Usually the thought of Thanksgiving invokes images of family and friends sitting around the dining room table enjoying good food, sparkling conversation and laughter…as well as reminiscing over past thanksgiving disasters like Ms Soapbox’s stuffing that was as dry as sand and Mr Soapbox’s failed experiment involving an oyster.
However, this year on the eve of the federal election, my
thoughts went to a letter written by Canada’s former governor general David
Johnston in which he described Canada as “a nation for all nations”.
To understand the relevance of Mr Johnston’s letter to the federal election we need to acknowledge that, much to our dismay, some Canadians are prepared to sink to the dangerous level of political lunacy we’ve witnessed every day since Donald Trump decided to run for the presidency—yesterday Justin Trudeau had to wear a bulletproof vest at a campaign event in Mississauga. We’ve reached a tipping point; all Canadians need to stop and ask themselves what it means to be Canadian.
Former governor general David Johnston
This is where Mr Johnston comes in.
What is a Canadian?
David Johnston served as Governor General from 2000 to
2017. He witnessed the shift in Canadian
political behavior and still remains inspired by his vision of Canada. He sets out this vision in a letter to John Buchan,
Lord Tweedsmuir, Canada’s first governor general who died the year before Mr
Johnston was born.*
This letter discusses the characteristics that have served Canadians
well over time.
As I list these characteristics consider how they’re reflected (or not) in the actions of politicians vying to become Canada’s next prime minister.
The first governor general, Mr Buchan, believed Canadians
tended to have a limited vision, they compartmentalized themselves and others
in little boxes of region, language, religion or ancestry. Decades later Mr Johnston has taken a more
expansive view. He believes being
Canadian isn’t a matter of choosing which box to live in but choosing to stay open
“to the world and all the complexity it represents” in order to overcome our
differences and minimize the forces that would tear us apart.
The first governor general believed Canada would “be home to
all the peoples of the world”. Seventy-five
years later Mr Johnston says this is indeed the case.
He says Canadians are inclusive and welcome the
contributions of all who live here, we’re honourable, peaceful people who use
our military power sparingly but with conviction when necessary. We’re selfless, “our survival has been
sustained by humility and acceptance of our mutual interdependence.” We’re smart and caring, our concern “for the
common good of our neighbours in each community makes us responsive. We do not abandon our fellows to scrape by in
times of distress or natural disaster” but come to their aid.
Mr Johnston’s description of the nature of Canadians is a benchmark by which the political leaders vying for our votes in the upcoming election should be judged.
Politicians who create a false narrative of victimhood and stoke anger to the point where a political leader is accused of treason and is forced to attend a political rally wearing a Kevlar vest, surrounded by uniformed security officers, are politicians who have fallen far short of Mr Johnston’s definition of a Canadian.
A time to give thanks…and to think
Thanksgiving is a time to give thanks for the privilege of living in Canada and to think about which federal party will lift Canadians up, not tear them apart, to satisfy their own political ambitions.
While none of the federal political parties are perfect, some
are significantly better than others.
I was delighted when Shelley Youngblut, CEO & Creative Ringleader of Wordfest, asked if I would like to interview Beverley McLachlin, former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, on stage before a live audience about her new book Truth Be Told: My Journey through Life and the Law.
Before we talk about the interview, let me tell you that Beverley McLachlin is not only an icon of Canadian jurisprudence; she’s also brilliant, warm, witty, and thoughtful.
Beverley McLachlin, former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada
After we’d arrived and introduced ourselves, Shelley
and her team left us in the Green Room.
We chatted about her first novel Full Disclosure. She started the book in the 1980s but put
it aside because of she was “busy at work”.
No kidding! She returned
to it when she was about to retire. She said
the process of updating it was fascinating because so much of what we take for
granted, (eg cell phones) didn’t exist back then. She made her main character, a defence
lawyer, grittier and added elements reflecting her love for Vancouver and West
Coast art. The novel was completed in a
year and instantly became a national best seller. You should read it.
Soon it was time for us to take our places on stage under the bright lights with a low coffee table between us and begin what felt to me like a private conversation in front of a sold out audience sitting quietly in the dark.
The interview
We started where the book starts, with her
childhood. The former Chief Justice, oh
let’s just call her Beverley, was a “free range” child born and raised in
Pincher Creek, Alberta. Her mother told
her “school will teach you everything you need to know.” Beverley needed to know everything, so she
augmented her public school education with books from the local library which she
credits with saving her from a “premature intellectual death.”
