The Paul Wells Show - Jason Kenney, the Man the Right Left Behind

Episode Date: September 28, 2022

Alberta Premier Jason Kenney reflects on his surprise resignation, after he lost the votes of nearly half of his party. He talks about how COVID hardened the divides in the conservative movement, how Donald Trump has influenced Canadian politics, and the future of conservatism in Canada.

It's a big world out there, and sometimes it seems like it's breaking. I'm talking to the people who are trying to fix it. This week, the man on the right left behind. That polarization existed everywhere to one extent or another, but was far more intense in Alberta. Alberta Premier Jason Kenney. I'm Paul Wells. Welcome to The Paul Wells Show. Alberta's getting a new Premier next week. It's had a few in the last several years.

After a long period of stability, economic turmoil and the energy transition have put a revolving door on the Premier's office. Next week, the governing United Conservative Party will try again with a new leader. For a little while yet though, Jason Kenney is still the Premier. I caught up with Kenney in the summer, only a month after the leadership review, that he won with barely half the votes. He decided on the spot that that wasn't enough of a mandate, so he announced he would step down. He was not expecting that result. He still had tire marks on his back when I spoke to him. You're going to notice the sound quality in this interview is not quite up to our usual standards. When I reached him, I was in a hotel room recording on my laptop.

But by getting Kenny early, I think I caught him in a thoughtful mood. He was able to look at his whole career in politics and to start to draw some lessons from it. I've known Jason Kenny for almost 25 years. In 1998, he was a newly elected Reform Party MP, not yet 30 years old, and his leader, Preston Manning, had already decided that reform wasn't a big enough party to get to power. Manning put Kenny in charge of outreach to other opposition parties. It was the beginning of the long process that led to the creation of the modern Conservative Party. This is part of the paradox of Jason Kenny. He's a loner. He works late, lives alone, never been married. He's got strong personal beliefs, a lot of them stemming from his Catholic faith.

But again and again, his work has led him to reach outside a narrow faction and build bridges. That's what he did at the end of the 90s, when he led the effort to unite the right. And a decade later, when Stephen Harbour put him in charge of Conservative Party outreach to new Canadians. And again, a decade after that, when he put together a United Conservative Party in Alberta. Now, theoretically, a United Conservative Party in a conservative place like Alberta should have been a ticket to long-term power for Kenny. But the collapse in oil prices that cost Jim Prentice and Rachel Notley their premiership still makes Alberta hard to govern. And COVID made it harder still. In our interview, he talks about how COVID seemed custom designed

to break up his governing coalition. He had the responsibility every premier has to protect public health, but a lot of conservative voters in Alberta reject the tools any premier would have to use. Vaccines, face masks, and restrictions on public gathering. They hated seeing Kenney using the same toolkit that Justin Trudeau was using at the federal level. Only two years after he became premier, members of Kenney's own caucus started to say they wanted him out. It's remarkable in our talk how often he says the trouble came from elements in his party that were further to the right than he was. He could almost sum up our conversation as, I'm Jason Kenney. If you're to the right of me, what's your problem? He talks about

the influence Donald Trump has had on Canadian politics. He speculates about what might come next for conservative politics in Alberta and in Ottawa. And he shows once again why he's always believed he could talk his way out of a corner. Because he's a great talker, eloquent, thoughtful, able to marshal his arguments in a coherent way. The question I'm left with is, if somebody with his gifts couldn't succeed in a place like Alberta, who can? Starting next week, somebody else will get a chance to try. Coming up, we'll bring you that conversation with Jason Kenney. Jason Kenney, thanks for joining us. Great to be here, Paul. Thanks. I got a bunch of questions written down, but they boil down to two things. What just happened to you and how are you?

A, or first of all, B, I'm very well, thanks. You know, Paul, I got elected first 25 years ago, this month. And you're one of the first reporters I probably met in Ottawa, I think. I wouldn't be surprised if it was at the bar at Darcy McGee's. 25 years is a long time. In the criminal justice system, it's considered a life sentence. And I think the Supreme Court actually just said it's cruel and unusual punishment. So to be totally transparent, When the Harper government lost in 2015, I was exhausted, totally enervated, and more and more was seriously considering cashing it in and going and doing something different. And then in the spring of 2016, I started to observe the whole situation unfolding

