due to Kenny's tireless efforts in these suburban writings in the GTA and the greater Vancouver area, where there are lots of immigrants. And that was a big part of the sort of Harper majority strategy because they realized, right, Mulroney's coalition
00:17:07
Speaker
which was soft Quebec nationalists, big city business elites, and then Western Canadian populace. The new Conservative Party, the Reform and PC merger, could
00:17:30
Speaker
The Quebec nationalists weren't interested in what they were selling, right? Because they're sort of fiscal conservatism.
00:17:44
Speaker
full-throated embrace of neoliberalism, even beyond what Brian Mulroney was proposing, didn't jibe with soft Quebec nationalists. So it was like, okay, what's that third leg for our stool to stand on? And Kenny was like, immigrants, we need...
Kenney's influence on Canadian politics
00:18:04
Speaker
We need to extend the benefits of Anglo-Canadian white supremacy to a select group of intimate immigrants who can put us over the top.
00:18:12
Speaker
Right, exactly. And it worked. And I think you see Paul Yev doing that again. I think, you know, our friend of the show, Nora Loretto, interviewed me for a newsletter about the book and she asked me, like, who is the Jason Kenney of today? And I thought that was a very good question. And I mean, the first I think is Melissa Lanceman. I think she's doing
00:18:39
Speaker
the work Kenny did formerly in the federal conservatives of bringing in these communities that were not part of the conservative coalition before and cultivating
00:18:55
Speaker
you know, reactionary elements, right? Because they're right-wingers in every type of community. I mean, with Lansman, her asset is her sort of connection to the 2SLGBTQ plus community, right? To find, you know, reactionary gaze to bring on side, but also like reaching out to like the sort of conservative Iranian
00:19:26
Speaker
exile community, you know, a lot of like monarchists, but also just people who are against the Shah.
00:19:38
Speaker
And yeah, so and then my, my, and then I also said, I think Danielle Smith is also today's Jason Kenney, which I think some people would find controversial. But as we discussed earlier, the worst things that she's doing are things that Jason Kenney would have done where he had survived. No, I definitely think she's picking up his mantle. And, you know, I don't have a smooth segue into this. But now that I think we have done the preamble on the book, remember by the book, go by
00:20:07
Speaker
the book is, you know, let's get into kind of Kenny's legacy, you know, the worst things that he has done as a politician. And just for context, you can pick anything he's ever done, federal or provincial.
Kenney's environmental policies and controversies
00:20:20
Speaker
I've got two federal and three provincial in my top five. I don't know if our top fives are going to overlap either because we did not talk about this beforehand as all good podcasters should do. But I do want to start. Do you want me to go first?
00:20:34
Speaker
My number five is what I called shooting the messenger during the climate crisis. I'm of course talking about his fight back strategy against environmentalists that he called for in the 2019 UCP platform, and then he did. Two things, of course, the war room,
00:21:04
Speaker
and the inquiry into anti-Albertan environmentalists. And I think that that was important because as the climate crisis was becoming increasingly urgent, rather than taking efforts to
00:21:30
Speaker
wind down oil and gas production, which is what's needed. And to advance renewable energy, he decided to dedicate a lot of resources to smearing environmentalist, right?
00:21:45
Speaker
Oh, I remember this quite clearly. I remember a lot about the public inquiry, such as it was. It wasn't very public, nor was it an inquiry into foreign-funded, what was the framing even, foreign-funded environmentalists? Yeah, so it was based on Vivian Krause's work, which I talk about in the book.
00:22:04
Speaker
I think Sandy Girasino at the National Observer did a fantastic job just completely and thoroughly debunking it. And Vivian Krause's work, of course, is based on Ezra LaVance's earlier work back during the Harper years, right? But before Ezra was
00:22:34
Speaker
semi cast out of polite conservative society. Talking about how the tar sands are so ethical, therefore anyone who opposes them is unethical and is supporting Saudi Arabia and Nigeria and Iran and all these other oil producers. And so Vivian Krause sort of builds on this.
00:23:01
Speaker
and says that there's this conspiracy of American interests to target to single out the oil sands for international condemnation because they are the most ethical source of oil. And the insinuation there, she doesn't explicitly say it.
00:23:23
Speaker
But the insinuation there is that it's being done to actually benefit American oil and gas interests. Of course, all this ignores the fact that Alberta's tar sands produce bitumen, which is uniquely emissions intensive to just get out of the ground, let alone refine it into crude oil.
00:23:52
Speaker
but by shifting the criteria for judging the oil from
00:24:03
Speaker
like actual environmental criteria in science to this metaphysical, ethical criteria, it's able to present what's clearly like an unsustainable enterprise in Northeastern Alberta as this moral crusade, which is very helpful for Kenny. And I draw a contrast in the book between
00:24:32
Speaker
when Notley and Shannon Phillips introduced their climate plan, right? They have like most, right, I think four of the five big oil companies, CEOs on stage, maybe all five, but it's in the book.
00:24:52
Speaker
But environmentalists, indigenous leaders, right, they were trying to build this like broad coalition between people who want to protect the environment and people who want to destroy it for profit. Right. This very conciliatory approach. They fast forward to 2019 in Jason Kenney holds his press conference announcing the creation of the war room.
00:25:22
Speaker
And you've got the inquiry and the worry you can probably put together in the same kind of bucket, right? Of, you know, Jason Kenny's fight back strategy.