Her education was supposed to prepare her for
the future, however the only occupations deemed suitable for a woman at that time—teacher,
nurse, secretary, telephone operator, and waitress—didn’t interest her. Besides she’d been told that due to her “low
alertness score” she would not be a very good telephone operator or
waitress. She did have an extremely high
reading retention score but what good was that to a woman. (A lot of good as it turned out!)
Beverley studied philosophy and law at the
University of Alberta. Women made up 10%
of her law class. She was a brilliant student (my words, not
hers) and was the Gold Medalist in her year.
Every law firm in Edmonton should have been clamouring for her to join
them as an articling student, however in her first interview she was asked “why
do you want to work?” The question perplexed
her until she discovered the unwritten rule that a woman, once married, should give
up her career and become a full time wife and mother. So much for seven years of education.
She worked in private practice before joining
the faculty at the UBC law school where she taught evidence.
She was appointed to the County Court in Vancouver in 1981 and nine years later was appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada. She spent 28 years at the Supreme Court, 17 of them as the Chief Justice—she said the position hands you the reins of power, it’s only later that you discover the reins aren’t attached to anything. Her goal was to do everything possible to help each judge be the best he or she could be.
Along the way she married Rory McLachlin and had a son, Angus. Rory developed cancer and died at 47, her son Angus was 12. When Brian Mulroney called to offer her a position on the Supreme Court of Canada she was reluctant to take it given all that her little family had gone through, but Angus encouraged her to accept the offer.
Eventually Beverly remarried, this time to Frank
McArdle, who proposed on an airline flight over the plane’s PA system.
Beverley is adept at weaving stories about
her personal life with observations about justice and fairness.
Discrimination
Discrimination can be overt or subtle. In her book Beverley said the world is
divided into two realms, one of men and one of women. “Women were occasionally allowed to venture
into the realm of men, but only to the extent required to accomplish what the
men wanted or needed.” She describes her obsession with perfection (which
she says is a uniquely female preoccupation) as flowing from the feeling that
women were allowed into a man’s world by grace, but to keep their place they had
to be perfect.
Discrimination can be brutally overt. In her book Beverley describes the injustices experienced by Indigenous peoples—when she was growing up public washrooms still displayed “No Indians” signs—and credits her family for not preaching inclusion but living it.
The Cases
When asked which of her cases was the most
memorable, Beverley said there were many but highlighted the cases brought by
Indigenous peoples struggling to protect the rights that have been guaranteed
to them under Section 35 of The Constitution Act.
She said if she had to pick a single case it
would be the Reference re: Secession of Quebec which held that Quebec
could not unilaterally secede from Canada but if a reference produced a clear
majority in favour of secession, then the federal government would need to meet
with Quebec to determine the terms of separation.
The Nadon/Harper incident
As a rule, judges do not respond to public criticism, however when Prime Minister Harper publicly accused Ms McLachlin of interfering with the appointment of Marc Nadon to the Supreme Court, Ms McLaclin was forced to respond. She issued a press release saying she’d done nothing wrong and setting out the facts. She invited Mr Harper to respond with additional facts if he had any. He did not. The International Commission of Jurists (and the legal community as a whole) examined the facts and concluded Ms McLachlin had not acted improperly. It called upon Mr Harper to apologize. When I asked whether Mr Harper apologized, Beverley said no, but he always gives her a big hug when he sees her.
The morning of our interview the Globe quoted Mr Nadon as saying he had more respect for the US Supreme Court than the Canadian Supreme Court and that Canadian “activist” judges should be more like American “originalist” judges who interpret statutes in the way the original drafters intended. (An originalist interpretation would have killed legislation allowing physician assisted dying, decriminalizing abortion and recognizing Charter protections for the LBGTQ community).
Beverley said people who support originalism don’t
understand that such an interpretation of our Constitution would turn our world
upside down because the Constitution as originally framed gave tremendous power
to the federal government at the expense of the provinces. She also said the complaint against “activist”
judges is often used by someone who just doesn’t like a court’s decision.
The perks of power
The Chief Justice is the third highest ranking official in Canada, after the Governor General and the Prime Minister. Consequently, Beverley and Frank attended many ceremonial dinners. She described attending a Golden Jubilee dinner for the Queen and discovering at the last minute that she was to be seated right next to Her Majesty. Had she known she would have prepared a number of conversational gambits, luckily as a child she was obsessed with Princess Elizabeth and drew upon this knowledge to ask the Queen about her dogs and her education and where her horse was buried. The two of them hit it off and every time someone tried to interject the Queen responded politely and then returned to their conversation with a regal “Now Beverley…” (Beverley does an amazingly good impression of the Queen).