in Alberta. From my perspective, significant damage being done to the province under the NDP government and a divided conservative movement and thought somebody had to step in with a plan to fix that and create a reunited conservative front. And I spent three years working on that successfully leading to the 2019 election. So I kind of, in a way, stumbled into an extension of my political vocation that I wasn't really expecting. And I'd never anticipated to be in this job for a long time. I was expecting, frankly, to planning on resigning about two years from now. I'd hoped that we could reconstitute after the difficult division in my

party through COVID and then hopefully win the next election, complete some of the more major policy files that we're working on, and then leave probably in the spring summer of 2024. So essentially, this just advances that for me, I mean, speaking personally, by two years. And when I was given the number, the 51.4%, I believe, number, at first I was surprised. And my second reaction was honestly one of relief on a personal level. I have obviously concern about the future of the party, the movement, the province. of the party, the movement, the province. But on a personal level, I felt some degree of liberation from what can be an incredibly difficult and constraining vocation. So what happened? Well, we created this new movement in, the party came together in 2017. We won the largest ever

election with over, first time ever, over a million votes in April of 2019. Hit the ground running with a very ambitious policy agenda. We recklessly ran on 375 platform commitments against an unpopular government that we probably could have defeated with virtually no platform. But we did it because I just observed that some really fundamental change was needed in the province to get the province, in particular its economy, back on track. Hit the ground running, I think firing on all cylinders, with a strong cabinet, and we were cooking with gas. Then we hit the triple whammy of COVID, biggest public health crisis in a century,

biggest global economic collapse since the 30s, but also unique within Canada, total collapse of our largest industry with oil prices going from $65 to minus $40 in the space of a few weeks. We couldn't sell bonds for nearly two months. We were looking, if that carried on, at bankruptcy as a province and a total economic meltdown. So that, you know, there were massive challenges there while we were still struggling to recover from the five years of economic stagnation and decline. And then COVID, the public health side of it, was like a buzzsaw right through our political coalition. We had, I'm generalizing here, but for the two intense years of COVID, we had, I would say the majority of Albertans, or certainly a plurality,

typically in the cities, thought that our government was too reluctant to bring in public health restrictions and too eager to lift them. But a significant minority, primarily in rural Alberta, people more on the right, felt that we were far too eager to bring in restrictions and too reluctant to lift them. Now that polarization existed everywhere to one extent or another, but was far more intense in Alberta. And then you have this kind of existential argument over the role of government in society, a government that is, let's be honest, circumscribing people's liberties, doing things that are unprecedented, at least since the Spanish flu,

to interrupt social and economic life. And then on top of all of that come the vaccines. Now, I never imagined the vaccines would be a point of broad contention. But it turned out that we have, like elsewhere, but I think here in Alberta, a larger faction that are somewhere between vaccine skeptical and militantly anti-vax. And that cohort, motivated in part by anger over public health restrictions, I mean, you know, there was an alt-right media outlet that put up billboards around the province saying Jason Kenney arrested more pastors than communist China, because I think three individuals out of 10,000 clergy violated court orders around COVID restrictions. That kind of stuff was pretty powerful.

And a constituency of people who have found themselves on social media, who are informed by alt-right media platforms, wanted revenge and want control of the government. Half the people voting in the UCP leadership review had never before been members of the UCP, the PC party or the Wildrose party. So completely new people, about two thirds from rural Alberta. And look, Paul, I'm not suggesting that people there, there were absolutely folks with I'm sure legitimate grievances, who didn't like my style or me personally, or perhaps some policy initiatives unrelated to COVID. And I own that. I'm not trying to diminish that at all. But I had a party AGM in

November of last year, so like nine months ago, which was 1700 delegates of your typical core party activists. And every resolution that I supported passed. My slate for the board was elected five to one. I got 12 standing ovations at my keynote address. And it felt like a party where basically something like 80% of the ordinary regular members were supportive. But that was not reflective of the population that voted in the review. So I'm not bemoaning that. Hey, the new members, I think, significantly motivated by anger over COVID and anti-vaccine sentiment. They're citizens. They have every right to join. It's an open process. You know, bully to them. They got their desired outcome. And I have to be self-critical and take responsibility for

the fact that I didn't do enough to, in my perspective, bring out the broader mainstream. There were some administrative things that happened as that vote approached that sure looked like you saw trouble coming and you were trying to keep above water. The main thing being moving from an in-person vote to a mail-in vote. Was that an attempt to give your people time to get out? No. Any member of the party board that made that call will tell you I never spoke to them about it. Nor did my intermediaries. That was the only call the party board could make because they had planned a typical in-person vote. You know, the way I describe this is back in the day, a typical PC leadership review vote would be like 1,400 hung

over Tories getting up in a hotel room in Red Deer one Saturday morning, grabbing a coffee and wandering in to cast a ballot. So based on convention and precedent, they planned for an in-person event. But about, what was it, about a month out? Yeah, it was about two or three weeks out. They had already received, I think, 16,000 registrations. And we were clearly on track to push past 20,000 for a venue that could accommodate maybe 2,000. And, I mean, Red Deer itself is a city of 100,000. There wasn't even enough space on the roads.

