Front Burner - Jason Kenney’s government to fire man investigating his leadership race

Episode Date: November 22, 2019

A bill to fire Alberta's election commissioner has passed in a legislature dominated by United Conservative Party MLAs. That's while the commissioner is investigating the UCP leadership race, won by Premier Jason Kenney. The opposition is outraged. Today on Front Burner, we talk to Maclean's Alberta correspondent Jason Markusoff about how Kenney has been using his strong majority, and how the electorate may respond.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. The House leader is misleading the House, but the Premier is saying that Albertans are subject to one set of rules, but when it comes to himself, it's a whole new world, and he can rewrite them as any cover-up demands.

He's firing the elections commissioner, asking his cabinet to play along in this abuse of power. That furious voice, that's Alberta NDP leader Rachel Notley inside the province's legislative assembly earlier this week. Actually, she was only temporarily inside of it. Rachel Notley, you are no longer permitted to be in the assembly for the rest of the day. The Speaker of the House booted Notley for essentially accusing the House leader of lying. And she refused to apologize.

This is all happening because the governing United Conservative Party introduced a bill that would terminate the province's election commissioner, also known as the guy who's been investigating the UCP leadership race. Even by introducing it, and certainly if it were to pass, Mr. Kenney will have earned the moniker of the most corrupt and anti-democratic premier in the history of the country. Well, the UCP government has now passed that bill. They did so on Thursday.

Alberta Premier Jason Kenney is commanding a lot of attention with his demands from the federal liberals right now. But inside the province, this bill is just one way Kenney is commanding a lot of attention with his demands from the federal liberals right now. But inside the province, this bill is just one way Kenney is wielding his powerful majority. Today, we're talking to McLean's Alberta correspondent, Jason Markasoff, about the cuts, the controversies and the commissioners. I'm Jamie Poisson. This is FrontBurner. Jason, hello. Hello. Thanks for coming back.

I feel like we just got to talk to you. So lucky us. Alberta's getting busy in the news for whatever reason lately. I know. You guys are in high demand. So look, this bill isn't law yet. It's been passed, but it has to get royal assent, as I understand it. But if it does get royal assent, Lauren Gibson's job as Alberta's election commissioner disappears. And so can you tell me exactly what Gibson was investigating? fairly new, had a new job, elections commissioner. It used to be Elections Alberta was investigating wrongdoing under the Elections Act in Alberta, but was not very effective. Very few powers,

very little activity. The NDP created this bigger office, independent office, and appointed somebody who was a former Elections Alberta chief electoral officer, who'd been fired by the old PC government. So there was already bad blood to start with. But here comes in Lauren Gibson, and he's very dogged. He was fining a lot of people for excessive over-the-cap contributions. He was racking up tens of thousands of dollars in fines to both sides, NDP and UCP. But one of the big things he was doing and levying $200,000 of fines was against one of Jason Kenney's leadership rivals in the 2017

United Conservative leadership race, Jeff Calloway, who had concocted, it seems, some very shady scheme regarding the financing of his campaign, basically using straw donors, excessive corporate donations, which are banned. Like essentially this corporation was donating to his campaign through individuals, but the money wasn't actually coming from them, right? That's right. One big donor cut a $60,000 corporate check, and that money was divided up to make it look legal. And Callaway is also known as the kamikaze candidate, right?

This is something that we've covered on this podcast before. That's the thing. If you had seen me talking to you over the air, you would have seen me use bunny quotes when I talk about him as a rival. There was always allegations and suspicion that Jason Kenney's team was putting him up just to undercut former Wild Rose leader Brian Jean. And sure enough, right before the general election started, the media got a whole trove of documents confirming there were emails between the campaigns confirming when he would resign, how to act, sharing memes. A cache of documents leaked to the CBC show senior Kenny campaign staffers routinely contacted Calloway staffers. They offered strategic directives,

speeches and opposition research for Callaway to attack Brian Jean. All the while, Callaway planned to drop out of the race and throw his support behind Kenney. But there have been denials, right, from Jason Kenney and certainly Callaway about this. They say we're just talking about this. We're just having discussions. Campaigns discuss policy and strategy among each other, you know, as friendly rivals in the past. They don't acknowledge that this was a sham candidate, but it's not what the ethics commissioner was investigating. And we should be clear that Jason Kenney's party has not been implicated into this whole financial investigation, right? That's right. It's just the Callaway campaigners.