All too quickly it was time to wrap it
up. I closed with a quote from Beverley’s
book where she said, “Canada’s justice system is not perfect, but it is among
the best in the world.”
I thanked Beverley McLachlin then and I’d like to thank her again now for having the tenacity, courage and intelligence to make it so.
Ms Soapbox just returned from Italy with a miserable head cold, jet lag and no luggage. In this pathetic state she is trying to make sense of the Trudeau/blackface stories that have dominated the news for the last week.
Trudeau apologized
twice and acknowledged that “layers of privilege” as a wealthy white man
blinded him to the racism behind his actions.
He appears to be truly remorseful.
This is enough for some people and not enough for others. Meanwhile the media continues to churn the story
with irrelevant questions like “who is the real Trudeau” and assertions that
the real problem is Trudeau “expects” forgiveness. (Since the only one who knows who the “real”
Trudeau is or whether he “expects” forgiveness is Trudeau, this is mindless
speculation).
A repentant Mr Trudeau
The only thing that
matters now is whether Trudeau’s behavior almost 20 years ago is enough to
derail the Liberals in this election.
Given the Liberals’
progress on immigration, indigenous issues and climate change and their efforts
to improve the quality of life for children and the elderly as well as those
who happen not to be in the top one percent it would be sad if Trudeau’s
lack of judgement so many years ago tanked the party’s chance of
re-election.
However, given the
Liberals failure to deliver on the promise of proportional representation and
their shoddy handling of the JWR/SNC file, this could be the last straw.
Which leads Ms
Soapbox to what’s truly bothering her about this mess—the feeling that we must
vote for Trudeau because Scheer’s conservatives are so much worse.
Only once did Ms
Soapbox hit the trifecta in an election where she respected the party leader,
she supported the party’s policies and she liked her local candidate. That was with Rachel Notley’s NDP in 2015.
Given the prospect
of a Scheer conservative government, two out of three isn’t bad…
…but surely, it’s
not too much to ask for political parties to allow us to vote for a
candidate with the best policies to face an uncertain future instead of against
candidates who by comparison are less worthy of our support.
Ms Soapbox and her daughter were admiring the statues in the Borghese Gallery in Rome when Amnesty International published an open letter expressing its concern that Mr Kenney’s decision to fund a $30 million war room and a $2.5 million public inquiry into foreign funding of environmental groups undermines and violates Canadian and international human rights.
Mr Kenney fired back with a mendacious diatribe that failed to address the issue (violation of human rights) and spewed nonsense intended to convince everyone that environmentalists were bullies and the energy sector and Albertans dependent on it were their victims. He’d promised to protect these “victims” and by golly he’d deploy the full power of the state to punish those who got in his way.
His supporters lapped it up; the rest of us were disgusted.
Which brings me back to the statues in the Borghese Gallery, specifically Bernini’s magnificent statue of David.
Bernini’s David
So here’s Mr Kenney’s problem. He’s got it backwards. He’s not David taking on Goliath, he’s Goliath taking on David and we all know how that turned out.
Those who oppose Mr Kenney’s policies on climate change, heck his policies in general, are like David, determined and unafraid. We’re gathering strength and refining our focus and one day that stone will fly and Goliath, the champion of the Philistines will fall.*
Mr Kenney’s cavalier response to a legitimate concern expressed by Amnesty International all but guarantees it.
*Ms Soapbox is not for one moment suggesting someone slingshot Mr Kenney. Like Mr Kenney’s use of the Putin/Greenpeace off-to-Siberia example, Mr Soapbox’s reference to David and Goliath is meant to be instructive, simply instructive.
When Jason Kenney asked former finance minister Janice MacKinnon “to conduct a deep dive into Alberta’s fiscal situation” he told her to deliver recommendations to balance the budget by 2023 and develop a plan to retire the province’s debt without considering the revenue side of the equation.
Ms M accepted this
cock-eyed mandate and worked her magic.
There’s been a lot of talk about Ms M’s recommendations, but very little discussion about whether her data support those recommendations or indeed whether the Blue Ribbon Panel lost all credibility when she agreed to Mr Kenney’s wonky mandate in the first place.