There was 3,000 parking spaces for potentially 20,000 voting delegates or more. So it was just logistically completely impossible. So the party board made, I think, the only responsible your quote into French so I could speak on Radio Canada about it. So I only remember your quote in French. But basically, you were calling elements within the party nutty, right-wing conspiracy theorists. First of all, did you know you were being recorded? Like that wasn't a tactical thing? No, no, no. A lot of people think it was an evil genius tactical play on my part. No, no, no. I was just actually, I was speaking to some caucus staff.

I've been asked to just chat with them. And I think you probably know my reputation in Ottawa. I tend to be pretty open and frank with people. So somebody recorded me and leaked it. Okay. Let me put some sort of goal lines around your depiction of the political landscape. Was Rachel Notley going to lose so resoundingly that you actually, in retrospect, didn't have to unite the Conservative parties against her? Could you have done this with the Progressive Conservative Party? Yeah, possibly, but it would have been more difficult and less certain. But yeah, I think a strong argument could be made in a hypothetical scenario that a, hypothetical scenario that that that a um you know let's say i took i i won the election as leader of the pc party i think there were ways that if i get map this out i don't spend a lot of time thinking about these hypotheticals that i could have we could have um substantially

reunited the divided coalition by taking strong policy positions, which I did in our platform. I mean, there's nothing the Wild Rose Party ran on in the past that we have neither committed to nor done as a government, that we have not committed to nor done as a government. So I think we, in that sense, I could have taken away the raison d'etre of the Wild Rose Party. But the best and surest way of defeating the NDP was a full formal merger. And we did that with 97% endorsement from both legacy parties. I did a panel in Calgary about the Alberta election a couple of days after you won. And there were some people who know more about Alberta politics there to even out the panel, but I was there. And Don Guy presented some polling, and he found really substantial support for taking Alberta out of confederation, concentrated in rural ridings, reasonably closely aligned with your voting coalition. closely aligned with your voting coalition. And we speculated about, is Jason Kenney going to turn out to be René Lévesque and join the rebellion? Or is he going to be Robert Bourassa and try and

surf it down to... Were you concerned about the fervor with which some of your folks elected you? Was that going to be a problem from day one? Well, it's always been a bumptious right of centre coalition in this province. So I'm not surprised by that. in this province, that even at the height of the popularity of Peter Lougheed and Ralph Klein, we're getting sometimes upwards of 10% of the vote, primarily in rural ridings, occasionally electing an MLA. And, you know, in the case of Peter Lougheed, 1982, an outright separatist MLA. My point was, we're not trying to bring those people into this tent. We're trying to create a broad, mainstream, free enterprise Alberta Conservative Coalition.

We don't need to, and we don't want to include those folks who are really on the far margins of our politics. One of whose motivating ideas tends to be separation. I was always explicit about using all of the levers at our disposal to create a more autonomous province, a stronger province, to fight federal intrusions into our jurisdiction, to fight federal policies that are massively damaging our economy, primarily our largest industry, the energy sector. you should mention Bourassa because I very consciously, and I said this, I think, more than once publicly, I saw my model in a way or analog as the Quebec Liberal Party at various points. Unapologetically, federalist, unconditionally Canadian, but also powerfully pro-autonomy. So I always saw that as the approach. was the view amongst that cohort that I have been a sellout to Ottawa, that I've not been serious about fighting Trudeau, standing up for the province, pushing for autonomy. Now, when I share that perspective with some of my fellow premiers or federal ministers, I mean, they bend over laughing because they think that

is so ridiculous, given how aggressive I've been. And Paul, I mean, let me be blunt about this. I think it's fair to say, I think it's objectively the case that I have been far more assertive about Alberta's role in the Federation than any premier since Peter Lougheed circa 1981-82 around the time of the National Energy Program and the Patriotation of the Constitution. And people forget he ultimately signed an agreement with Pierre Trudeau for the continuation of the National Energy Program. And signed on to the Constitution. If I'm not mistaken. You're very good memory. And champagne flutes, to be precise. And there was, you know, ultimately the Patriotiation. He signed