right? That's right. It's just the Callaway campaigners. There was stuff that Jason Kenney's leadership campaign was doing, like soliciting certain types of donations, that is being investigated by the elections commissioner, or at least has been until dot dot dot. Okay, so you know, I think that this segues pretty well into my next question. Of course, Kenney won the premiership with a very strong majority in Alberta. He kind of brags about that. It was a really tough campaign, but I was gratified. We ended up with the 55% of the popular vote, the largest number of votes ever cast for a party in Alberta electoral history, the highest popular vote in a couple of decades, at least. And now the UCP has three quarters of the seats. So they've pushed this bill through Bill 22. Like, why do they want to do that?

push this bill through Bill 22? Like, why do they want to do that? Well, there's the de facto reason and the official reason. The de facto reason is they don't like this ethics commissioner. They love to sideline him. And with this majority, they can do this within an omnibus bill, 172 page bill that they introduced on Monday and have passed on Thursday. Whoa, that is quick. That is quick. The only time you normally see them do that is for emergency legislation to say force striking rail workers or postal workers back to the job. It's unusual to see, especially an omnibus complex bill that does many other things.

Push that through the legislature before it can really get much public scrutiny is astonishing. Why is Jason Kenney saying they want to get rid of this position, they want to get rid of this guy? It's worth noting this conveniently happened on a week where Jason Kenney was actually out of the country. He's in Houston and Texas on a trade mission, but this is a government bill, so his thumbprints are all over this. The official reason is that this is part of deficit reduction and good proper management. Other provinces, and this is true, don't have an independent body as an elections commissioner. That's an organization within their own elections branch, like Elections Newfoundland, etc.

And the other point is that this could save money. This will save $200,000 a year. Jason Kenney, and we might have talked about this before, is aggressively trying to curb Alberta's deficit. Okay. He's positioning this as like a cost-saving measure. If this bill gets royal assent, if Gibson loses his job, is there a scenario in which he could continue the investigations that he's been doing? That's the other argument that the Kenney conservatives are making. This doesn't actually necessarily kill investigations or kill the investigative function. It will now fold into the election Alberta office. They say that the electoral officer could still hire back Mr. Gibson to do this job. This doesn't necessarily kill the investigations.

The Honourable, the Government House Leader. Mr. Speaker, this is a prime example of the official opposition overplaying their hand yet again. Nobody has fired a law enforcement agency, Mr. Speaker. That is completely and utterly ridiculous. The Election Commissioner office and position remains. It is now consolidated within the recommendation of the current chief election commissioner, sorry, the election commissioner inside the province of Alberta to another province. It consolidates the process, saves taxpayers upwards of a million dollars, Mr. Speaker.

It protects all current investigations and future investigations and continues, Mr. Speaker. That's their argument. But maybe he won't. No, he might not. And this, you know, this sends a clear message to any officer of the legislature that this UCP majority is watching you. And you may not have your job much longer if you're pursuing things and pushing the envelope too aggressively. The reality is that under a new management, this process is very likely to change. In the same way that Donald Trump had the chutzpah

to fire Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor, the special prosecution and that report still would have been investigated and still would have been pursued. But with a different leader, you get a different approach. Maybe this wouldn't be deemed as a priority like it is. It's very unusual. It's rather contemptuous, frankly,

of the notion of accountability within a democracy. But Jason Kenney feels he can get away with this. Do you think Jason Kenney knows what he's doing here, that the optics of this could be quite bad? Again, this is his risk calculation, that he knows the optics are bad. He's a guy who's very aware of optics. Gosh, he's somebody who bombed around the province for three years in a blue pickup truck. And anybody who knows anything about him from Ottawa knows that that is not his inherent style, but he knows the positives of a good image.