Ms MacKinnon
Half a budget
For a government
that prides itself on being willing to use “all of the tools in its toolbox”,
the fact Kenney prevented Ms M from considering the revenue side of the
budgeting process confirms he was looking for a political report, not one based
on economic logic.
Ms M started by
reassuring Albertans she understood the importance of revenues. She defined a budget as a plan “outlining
anticipated revenues and expenditures” and warned that to manage
Alberta’s finances it would be necessary “to increase stable sources of
revenue and decrease reliance on volatile non-renewable resource revenues”.
That said, she began
to spread the pixie dust.
She selected three
comparator provinces, BC, Ontario and Quebec—all of which have a provincial sales
tax and higher personal income taxes than Alberta and factor them into the revenue
side of their budget deliberations—and concluded Alberta had to cut $600
million in spending and radically change its approach to capital investment or
face disaster.
No one, not even Ms
Notley’s NDP, disputes the idea that Alberta’s economy is facing “crisis” given
its unsustainable reliance on volatile non-renewable resource revenues to
balance the budget; where we part company
with Ms M and Mr Kenney is on how best to address it.
The magic
rule: cheapest is best, always
Throughout the report Ms M’s tries to justify her recommendations with evidence but when the evidence isn’t in her favour she simply defaults to the magic rule: Alberta must match the cheapest province in the comparator group; and when Alberta is the cheapest province she sets the bar even lower by expanding the comparator group.
Healthcare
Ms M said Alberta’s
healthcare spending per capita ($5077) is higher than BC ($4267), Ontario
($4080) and Quebec ($4370). She noted Alberta’s
healthcare spending increased by 26% over the last 10 years but the rate of increase
slowed to 3.2% (in line with the other provinces) under the NDP. Ah, so the NDP’s plan to “bend the cost
curve” was working.
Ms M said one would
expect higher spending to produce better health outcomes but Alberta’s
“outcomes are no better and are often worse than comparable provinces.” This is not entirely true.
Some of Alberta’s outcomes lag the comparator provinces, but others are better (eg. general mortality rates and the treatment of kidney disease) or on par with the other provinces (eg. hospital sepsis, patient readmittance to hospital, the number of family practitioners and specialists per 100,000 and wait times).
Alberta’s supposedly
poorer health outcomes do not justify reduced spending…and it doesn’t need to
because the magic rule is Alberta’s spending must be as low or lower than the
rest of the comparators. Period.
There’s no doubt
Alberta needs to improve its health outcomes (all provinces do) but Ms M
provided no evidence to support her recommendation that the solution lies in
more privatization and picking fights with doctors and other medical
professionals over compensation.
Education
Guess what,
Alberta’s K – 12 teachers are not the highest paid in the land. They make less than Ontario teachers, and more
than BC teachers, there is no comparative information for
Quebec.
The same is true for
Alberta’s spending per student and the split between program spending versus
administrative spending—Alberta spends more than BC but less than Ontario and
Quebec.
Nevertheless, the magic
rule dictates Alberta’s education budget be reduced to match BC with no
consideration of the fact that Alberta has two education systems (public and
separate) while BC only has one (public).
This is so easy when you don’t have to think about it.
The most troubling
part of Ms M’s analysis is she fails to distinguish between public and private
education. By blurring the lines, she obscures the impact of her recommendation
that the funding formula move away from one based solely on enrolment to one
that considers outcomes including a school’s success at delivering “strategic
outcomes desired by the ministry”.
Leaving aside the
uncertainty around what “strategic outcomes” means and how it would be
measured, this recommendation paves the way for private schools to get more
public funding than public schools whose outcomes are impacted by fewer
resources and the fact they can’t screen out higher needs students.
With respect to post
secondary institutions, Ms M found Alberta spends $$36,510 per full time
student, this is more than BC ($31,299), Ontario ($21,536) and Quebec ($25,
822), and less on administration than Quebec but more than BC and
Ontario.
What’s not clear is
why. (Ms Soapbox found the bubble charts
and bar graphs incredibly unhelpful).
In any event Ms M’s
recommendation is clear: some
institutional aren’t as financially viable as others and should be on the
chopping block. One suspects institutions with strong UCP supporters on
their boards of governors will be just fine. The rest are on their own.
Public sector
This is where Ms M’s logic went
right out the window.
Ms M says the government grew in
size from 2014 to 2019 despite the recession and growing deficit and debt.
What’s that got to do with it? A
caring government strengthens the social safety net in tough times, it doesn’t
rip it apart. (Incidentally, the increase
over those five years was small, only 5.4%).