00:25:31
Speaker
Right, but there's, you know, he has Vivian Krause up there. He's got Robbie Picard from Oil, Sand, Strong up there, who's holding up a picture of Tsipora Berman with her face crossed out, right? And Kenny had this really like obsessive hatred of Tsipora Berman, who was upon the request of the oil and gas industry
00:26:05
Speaker
placed into a leadership role on the sort of oil sands advisory panel that the NDP created. And I think Sephora was actually probably the best interview I did for the book. She was very candid and like reflective on her sort of role in all this and the backlash that she faced, including getting assaulted by some guy at
00:26:32
Speaker
the Edmonton Airport, which Kenny of course very much played into and she left the MDP panel.
00:26:44
Speaker
they sort of agreed that she would step down. And then Kenny only amplified his attacks on her because once she wasn't constrained by sort of sitting at the table with oil and gas industry, she became more vocal in her anti-pipeline advocacy and Kenny would always highlight, remember this person was appointed to an NDP
00:27:04
Speaker
panel. So it also got very personal with his attacks on Sephora Vermin and then of course Ed Whittingham. That was another really extraordinary aspect of the UCP platform at the time, right? Just saying fire Ed Whittingham from the Alberta Energy regulator, which the NDP appointed him to in it lasted a few months. But anyways,
00:27:28
Speaker
My point is that the War Room, of course, quickly became a laughing stock. You know, I played a minor role in that story when I wrote an op-ed sort of mocking the War Room and I got an email from their comms director that CC'd my boss demanding space in the Medicine Hat News to rebut the
00:27:54
Speaker
inaccuracies in my article, which the Medicine Hat News did publish. And there was no rebuttal of any inaccuracies. It was actually like really boring. Just a bunch of boring propaganda.
00:28:15
Speaker
But I think the funniest War Room mishap would probably be the feud it started with Netflix over its Bigfoot family movie. It wasn't even about the tar sands, right? It was about... It was spent in Alaska, but it did say mean things about oil and gas, and that the villain was an oil and gas executive, essentially, so yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It had a petition on it.
00:28:41
Speaker
Yeah, and this made the international headlines. Al Jazeera did a story on it. Kenny just saying that calling this kid's movie like vicious and like inflammatory. So that would be the highlight of the war room. And what's interesting is this inquiry that's then launched with by headed by UCP donor and accountant Steve Allen.
00:29:08
Speaker
keeps getting deadline extensions. And not only that, but it's frames of reference keep shifting to make it more broad and also less specific, right? Like at first it was like to look into this foreign funding misinformation, I believe. Initially it was supposed to be like, oh, they're telling dirty, nasty lies about our precious
00:29:38
Speaker
beautiful oil sands and I was like, well, you can't really have a public inquiry that like starts from its premise that there's already misinformation that everything. Yeah. Yeah. So they add if any to the terms. Um, and then also Steve Allen comes out and he's like, well, actually my job isn't, I'm not actually qualified to determine the veracity of environmentalist claims. And so
00:30:06
Speaker
And then basically, it comes out with its report, which I believe you got a draft copy of, at least part of it. And it's like, yeah, I mean, everything's above board, like environmentalist or
00:30:26
Speaker
some money. They did get some money over the years, not nearly the billions of dollars that Kenny and the UCP claimed or Vivian Krause, let alone. And then it didn't really matter what the report said. The report was just an excuse for Jason Kenny and Sonia Savage, the energy minister at the time, to declare victory and run and be like, oh, yeah, well, it said that money went to him. And we think they're bad. And the case closed, everyone. And
00:30:52
Speaker
you know, it kind of became this ongoing kind of open sore and I think they were kind of kindly, I think they were happy when it finally ended because, you know, this guy that they had, you know, kind of haplessly appointed to this role to kind of
00:31:06
Speaker
really pin down and create propaganda for why important funded environmentalists were bad and were doing bad things and all of this money was flowing to them to do bad things. But also a real funny part about that, I believe it was Lisa Johnson at the Edmonton Journal reported that the inquiry report itself went after the war room and said it's done more harm than good.
00:31:37
Speaker
Did have some mild criticism of the war. Yeah, which was delightful. But as you said, I mean, it's easy to sort of dismiss the outcome of both the war room and in the inquiry as, you know, a
00:31:56
Speaker
a flop, a blunder, a nothing burger. But I think, as Sandy Girasino quite aptly noted in a very powerful piece she wrote once the inquiry came out, that the purpose wasn't actually to find anything or dispute any factual errors. It was to target
00:32:23
Speaker
environmentalists or politicians who were more climate conscious than the UCP, which is low bar, um, for, um, a program, right? To drag their names to the mud and cast the shroud of suspicion over their activities. And in, in, in, in, in, in, if you look at it in that respect, it wasn't
00:32:50
Speaker
the failure that I think it's easy to dismiss it as, right? If you don't accept the purpose behind this fightback strategy at face value and you look at the actual function it's served, right? And so that's why I think it's one of the worst things Jason Kenney did. There you go.
00:33:13
Speaker
number five on your list, though it's funny that it's always funny when you kind of ask someone to kind of come up with a list, you know, how you organize it. I mean, mine is in no particular order. And in fact, if I were to kind of tell you how it's organized, it's kind of like my first two are kind of Jason Kenny as a federal politician stuff. And my final three are Jason Kenny as a provincial, as a premier. But the first one on my list of top Kenny of
00:33:40
Speaker
Jason Kennedy's top five worst, most terrible things is something we're still kind of largely living with today and something that people who want to become citizens of Canada still have to contend with, which is when he was immigration minister under Stephen Harper, he, with the help of his kind of loyal toady, Chris Champion, rewrote the citizenship guide. Ah, yes. And you cover this kind of extensively early on in the book.
