Roundup: Another of Kenney’s talking points blows up on him

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The Alberta government is facing yet another situation where reality butts up against their preferred victimhood narratives – this time around equalisation. You see, for the first time since the 1960s, they have received more in federal transfers than they paid in federal taxes, and we can thank Justin Trudeau’s benediction, not only in pandemic transfers, but in things like money that they sent to the province to remediate orphan wells as a job-creation (and environmental) programme – never mind that they never should have because it meant that private companies and the province were able to successful offload their environmental liabilities to the federal government after the Supreme Court of Canada specifically ruled that they couldn’t under existing bankruptcy laws.

Of course, this isn’t stopping Kenney or his government from trying to spin this to carry on their narrative. For example, the province’s finance minister is claiming that they are still being unfairly impacted because of their contributions on a per capita basis continue to outstrip their share of the population. Because they have the highest incomes in the country by far and we have a progressive federal income tax. This is yet more of the province’s outright disinformation on how equalisation works because they are trying to make people angry rather than properly telling them how the system works, because if people understood, they might not be able to summon some performative outrage about it, and that wouldn’t help Kenney and his agenda.

Because really, so much of how the province is spinning this is yet more distraction sauce from Kenney’s continued failures, and the thousands of unnecessary deaths on his watch, and as I have pointed out elsewhere, Kenney has only one tool in his toolbox, and that is anger. He’s losing yet one more argument that Alberta is being treated “unfairly,” so you can expect a lot more gaslighting and deception in the near future as Kenney and company will try to push back against reality.

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1458600346398478337

Good reads:

  • Chrystia Freeland says that the government is well-placed to help solve the skills mismatch between available jobs and those looking to fill them.
  • Steven Guilbeault says Canada won’t be increasing its 2030 climate targets at this point (seeing as we need to focus on meeting the targets we have).
  • At COP26, Omar Alghabra signed a zero-emission car accord to cut transportation emissions in less than two decades.
  • Lawrence MacAulay says that Veterans Affairs is hiring yet more staff to help clear the backlog (as they have been previous hires have not been enough).
  • The government bought another second-hand icebreaker with the intention of filling gaps when existing icebreakers go in for their maintenance cycles.
  • Former Senator Murray Sinclair has been tapped to lead the negotiations around compensation for First Nations children taken into care.
  • Complaints have been filed about the Clerk of the Commons, alleging biased behaviour in favour of the Liberals, and sleeping on the job.
  • Annamie Paul says that she’s submitted her resignation for real this time (but there could still be a thirty-day termination period in her contract).
  • Kady O’Malley’s Process Nerd column goes through the logic of a Liberal-NDP coalition, which (spoiler alert) doesn’t actually exist.
  • The Line hears from a serving soldier about the four things he wants people to remember for Remembrance Day.
  • Susan Delacourt talks to the mayor of Windsor in advance of the Three Amigos summit, and he doesn’t see much difference from Biden in terms of protectionism.

Odds and ends:

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One thought on “Roundup: Another of Kenney’s talking points blows up on him”

  1. Well, the foot-stompin’ cowboy crybaby has got Daddy Harper in his corner, and the broken Canadian media platforming him. Globe headline “Harper says Trudeau is a mean bully to the hurtin ‘Bertan, waaaah”. Reminds me of the “Cletus safari” genre of softball sociology reaching out to MAGA pols and constituents, as popularized by the NY Times.

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