He knows that this is burning political capital, that this will not be a popular thing. This will be something that is harshly received, certainly by critics, perhaps by some soft Tory supporters. But he thinks he has so much goodwill, he can burn through this. Let's talk about the opposition here, critics of the bill. Rachel Notley, as we heard at the beginning of the show, she is furious about this, hey? She is going all out on this. And they've been hitting the panic button on a few measures, quite a few measures that Jason Kenney is doing as he moves fast and breaks things. But this is perhaps the most urgent they've reacted. And what are they doing to try and thwart this? She held that stunt of being thrown out of the legislature. They've written

to the ethics commissioner to try to flag some of the conflicts of interest. Well, maybe they could delay this bill. The ethicsics Commissioner wrote back and said, that's not something I normally do. She even went to the step as far as writing to the Lieutenant Governor who would provide royal assent, urging the Lieutenant Governor not to sign this bill. We've not heard anything back yet. I, of course, would be happy to meet with her to discuss it in more detail, but we've made our case as respectfully as we can.

That's not the way government works. That's a bit cuckoo. The royal delegate, the Queen's representative, does not offer her own opinion on the quality of a bill. If our democracy were to otherwise, we wouldn't have much of a democracy. That was a real blind lob pass from the opposition. To call it a Hail Mary may confer too much religious dignity. Fair. Hey, you mentioned before that this government is moving fast and breaking things on a couple of different fronts. And so what are they doing? They introduced their budget a few days after the election, and it's laden with cuts and things they want to change.

Right. I know he's wiped out like 2,000 public sector jobs, right? Over the next five years, something like that. The government of Alberta jobs, public sector, it could be much larger. They're cutting post-secondary education by a whole lot. They've cut funding for school boards who are trying to keep up with still rapid enrollment growth. And you mentioned before he's also socially conservative, although I remember when he was campaigning, he promised not to bring in legislation on abortion. But

I understand there's now some legislation that kind of skirts around that promise now, right? There's a private members bill by a former federal Kenny aide, not a bill of Kenny's himself, but one that he may well agree with. We don't know yet, that gives a whole bunch of safeguards to quote-unquote conscience rights for physicians, basically protecting them from having to conduct services or refer for services they don't agree with, such as abortion, contraception, medically assisted dying, perhaps some services for transgender individuals. The bill was introduced by Dan Williams, an elected MLA with Alberta's United Conservative Party. He says existing protections that give medical professionals

the right to opt out of services they don't believe in don't go far enough, because health care providers are required to make referrals. These are very controversial bills. I'd be curious to get your perspective on how Albertans are reacting to this, because, you know, the bottom line of Kenny's campaign wasn't any of this, right? It was jobs, pipelines, the economy. So is that what Alberta is getting here?

With these measures, no. But I think there's still a lot of goodwill toward Kenny and a lot of relief that Rachel Notley, who was not popular, was gone. And we have somebody who is fighting for jobs, fighting more aggressively for pipelines, punching as much as they can toward Ottawa. A lot of what Jason Kenney seems to be banking on is what he was banking on in the election, that this kamikaze matter, there was an RCMP investigation investigation to Kenny's own campaign during the election. And when I would ask Conservatives how they're sweating this, they said, it's fine. People don't care. All they care about is jobs, pipeline, and Trudeau. And we're going to focus on those issues

and people won't mind the other things that come up, the other barbs that come, attacks on his social conservatism. Kenny will get re-elected. We'll forget all about this and life will get on. Under the NDP, I couldn't have survived another four years. We're in trouble now. I'm hoping he's going to bring the jobs back. I'm willing to overlook all the rest of it. And what is the status of that RCMP investigation now? That is not being touched by the Election Commission matter. That is into voter