00:34:08
Speaker
And, you know, this citizenship guide is essentially the guide you give to people who have come to Canada, who are trying to become citizens, essentially you have to take a test in order to kind of become Canadian. And you have, this is the study guide that you must use in order to kind of like take the test and eventually become Canadian. And Jason Kenney with the help of kind of Chris Champion,
Nationalistic shift in Canadian citizenship guide
00:34:32
Speaker
this, what does he identify as? He's not really an academic, he's kind of like a,
00:34:37
Speaker
you say Chris Champion is an academic? Well, according to the UCP, he is a respected academic and military veteran. Very relevant that he's a military veteran. Are you saying you don't support the troops Duncan?
00:34:56
Speaker
I don't support Chris Champion, but essentially Chris Champion and Jason Kenney came in and redefined kind of what it meant to be Canadian to a whole bunch of people who were trying to live and become Canadian. And, you know, the guy became this kind of highly nationalistic document, you know, glorifying the military, highlighting the, quote, enormity of sacrifices made by our men and women in uniform. You know, Jason Kenney said this was far more important
00:35:23
Speaker
people to learn then learning that like potash is an important industry in Saskatchewan or whatever. You know Kenny's monarchism which is something we've already touched on kind of shown through the document. You've got a quote here from the monarchist league of Canada chairman telling them he was thrilled with the prominent placement given to the crown and the updated guide. You know he essentially got to like rewrite this document that
00:35:49
Speaker
people have to read. And he just got to turn it into this like, all the same shit that he's obsessed with, he just got it essentially stuffed in there. Right. And that's a big part of what so this notion of Kennyism, I didn't coin that that was John Carla this. He wrote his PhD at York University actually about Jason Kenney's time as the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration sort of formulated this
00:36:19
Speaker
ideology of Kennyism based on that, that I sort of token expanded on a bit, but he calls this neoconservative multiculturalism, right? That this is a good example of that, where the sort of rhetoric of diversity and multiculturalism is embraced, but it's done so
00:36:50
Speaker
in a way that is very much ideologically driven. So it doesn't matter where you come from, what your background is, as long as you accept certain ideological precepts, which are really reflected in this citizenship guide, which is still the citizenship guide, right?
00:37:12
Speaker
Yeah, it's only been lightly updated, right? Like, I don't think it's really seen a significant rewrite since... Well, they updated it because a big controversy at the time was the fact that it didn't include anything about LGBTQ rights in the document in Canada. He left that out.
00:37:31
Speaker
Except when they were talking about an Olympic swimmer whose name I can't remember. Mark Tewksbury. He came to speak to my elementary school class. I remember Mark Tewksbury. Yeah, they mentioned that he is like an LGBTQ icon in Canada, but that was it. And so they updated that to note that gay marriage is legal in Canada, despite the best efforts of Kenny and the conservative party, most of the conservative party.
00:38:01
Speaker
And yeah, it became this, you know, hyper nationalist militaristic document that is very much reflective of neoconservative ideology, which in contrast with neoliberalism is this embrace of sort of
00:38:27
Speaker
nationalism in tradition and military might and a much more sort of collectivist philosophy than neoliberalism. And it's used sort of often because most neoconservatives are neoliberal in terms of economic policy as Jason Kenney is, but it's sort of used to give shape
00:38:56
Speaker
to the chaos created out of neoliberalism dismantling all our social structures. And so immigrants, again, we're under Kenny, we're welcome to come to Canada. In fact, immigration increased under Harper. But the
00:39:22
Speaker
criteria under which immigrants were selected to come to Canada were restructured to make it more about what can you do for us, right? What jobs can you fill? What education level do you have? Can you speak English and French, right? And that was another asset. And so this was also used to
00:39:52
Speaker
Again, as part of recruiting sort of higher status immigrants who are more educated, more proficient in English or French, right? By making this citizenship guide much more difficult for people who are new to this country and ensuring that those people who passed the test would be
00:40:22
Speaker
indoctrinated already into this neoconservative vision of what it means to be Canadian. And the last bit on the citizenship guide is that this Chris Champion, Jason Kennedy collab was also the first real instance of barbaric cultural practices kind of entering the cultural and conservative lexicon specifically. There was a section there about how Canada is tolerant, but we're not
00:40:52
Speaker
If you do shit that we don't like, we don't like that. And this was on the page that mentioned kind of barbaric cultural practices. There was a picture of a woman in a hijab, which is an absolute racist dog whistle. But that's all for me. That's my first one. What's your second? Yeah, and just one more thing on that. This was something that Kenny in Champion
00:41:19
Speaker
thought with bureaucrats over, right, who were sort of uneasy about making it this hyper political document. And, and the bureaucrats just totally caved, right? The, they let Chris Champion write a draft of the guide, which was unheard of. At the time letting a political staffer actually write this document that's supposed to be done by bureaucrats, but
00:41:46
Speaker
Kenny and Champion were so insistent that it be this way, the sort of bureaucracy as... Griffiths? Griffiths? Yeah, Andrew Griffiths. Yeah, and this kind of weak need bureaucrat just totally rolled over when it came to Kenny and Champion. Yeah, totally. And that also, I think, you can tie
00:42:12
Speaker
to the curriculum, which as you exposed, one of several scoops of yours that I cite in the book, was probably written by Chris Champion.
Mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic by Kenney
00:42:25
Speaker
Well, just you wait. You might be surprised by a further best, worst thing ever. So what's your next worst thing ever? My next worst, so I actually did
00:42:37
Speaker
the opposite of you in that my first three are him as premier and then my top two are him as cabinet minister in the federal government. But my number four is the best summer ever. Yeah, this one's on my list, too. I'm glad you got it in there. Is it higher on your list? I don't have it ranked, but I'm fine to just have some crossover. We can both talk about it. It's fine.