Ms M says the government is too
big, but the metric she uses (# of employees per 100,000 population) shows it’s
just right. Alberta’s public service is similar in size to BC, higher
than Ontario but much lower than Quebec. It’s in the sweet spot and
arguably should be left alone…but for the magic rule, cheapest is best.
Ms M acknowledges the unions exercised
“restraint” in past years but suggests a 2.5% pay hike in 2016/17 and 0% and 0%
in the next two years wasn’t enough “restraint” because union employees are
well paid and get other benefits. This ignores
the fact that they did not get sky high salaries and bonuses in the good times; if they can’t take advantage of the “boom” why
should they be penalized for the “bust”?
Then Ms M does an about face and
recommends the pay freeze on government non-union employees be lifted. The only distinction between these two groups
is one is unionized and the other is not.
She wants to overhaul collective
bargaining by tying pay raises to salary levels in comparator provinces. This
recommendation undermines the role of unions which is to negotiate the best
deal for their members here in Alberta. Furthermore, it’s inconsistent with the
practice in the private sector where compensation is based on annual surveys performed
by Towers Perrin and Mercers who compare salaries and benefits across the employers’
peer group in a specific marketplace. What
an oil company’s peer group pays its engineers in Calgary sets the benchmark
for Calgary, no one cares what a company pays its engineers in Ontario.
Ms M recommends the government
reduce the size of the public service by attrition (good), eliminating lower
priority services and programs (let’s talk) and alternative delivery options
(oh you mean privatization, we really need to talk!).
Capital Spending
This one had poor Ms M
scrambling.
It turns out Alberta’s capital
spending is low when compared to BC, Ontario and Quebec. No problem, Ms M simply ditched the
conventional way of measuring capital spending (it’s used across Canada and
internationally) and replaced it with a metric that compared Alberta’s capital
spending on a per capita basis with the 10-province average. And voila, Alberta’s spending was above
average for the last 20 years.
She wants Alberta to decrease capital
spending to align with the 10-province average.
Furthermore, she’s against borrowing to finance capital spending. She wants the government to implement a long
term capital plan that finances capital spending out of current revenues.
This is contrary to David Dodge’s advice that the government should borrow to finance capital spending in times of slow growth. He believes “attempting to maintain a balanced budget each and every year will exaggerate cyclical economic volatility and have a perverse impact on long run growth.”
So, who do we trust: Ms M or David Dodge, the former governor of
the Bank of Canada, and the national and international community?
The magic continues
Ms M expects Alberta to increase its revenues by growing the economy. She applauds the corporate tax cut as one way to get there. Given the fact Alberta was already the lowest tax jurisdiction in Canada it’s questionable whether the $4.5 billion gift to corporations will make a significant difference. However, any moves on Mr Kenney’s part that damage publicly funded and publicly delivered healthcare, education and other public services will negatively impact Alberta’s reputation for offering a good quality of life.
On Sept 1 Premier Kenney wished Alberta a happy birthday. Not once in his video message did he mention Canada. It was as if Alberta became a province in 1905 only to float around in No Mans Land for the next 114 years.
He did, however, acknowledge Alberta’s connection to Canada in the official press release by noting Alberta became “a full and equal partner in the Dominion of Canada”, “Albertans have built a province that is the engine of Canada’s prosperity (actually it’s not the engine, it’s one of three engines, Ontario and Quebec both contribute more to Canada’s GDP than we do), and Alberta is “the best place in Canada to live, work, play and raise a family.”
Both the video and the press release repeat the
message that Albertans are “people of destiny”.
Given the ambiguity of the phrase (it can refer to anything from
evangelical groups to pop stars) it’s important to note how Mr Kenney
characterized the phrase.
Mr Kenney said a “program” entitled “A People of
Destiny” was printed to mark the day Alberta became a province in 1905. He doesn’t tell us what the “program” said. He does tell us that he believes generations
of Albertans have lived up to the “notion of being people of destiny, that we
have created something exceptional here, a culture of enterprise, of personal
responsibility and strong communities.”
He asked us to remember those who helped build Alberta “while
rededicating ourselves to live by the values of community enterprise and
freedom in an Alberta that in the future will continue to be strong and free.”