fraud issues, which seem to be out of the purview, or at least above the purview at this point of the Election Commission, or they are being investigated by the RCMP. And now there is an out-of-province prosecutor handling this file, so it's out of the government's hands. which can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem, brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. You know, I can't help but thinking, you know, when you bring up moving fast and breaking things, that there's this very easy comparison here to make

with Kenny's government and Premier Doug Ford in Ontario. So he also made these rapid spending cuts after getting elected. He fired the Ontario Police Deputy Commissioner, who is awfully critical of Ford appointing a friend as commissioner. And all of this did not go so well for Ford. Like he ended up getting booed at the Toronto Raptors victory parade. The premier of Ontario, Doug Ford! His poll numbers plummeted. So why is Kenny going down this road? Is it different for him? I think Kenny feels something that Doug Ford may not feel, or at least may not have in reality, in that people are so willing to support the head of the Conservative Party of Alberta right now, the United Conservatives, that they're going to cut him a lot of slack. They cut him a lot of slack in the election,

and it seems like they're cutting them a lot of slack on some of the cuts. Especially because there's a unique to Alberta and that you don't have in Ontario is there's a certain bloody-mindedness, a certain willingness among a large segment of the public that it's time for the public sector to pay. There have been mass layoffs in the private sector, in the oil patch. People have been taking a lot of pay cuts. A lot of people are unemployed. And meanwhile, they see the nurses and teachers

and civil servants not being affected, having their pay frozen, sometimes perhaps increased, although there have been pay freezes lately. So a lot of people out there say, yeah, Kenny, it's their turn. It's the public sector's turn to feel the pain that we've been feeling. That's a bloody mindedness that doesn't exist in Ontario. And Jason Kenney's proven much more effective at keeping the focus on the external foe. Right. On Trudeau, on Ottawa. Yeah. And the other point, if I could add, is that keep in mind Doug Ford, when he came in really quickly as leader and got elected fast, and may have not had the competence and the readiness to act as fast as he was moving. Jason Kenney had been working on this project for about three years before he got elected,

and is very methodical, very experienced in the federal government, so he knows how to more effectively move fast and break things. That's a really good point. Doug Ford's conservatives have been criticized for just completely bungling the communication strategy and also just like the rollout itself. People have described the atmosphere there as like a total mess, which is probably very different from Jason Kenney's UCP. No, there's not a sloppiness. There's a smooth, confident centralization in this government.

You know, is there a point, though, where this tips for him? You know, with Doug Ford, I think there seemed to be a few tipping points where at first he wasn't apologizing or backtracking, and now, gosh, there's a long list of backtracks that Doug Ford has taken. At this point, Kenny hasn't. He's still moving forward with incredible confidence and a side of the unapologetic nature. But we'll see. This election commissioner thing is attracting a bunch of people to be ticked off who are not normally ticked off

at what Kenny's doing. And there are a few other spending scandals that they've had. Charter airplanes. Alberta taxpayers were on the hook for forking out more than $16,000 to get a charter plane to fly a group of premiers from the Calgary Stampede, where the Alberta government was hosting a breakfast, to Saskatoon, where there was a meeting of all of Canada's premiers. Some lavish trips to Britain by a senior Kenny Aid recently. These are the sort of things that the old Alberta Tory regime was thrown out for. People see a return to quote-unquote Tory land, as some people call it here. That could really

come to bite, Kenny. You know, there are now accusations of corruption with this election commissioner strongman move. And I think that, you know, you'd imagine the Alberta public may only withstand so much of this before they say, hang on a second. This isn't the stuff we voted for you. This is, yeah, we're with you on the jobs pipelines, Trudeau stuff. But, you know, you can only go so far with everything else. Okay. Jason Markosoff, thank you so much. My pleasure. That's all for this week.

Frontburner comes to you from CBC News and CBC Podcasts. The show is produced by Elaine Chao, Imogen Bircher, Shannon Higgins, Ashley Mack, and Derek Vanderwyk. Our sound designer this week was Billy Heaton. Our music is by Joseph Shabison of Boombox Sound. Have a great weekend and see you all soon.