00:43:06
Speaker
Okay, yeah, so best summer ever. Basically, in early 2021, you really see the fractures in the UCP develop along essentially urban and rural lines about how to address the pandemic with the rural caucus saying that we shouldn't do anything, right? Late 2020,
00:43:35
Speaker
Kenny, which was the, right, the second wave of COVID was the deadliest in Alberta. And because of that, Kenny was dragged kicking and screaming to impose these restrictions, which didn't make any sense, right? This was when you could, you couldn't hang out with like a friend outside, outdoors, but you could go with them to the mall.
00:44:03
Speaker
which was hoping that reduced capacity, it's unclear who was enforcing this capacity restriction, but it was just this mishmash of restrictions and exceptions that didn't make any sense. And they started reopening in 2021, a phased reopening, right, based on hospitalizations. And I believe they get to phase three,
00:44:34
Speaker
and hospitalizations go up. And so they halt the phased reopening and go back to what the restrictions were at the beginning of the year.
00:44:50
Speaker
And this is what precipitated this backlash, right? The rural caucus writes a letter to Kenny saying there should be no restrictions. Drew Barnes is going around saying that the restrictions are killing as many people as COVID.
00:45:10
Speaker
But at this point, Kenny's like, okay, they have a right free speech, they can say whatever they want, but we're doing this. This is our like, responsible approach, right? He used this phrase, responsible freedom, right? That he was urging everyone to exercise. This also came as
00:45:37
Speaker
the um while he had banned travel um in late 2020 um as a result of like skyrocketing covid cases uh some of his cabinet masters and his advisor uh were um were caught going on vacation right if you remember aloha gate um that also again pissed everyone off because
00:46:06
Speaker
the people who were against restrictions were saying, you're not even abiding by them, or your caucus isn't even abiding by them. And then people who supported restrictions was like, also, your caucus isn't abiding by them, these need to apply to everyone.
00:46:20
Speaker
And so basically, and then in spring 2021, while there's still lockdowns, there was this rodeo, rural Alberta, this anti-lockdown rodeo, I believe in Bowdoin, was it? Yeah, rural central Alberta.
00:46:39
Speaker
there is this anti-lockdown rodeo and Kenny was just like, this is a slap in the face to Albertans who are doing their best to, you know, keep the virus at bay. Meanwhile, like weeks earlier, he was saying that, yeah, I mean, COVID is just a flu. It's not a huge deal. And so there's this mixed messaging. Anyways, he needed a W is the point. And so he put all his chips
00:47:10
Speaker
He went all in on, if 70% of the population gets their first dose of the vaccine, they're going to get rid of all restrictions in time for Canada Day and Calgary State. This first stampede, too, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, because it was canceled in 2020 for the first time in like 100 years. And he went all in on this.
00:47:39
Speaker
At Stampede, he was confronted, the sort of anti-lockdown movement then shifted from being anti-lockdown to anti-vax because Kenny was telling people to get vaccinated. He got vaccinated himself and did a whole press event about it.
00:47:57
Speaker
And the UCP started selling Best Summer Ever, Alberta 2021, baseball caps on its website. I believe David has one, by the way. Oh, does he? I think so. He paid for one? I believe so, yeah.
00:48:13
Speaker
I mean, whatever, I have a maggot. Just a timeless souvenir from the best summer ever. But yeah, I think we're all remembering the same thing here, which is, Jason Kenny goes all in. He says, we're going to have the best summer ever, folks. COVID's finally over.
00:48:30
Speaker
some arbitrary, whatever, not a big deal. It's only going to affect old people who are going to die anyways, right? That sort of so he goes from
00:48:46
Speaker
being drag-kicking, screaming to impose basic restrictions that are totally contradictory and make no sense to just letting it fly. And doctors said, don't do this, right? Throughout the pandemic, doctors were saying, no, no, no, we need like a two week circuit breaker lockdown and then we can talk about reopening, but we need to... We need to directly address transmission that's happening
00:49:16
Speaker
And they noted that BC and Ontario both also had phased
00:49:26
Speaker
approaches towards reopening that were based on vaccination rates, but they were going a lot slower, right? The end point wasn't the summer, it was the fall. And they were also not just looking at the first dose of the vaccine, but how many people had gotten both doses, right? Ken didn't do that. So mid-August, as predicted, Alberta's intensive care unit start
00:49:54
Speaker
setting records from the, even exceeding that in those that occurred in the second wave, which was the deadliest, the Delta wave
00:50:08
Speaker
was in effect. And at this point, Kenny decides to go on a three-week vacation. Yeah, he just pees out, right? Right. And we still don't know where he went. I couldn't find out. Again, there's a lot of rumors. I've heard rumors. I have two, but I wasn't going to publish them. Yeah, like he ended up somewhere in Europe with his buddy David Nightleg. But I was never able to kind of nail that down either. Yeah.
00:50:35
Speaker
But emissions keep climbing. On early September, he comes back and does a Facebook live, shows up and just says, all right, everyone, just be responsible, right? Personal responsibility. That's what's going to get us through this. Just even though you can
00:50:57
Speaker
go wherever you want. Maybe you shouldn't, right? Just again, this mixed messaging. By the end of September, there are 257 ICU patients in a province that just has 246 ICU beds. Dr. Verna Yu, who is then the CEO of AHS,
00:51:21
Speaker
said that the only reason that ICUs aren't completely overrun with patients is that people are dying. I know Dr. Elon Schwartz, who at the time was a physician at the University of Alberta,
00:51:40
Speaker
said, told New York Times, right, this made international news, that the Alberta health care system has collapsed. It's not their risk of collapsing anymore. It has collapsed. And so during this wave, it's still collapsing, folks.