Perhaps this is just feel good talk Alberta-style, but it’s troubling in the context of Mr Kenney’s misleading rhetoric that the feds are using the equalization formula to unfairly benefit other provinces at Alberta’s expense and his contradictory campaign promises about the purpose of a referendum—the UCP policy document says it’s to (a) remove equalization from the Constitution, and (b) use the threat of the referendum to demand changes to the equalization formula (do we want it removed from the Constitution or not?) if there isn’t substantial progress on a coastal pipeline and if Bill C-69 isn’t repealed, (so we’re okay with the equalization formula if we get Trans Mountain and Mr Scheer becomes prime minister and repeals Bill C-69?).
Mr Kenney’s sloppy language has led many
Albertans to conclude that Mr Kenney will call a referendum on equalization and
if the majority of Albertans say the feds should restructure the formula and the
feds refuse that gives Mr Kenney the mandate to start working on Alberta’s
independence.
Mr Kenney attempted to disabuse Albertans of this
notion with an angry press release upbraiding Quebec Premier Legault for saying
Mr Kenney was “starting to become a separatist” and reminding Albertans that it
was he who insisted the UCP merger agreement include a principle of loyalty to
a “united Canada” and for him “that loyalty is non-negotiable”.
But it’s too late.
His supporters firmly believe that Mr Kenney will
lead them to the promised land if the federal government fails to come to heel.
And goofy happy birthday greetings telling Albertans they are “people of destiny” without acknowledging how fortunate we are to be part of a diverse and wealthy nation called Canada only add to the confusion.
This just in from the
how-to-make-a-good-news-story-sound-bad department:
Mr Kenney’s government issued two press releases this week,
one about the restart of construction of the TMX pipeline project, the other
about the favourable ruling of the Nebraska Supreme Court on Keystone XL. Both of these announcements are about a good result
achieved by someone else.
And that’s why Mr Kenney’s knickers are in a knot.
Mr Kenney going on about something
Good news isn’t really good news because…
The TMX press release contains just one word that’s not critical or negative. It appears in this sentence: “The news that construction will restart on this project is positive; however there is still not reason to celebrate.”
The Keystone XL press release contains two words that aren’t critical or negative. They appear in these sentences: “Today’s approval is encouraging news for both Alberta and our nation as a whole. This court victory is another step forward for this vital pipeline project after far too many years of regulatory delays and hurdles.” No wait, there’s a third positive word, Mr Kenney expressed gratitude to the US administration (is he afraid to say the word “Trump”) for issuing the second permit for Keystone XL.
After offering those tepid “attaboys” the press releases
shift into campaign rhetoric and misleading information.
Mr Kenney promises his government will “fight” those who “obstruct
progress,” and who must not be allowed to “illegally block” construction and “essentially
veto a project.” He fails to mention that
TMX protestors (including Elizabeth May) who violated the injunction protecting
the TMX work site in Burnaby were arrested and fined and will be arrested and
fined if they violate injunctions in the future. And that Canada has no jurisdiction to fight
those who illegally block the construction of Keystone XL in the US.
In case his rhetoric isn’t persuasive enough, Mr Kenney ends both press releases with a demand that the federal government repeal what he calls the ‘No More Pipelines’ Bill (C-69) and the West Coast Tanker Ban (C-48), but neglects to mention that neither bill has any impact on TMX or Keystone XL whatsoever and may have minimal impact in the future because some oilsands executives say Canada will have enough takeaway capacity for quite some time if TMX, Keystone XL and Enbridge Line 3 are completed.
Mr Kenney’s references to Bills C-69 and C-48 are red
herrings intended to divert our attention from the fact his government had
nothing to do with TMX and Keystone XL achieving these milestones.
Mr Kenney may argue he’s just being realistic. If so, he should have mentioned Keystone XL
and Enbridge Line 3 (and Line 5) are facing additional legal challenges in the
US. If Mr Kenney wants to get in on the
action, perhaps he can aim the big guns in his $30 million War Room in the
Americans’ direction. (NOTE: “big guns”
is a metaphor, Ms Soapbox is not for a moment suggesting Mr Kenney take up arms
and declare war on the United States).
Where’s a stateman when you need one?
Even the former premier, Rachel Notley (NDP) and the former Natural
Resources Minister Jim Carr (Liberal) were able to overcome their lack of
affection for Donald Trump (nutbar) when he reissued the federal cross-border
permit through an expedited presidential order that allowed Keystone XL to
proceed. They issued press releases
welcoming the news.
Wouldn’t it be nice if Mr Kenney could rise to the level of
statesman instead of defaulting to cheap partisanship and misleading attacks on
the federal Liberal government?