00:51:56
Speaker
Yeah, oh, yeah. It's a process, right? And we're dealing with the consequences as a result of that. And Smith is used as an opportunity to dismantle AHS. So while the second COVID wave killed the most people in Alberta, I think the open for summer wave, which killed the second most people
00:52:22
Speaker
cause the largest chaos in the healthcare system with clear ramifications in the present. Danielle Smith is using that as a pretext to just dismantle AHS and sell off as much of it as she can get away with.
00:52:46
Speaker
starting with the parts that are already largely privatized like continuing care and of course mental health and addictions, the latter which I will get to shortly.
Kenney's impact on Alberta's education system
00:53:01
Speaker
Well, best summer ever is, yeah, it was kind of my catch-all for, you know, Jason Kenney's bungled COVID-19 response. And it's hard to think of kind of a worse politician and a politician who performed worse than Jason Kenney kind of during COVID, given the kind of contradictory things that he did and decisions that he made. And yeah, you know, best summer ever had the catchier tagline.
00:53:24
Speaker
as a catastrophe, but it was only the second biggest wave of deaths from COVID-19, as you're saying, that the first wave really did kill the most people.
00:53:37
Speaker
But it makes sense that we both- The second wave. Yes, the second wave killed the most people. And it does make sense that we both had this on our list. This is one of his indelible legacies is just how many people he killed due to his public health decisions and how much harm was done to the healthcare system that we are, again, still living with that we still have not recovered from. It makes a lot of sense.
00:54:01
Speaker
For my second one, I don't know where we're at. It doesn't really matter. And we're going to have to kind of hurry this up as well, Jeremy, as we get closer to the ends of our list. I'm going to go back to Chris Champion and the harm that Jason Kenney and Chris Champion did by introducing the new social studies curriculum, K-6 social studies curriculum.
00:54:24
Speaker
You know, you write about this extensively in the book. You cite some of the work that I and many other journalists did kind of digging into this file. But yeah, Chris Champion shows up again. And Jason Kennedy tapped him on the soldier to essentially write the entire K-6 social studies curriculum.
00:54:42
Speaker
And to no one's surprise, it's absolute white supremacist, you know, monarchist, military-filating dogshit. And there is a huge backlash from teachers and from parents. Chris Champion is, you know,
00:55:00
Speaker
He's minimized. There's this attempt to kind of minimize the work that he did and how influential he was in the creation of this curriculum. But as my freedom of information request showed and some of my reporting showed, he was integral to the writing of this social studies curriculum. And it is just, again, the UCP kind of seeing the outcry
00:55:29
Speaker
did walk back some kind of some of the worst stuff. But this guy still essentially wrote the K-6 fucking social studies curriculum. And yeah, it sucks. And I put it up there with one of the worst things that Kenny's ever done. Just maybe I'm a kid who's a great one, but you know, that's that's that's where I'm at.
00:55:49
Speaker
No, it absolutely is. And I think in the chapter where I discuss it, where I discuss Kenny's approach to education writ large, I spend like half the chapter just talking about the social studies curriculum in particular, but place it in the context of like the broader chaos Kenny was sowing.
00:56:15
Speaker
in the public education system at the time, right? And that was a part of it, right? I mean, first thing Lagrange did was to rip up the NDP's agreement with the Teachers Association that declared them
00:56:33
Speaker
an equal partner in developing curriculum, right? Say, no, no, no, they're just one of many stakeholders. We need to consult other people too. And so it also needs to be viewed as an attack on
00:56:52
Speaker
labor rights for teachers, I think. And also, when you see this expansion of charter schools, and just in my view, and I think I observed this when it was happening, that I think the purpose was, again, to just create disarray in the public school system
00:57:21
Speaker
And essentially to leave, I mean the curriculum ended up getting put on ice and now apparently it's going to come back this year and Lord knows what it's going to look like. I think it will probably be less egregious but will probably
00:57:45
Speaker
have a lot of the same problems as the original did, and then the UCP can just say, look, we've been over this so many times. Let's just pass it. We need our students to be learning and modern curriculum. But having such a shoddy curriculum, it really downloads responsibility for how to teach
00:58:14
Speaker
And having such an outdated curriculum when it was put on ice, sort of downloaded responsibility onto individual teachers to figure out how to teach social studies to kids. And when you get to that point, then one type of education, whether it's private or charter or public, isn't necessarily
00:58:36
Speaker
better than the other. And it sort of breaks down these distinctions between public and private education that you saw the UCP doing under Kenny.
00:58:52
Speaker
Jason Kennedy just has an active antipathy towards public goods, towards public education in general. The end result of it's all the chaos caused by charter schools, by this curriculum thing, it's just a plus for him and his political project. If he's able to make public schools dysfunctional, great. He's a happy man and he's able to go to himself and his supporters and say, I did good.
00:59:18
Speaker
And, you know, he just largely, I mean, all the signs were there, right? Like, I remember all of the, like, same people who were banging on about trans kids these days were saying psychotic things about, you know, the curriculum that the NDP were bringing in themselves. You know, I think Jason Kenney was worried that, like, he said in some rally that, you know, pretty soon they won't call in themselves girl or boy, but they'll be calling each other comrade or whatever. And like, he would just make up stupid shit like that all the time. Which is awesome.
00:59:47
Speaker
which is awesome. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And again, it was the secretive rewrite created by NDP ideologues, even though they were simply continuing the very middle of the road approach of the Stelmak era PCs. And it wasn't without its flaws, the NDP curriculum, but it was something that
01:00:17
Speaker
had Kenny actually been interested in taking a constructive approach to education, he could have consulted with experts to fix rather than to create this curriculum advisory panel with no active teachers on it to, you know,
01:00:38
Speaker
turn kids into honest used car salespeople. Jason Kenney's relationship to public education is just tortured, right? Like he wants to be able to have a workforce that is educated, able to follow instructions and a manual and kind of make widgets and follow orders. But you know, you don't want to have them too educated. He's literally too much. And then they start learning about things that they shouldn't be learning about.
01:01:06
Speaker
That's the thing with why there is such an act of antipathy towards public education from the conservative political movement.
01:01:16
Speaker
Yeah, but I think Kenny's vision of education is one that's two-tiered, so you have the masses in these increasingly overcrowded, under-resourced public schools that are just being taught how to be honest-used car salespeople, and then you have the privileged
01:01:39
Speaker
families sending their kids to these specialized charter schools where they can be taught to sort of follow their dreams, right? And then with post-secondary, which I have at the end, which I mean the cuts to post-secondary education under the first few years of Kenny were, I mean,
01:02:03
Speaker
were massive, right, especially for arts-focused schools like the U of A. And, of course, the cuts meant tuition had to go up. And so then it also, post-secondary education becomes something that elites
01:02:27
Speaker
that is only attainable by elites who can be trusted to learn about history and the great works of the Western canon, which Kenny studied at the University of San Francisco, but never finished his degree,
01:02:49
Speaker
Um, whereas statue history, right? Yeah, right. And then, um,
01:02:59
Speaker
trade school became more accessible. There was a huge focus under Kenny of trades education and getting kids and as many kids as possible into trades education, beefing up that part of the education system. I mean, we could go on and on about education. We've written a lot about it, but what's your next one?
01:03:24
Speaker
Uh, is dismantling harm reduction services during the drug poisoning crisis.
Criticism of Kenney's drug policy
01:03:29
Speaker
Uh, right. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I think it was the most. Right. I mean, we talk about, uh, Kenny's policies leading to mass death during COVID and of course they did, but it's a lot harder to attribute all those deaths to him.
01:03:52
Speaker
to his policies during COVID, right? Because people were going to die of COVID, right? But his policies exacerbated the amount of people
01:04:04
Speaker
But the drug poisoning crisis, I mean, every single one of these deaths could have been prevented if there was a harm reduction infrastructure. Right. And there was a report that came out from Tara Moriarty at U of T that looked at excess deaths in Alberta during the pandemic and or during the first two years of the pandemic and it
01:04:35
Speaker
found that Alberta had about 10,000 excess deaths. So that's the amount of deaths more than you would expect in a typical year based on mortality rates. And the interesting part of Moriarty's finding was that it was, yes, the pandemic of course was part of that, but it was also the drug poisoning crisis.
01:05:04
Speaker
right, which of course really went into overdrive when the pandemic started. But Kenny laid the groundwork for these mass opioid overdoses by whittling away at Alberta's already minimal harm reduction infrastructure
01:05:27
Speaker
In his early days in office, of course, there was closing down arches in Lethbridge based on allegations of financial mismanagement, which were real, but they also suggested that this was criminal, that arches was engaging in fraud. And the Lethbridge police investigated it. They ended up accounting for the money that was missing.
01:05:56
Speaker
But by then, Kenny had already made his decision, no, we're closing it down. And that was the most frequent and supervised consumption site in North America because it was the one site in a city of 100,000 people and the First Nations reserves surrounding it and rural areas as well.
01:06:20
Speaker
And yeah, I mean, again, he sowed chaos in that sector. Also, right, Safeworks, the one supervised consumption site in Calgary, a city of 1.5 million people located in the heart of downtown.
01:06:42
Speaker
He announced plans to close it down and relocate it to two more bare bones overdose prevention sites elsewhere in the city. We still don't know where those are going to be. And Safer's is still open, right? But there's that cloud of uncertainty hanging over it. But most importantly,
01:07:06
Speaker
While he is reducing resources for existing harm reduction infrastructure, he's also introducing this recovery oriented system of care, which I did some reporting on for you. This is actually the first chapter I wrote for the book. I wrote for my proposal, just because I had written at length about it before.
01:07:31
Speaker
And yeah, the recovery racket, we were really the kind of first outlet to kind of get into detail and make those connections with like, what this what a recovery oriented system of care such I fucking hate that kind of term a turn of phrase, but what the recovery racket kind of looked like in practicality, right? Like,
01:07:51
Speaker
One, they were always going to overblow the numbers of how many beds they were creating, how many people were actually going to be able to get treatment, because you still can't really get treatment in Alberta if you really want it. And two, they were going to vastly overblow how effective getting people into treatment
01:08:07
Speaker
Would what it would mean to the to the opioid kind of or the drug poisoning crisis and this kind of cynical weaponization of recovery as The solution the only solution to the drug poisoning crisis over everything else to the detriment of harm reduction as you said, right? Yeah
01:08:29
Speaker
Yeah, and yeah, just this policy of just shoveling cash towards these private, abstinence-only recovery clinics at the expense of harm reduction resources was
01:08:50
Speaker
really reflective of, again, this neoconservative moralism that Jason Kenney was such a staunch proponent of, right? That the problem isn't in the increasingly toxic drug supply, it's actually the choices individuals are making to use drugs and they need to
01:09:17
Speaker
be prevented from doing that. And so on the campaign trail, it's interesting because Kenny was just taking this hard-edged law in order position that we can't help people, right, inject poison into themselves. He said, we need to cut off the drug supply.
01:09:42
Speaker
not tinker with it and we need to start arresting people. We need the federal government needs to be harder on China where fentanyl is being manufactured and all this. Then he takes and I think this is really in
01:09:59
Speaker
strategically smart approach is that he, through this recovery oriented system of care, he's able to put this compassionate face on the same old drug war policies that instead of just sending cops to bust people, which there's plenty of, it's no, we're going to give them the opportunity
01:10:22
Speaker
to start fresh, which is in itself good. Recovery should be more accessible. It's good that Kenny waived fees for recovery. But the approach, this rigid approach of abstinence only, this increasing integration of that recovery
01:10:46
Speaker
Oriented system of care into the law enforcement system, right making it so that cops That you have the option upon being arrested for a drug charge of just going to rehab Really reveals that this is the same old Lawton order drug war
01:11:09
Speaker
failed policy, but with a more compassionate veneer. And you've seen Danielle Smith, again, take it to its ultimate conclusion with her impending legislation to allow
01:11:27
Speaker
unhoused people to be forced into recovery, even though all evidence indicates that that will just lead to increased overdoses because if you're being forced into recovery, you're much more likely to relapse when you're out because it has to be something you want to do.
01:11:44
Speaker
And also Paul Yev, of course, has been really quiet about it since our drug poisoning numbers have now reached previously unforeseen highs. But in the few months where they had been lower, he was talking about if this is the approach. There was like two months of fucking like slightly lower than, not even pre-COVID, just like lower than the year before
01:12:13
Speaker
Yeah. And Mike Ellis and Kenny and the UCP were fucking taking victory laps saying, oh, our recovery oriented system of care is working. And it's like, shut the fuck up. No one, no, it's not. And two, yes, this year or the past year, 2023, we will have the highest amount of deaths from drug poisoning ever. Your recovery oriented system of care is not working. More people are dying and you can.
01:12:38
Speaker
talk about it, which is really what the kind of recovery-oriented system of care, the recovery racket system is. It's a public relations strategy. It's not meaningful public health. It's not a meaningful approach to the drug poisoning crisis. It's a way for conservatives to point at something and say, look what we're doing. We're doing something. We're doing something to address this huge problem that a lot of people are struggling with and that are
01:13:04
Speaker
that has affected tens of thousands of families. The numbers on drug poisoning are insane of the people affected by it, of family members and friends who have died. And again, as I said off the top when it came to this part, every one of these deaths is a preventable death. With COVID, some people were going to get COVID, some people were going to die. It was a novel virus. There was a lot that was unknown.
01:13:32
Speaker
But when it comes to drug poisoning, there are solutions. There is simply just no, the police and the politicians are simply not interested in pursuing them. And that this recovery racket bullshit is just a, it's a way to kind of like hold up a shiny object in front of everyone and say, look, this is what we're doing.
Kenney's refugee policies and their legacy
01:13:50
Speaker
Um, Jeremy, we are going long, so I'm going to have to cut you off. So my last one is, I'll just, and I'll keep it short. It's just, it's a, it's not even, uh, it's just a kind of emblematic of just what a racist piece of shit Kenny is. But it's when he was immigration minister, when he was putting up billboards in Hungary, telling Roma refugees. So these are people who are fleeing far right neo-Nazis who are coming to Canada as refugees, telling those people, telling those Roma folks not to come to Canada.
01:14:20
Speaker
just an incredibly vicious and racist thing to do against, again, one of the kind of most marginalized and most vulnerable groups in Hungary. You know, just an absolute dirtbag racist thing to do. And I always think about it whenever I think of just like some of the straight up most evil shit that Kenny has done.
01:14:38
Speaker
up there. What about you? What's your last one or last two? Well, that was my number two, though it could, and my number one is related to the refugee file. But just briefly, if I could give some background on the Roma billboards. So while Kenny was
01:15:04
Speaker
Again, bringing in more immigrants, but ones that were seen as useful to his larger political project. He was making it harder for refugees to settle in Canada.
01:15:21
Speaker
using rhetoric like bogus refugees and queue jumpers while he was actually bringing people in certain fields of work to the front of the queue, right? Like IT workers and physicians and people work in the oil sands and these upwardly mobile people. But when it came to refugees, he
01:15:49
Speaker
made it harder to seek asylum in Canada, particularly for refugees or refugee claimants from countries with which Canada was aligned geopolitically. So once Harper had his majority government,
01:16:09
Speaker
They passed legislation giving Kenny the power to declare certain countries as designated safe countries whose asylum seekers from these countries would then get one chance at the Immigration Refugee Board. If they'd lost, they would be deported.
01:16:35
Speaker
there would be no appeal process within the immigration refugee system. They could appeal to federal court, but they would have to leave the country in that time. Two of the countries listed were Czechia and Hungary, which have significant Roma populations fleeing, as you mentioned, neo-Nazi violence.
01:17:01
Speaker
And another country was Mexico, where people, there were documented instances of people being deported. Oh man, the details on the fucking Mexico families were just fucking heartbreaking, so brutal. Yeah. And so on the one hand, he was, these were countries he was waving visas for, for people to come visit from.
01:17:32
Speaker
maybe begin the process of immigrating from, but then if you're a refugee, if you're seeking asylum, he sought to make it harder for people to do so. So these billboards in Hungary boasted of how if you want to come to Canada, you better make sure you have a good case because we will deport you swiftly if you don't. And now often
01:17:57
Speaker
What Kenny and other neoconservative ideologues refer to as bogus refugees or people who are cheating the system are people who were rejected on a technicality, right? They didn't have their papers totally in order or
01:18:21
Speaker
you know, someone didn't show up to testify, these types of things that happen all the time. And so, of course, the solution would be to give the IRB more resources, but instead, it was no, we're cutting these people off, which leads me to my number one
01:18:41
Speaker
worse than Kenny did. And I think it's pretty interchangeable with number two in terms of where I'd place it is cutting healthcare for refugees or refugee claimants rather. So he cut a hundred million dollars in extended healthcare benefits for refugee claimants. So things like, like obviously basic healthcare refugee claimants get
01:19:08
Speaker
and they continue to get after Kenny cut funding, those things like dental care, eye care, and prescription drug coverage, which Kenny rationalized by saying, why are these people who may not even be legitimate refugees getting better healthcare coverage than most Canadians? And this is a classic Kennyism
01:19:33
Speaker
is right and he would do the same for in his early Canadian taxpayer federation days talking about politicians pensions right he got the MLA pension in Alberta like totally eliminated by Ralph Carne
01:19:52
Speaker
by saying, look how generous politicians' benefits are compared to average working-class people. It's like, yeah, average working-class people should have better benefits. But of course, when you're advocating harsh austerity, then that's just a pretext to cut everyone's benefits, which he freely admitted
01:20:19
Speaker
in an interview with his friend Ken White, who was at the Globe and Mail at the time, was the founding editor of National Post, I believe. But so you see this pitting
01:20:33
Speaker
the broader population, including established immigrant communities against refugee claimants, some of the most vulnerable people in the world. And this forced physicians to absorb the costs of providing care that was often life-saving to refugee claimants. But others, of course, weren't as fortunate if they didn't have a physician who
01:20:59
Speaker
decided to take a hit to their pocketbook to provide this care. And there were also because the policy was so convoluted and it had sort of an arbitrary cutoff date,
01:21:14
Speaker
there were refugee claimants who weren't getting extended health care when they were still eligible for it because they're under the impression and their physician was under the impression that was over. Now, these were the two, I would say, most draconian policies, the designated safe country list and the
01:21:38
Speaker
cutting health benefits for refugee claimants. They were also the two that were deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court and were thus reversed by Trudeau when he came to power. But the infrastructure there, this system that welcomes refugees, sorry, that welcomes immigrants with open arms if they are
01:22:07
Speaker
a valuable unit of economic growth, this increasing reliance on temporary foreign workers and vigilantly ensuring that they don't overstay the terms of their contract or work elsewhere.
01:22:35
Speaker
And the ability also to declare someone at the cabinet level a risk to public safety and have the RCMP incarcerate them without charges, that infrastructure is still in place under
Upcoming events for 'Kennyism' and conclusion
01:22:56
Speaker
Trudeau. He just sanded the rough edges off of
01:23:02
Speaker
what Kenyon Harper did that the Supreme Court said they couldn't do. All right, I think we're through our lists. Jeremy, this brings us to the end of our time together. What's the best way that people can find the book? Can you tell people about any kind of book signings and launch events that are coming up that people all across the party can get to?
01:23:26
Speaker
Okay, well, if you're listening on February the 6th, tonight I'm doing my official book launch with Graham Thompson. We're going to be talking about Jason Kenney's enduring political legacy at the aviary. The event is also going to be emceed by Colin Galant of Taproot Edmonton.
01:23:50
Speaker
uh not the conga lance i used to work with at medicine hat news there are two journalists conga lance in conga lance in alberta um i'm also going to be doing a signing at Audrey's bookstore on Jasper Avenue downtown Edmonton on the 11th
01:24:08
Speaker
which is a free event, the official book launch. Tickets are $20 in advance, $25 at the door, and comes with a copy of the book that I will of course sign for you after the formal event has concluded.
01:24:25
Speaker
I'm also going to be in Calgary on February 13th to launch the book there at Mount Royal University in conversation with Professor Roberta Lexier. And I'm going to be in Lethbridge February 15th for an event with the Southern Alberta Council on Public Affairs at noon at the Senior Center.
01:24:51
Speaker
there, and I'll be giving a talk followed by a Q&A. And then finally, I will be... Well, actually, you know what? This hasn't been officially announced yet, but I'm going to do this here. This is going to be a progress report exclusive. February 17th.
01:25:15
Speaker
me and my pals at Team Advantage are going to be doing a live podcast recording at Highline Brewing in Calgary's Inglewood neighborhood, which I believe is where Jason Kenney lives. So we're going to be doing that. The event is free. Just come on out and get ready to
01:25:43
Speaker
Listen to me and some Alberta Vantage contributors talk about sort of the destruction wrought by Jason Kenney, followed by Q&A and selling books as my supplies remain and signing them.
01:26:00
Speaker
And then, yeah, we're at 4 p.m. So we're going to do the event and then we'll, you know, have fun at the bar that night. So if you're in Calgary, come out to that if you can't make it to the book launch. And then finally, February 20th, I am going to be speaking at the Snell Auditorium at the downtown Red Deer Public Library. So if you're in Red Deer, come on out to that.
01:26:29
Speaker
and tell your friends because I don't know too many people in Red Deer, so definitely spread the message. I'll probably have posters made that I'll put up there on my way down to Calgary on the 12th. So yeah, February 6th book launch, February 11th,
01:26:52
Speaker
book signing in the afternoon before the Super Bowl, February 13th, Calgary Book Launch, February 15th, Lethbridge SACPA event, February 17th, Albert advantage live recording, and then February 20th, Red Deer Book Launch at the library.
01:27:14
Speaker
And for those who are in Grand Prairie, Fort Mac, and of course, Medicine Hat, where it all started for me, I will be there at some point in the near future, but I haven't arranged anything yet. So if you're in those cities and know of a good venue, hit me up.
01:27:36
Speaker
There you go, folks. That's how you can get the book. That's how you can meet Jeremy, get your book signed, if that's what you want. Thanks again to Jeremy for coming on the pod. Thanks again for listening all the way to the end. We very much appreciate you, the listener. And if you want to join the 500 or so other folks who help keep this little independent video project going, please go to the progressreport.ca slash patrons. Put in your credit card and put in 5, 10, 15, 50, 500 a month, whatever you can afford. We really, really appreciate it.
01:28:06
Speaker
Thanks again to Jim for editing. Thank you to Cosmic Family Communist for our theme. Thank you for listening and goodbye.