on to the patiation. He was not LVAC. I mean, I have pushed files that I hope continue to fruition, to be honest, including creating our own Alberta Provincial Pension Plan, replicating the QPP, Alberta Provincial Police, suing Trudeau on the carbon tax unsuccessfully, suing him so far successfully on the Impact Assessment Act Bill C-69. I could go down a very long list of things that none of my predecessors have supported or done. But for that particular cohort, all of that was inadequate, insufficient, and a sign of weakness. Which leads me to wonder whether the UCP is governable. Is it a party that can be led by somebody who wants a broad mainstream fiscally conservative party? Or are they in the

market for something else? Well, I think the answer is yes, because I don't think this stuff would have happened without COVID. I think COVID was the black swan event that, as I say, was like a buzzsaw in our coalition. And I think without that, there would have been some chirping and marginal criticism that we weren't being tough enough on Ottawa. But broadly, Paul, when I go through our huge policy agenda that we've delivered on, There are precious few members of the Conservative Coalition in this province, even folks further out on the right, that could object to it. And we're seeing the fruits of this. We're leading Canada in economic growth by far. Mojo is back. People are moving back to Alberta. Huge net population growth, fantastic diversification. Things that matter to conservatives, get them out of bed in the morning.

Expanding Alberta's already robust tradition of school choice, tough on crime reforms, the things we've done to create a more autonomous province, a chief firearms officer at Alberta Provincial Parole Board pursuing police and pensions. We've delivered substantially or completely on 90% of our platform commitments. There's virtually no contention on those things in our coalition. So I think absent COVID, people would be, and in fact, Paul, what I mean, what I find when I go around just anecdotally is ordinary people come up to me and say, well, you got a bum rap. You know, COVID was impossible. You only had bad choices and you guys have done a good job. So I think that the mainstream is there, but we had a leadership process where people who I would characterize as not being in the mainstream

were able to have a very big show. We'll come back to my conversation with Jason Kenney in a minute. It takes a lot of people to make a show like this, and I am so grateful to all of our partners for helping us do it. The University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, the National Arts Centre, our founding sponsor, TELUS, and our title sponsor, Compass Rose, and our publishing partners, the Toronto Star and iPolitics. You just mentioned federal-provincial relations, and I've been wondering, I mean, you were a premier dealing with a prime minister. What was that like? You were dealing with a premier dealing with a prime minister you had publicly ridiculed. And I don't know whether that tainted the thing. You called him an empty trust fund millionaire

who has the political depth of a finger bowl. Did he hold that against you? I don't think so. Lord knows, Justin Trudeau has taken more than his share of shots at me and at Alberta. You know, when you're in these kinds of positions, you know that there's going to be some sharp elbows and occasionally some unkind things that are said. But the truth is this. We always approached our relationship with Ottawa in two categories. our relationship with Ottawa in two categories. Category A, areas where we could find common ground. Category B, areas where there was just going to be full-on conflict. I said to the Prime Minister the day after when we first spoke after my election that I wanted wherever possible to find common ground. And we did on things that are really consequential to Alberta, but things that are not front page issues that didn't get much credit from the people who straddle separatism. So, for example, we got a critical equivalency agreement over the regulation of major industrial greenhouse gas emissions that probably saved our largest industries billions of dollars because we in Alberta, we know how to regulate oil and gas.

Ottawa doesn't. It's something we've been doing for about 70 years. They've never done. And a hugely important win. We got an equivalency agreement on methane regulations. And we're world leaders. When I go down to Washington, they all want to know, how have we reduced methane emissions by 45%?

And we're on track to hit 75%. Ottawa had a ridiculous scheme that would have cost billions more how have we reduced methane emissions by 45% and we're on track to hit 75%? Ottawa had a ridiculous scheme that would have cost billions more for less reduction. We got an equivalency agreement to allow Alberta to regulate northern caribou habitat regulations. Now, again, boy, that sounds like a snoozer of an issue. But if Ottawa had proceeded with their plan, they would have sterilized a third of the landmass of northern Alberta, cost us about 6% of GDP, and upwards of 60,000 jobs. We got control over that. And so we're doing it in a much more targeted and smarter way. These are big, big, big ticket items. We got them to

lift the cap on the fiscal stabilization program. Now, it didn't go retroactive, which is what we wanted, but it was an important step forward for fairness. We got a billion dollars out of them as a stimulative, counter-cyclical measure during COVID recession for well reclamation to help us address a longstanding environmental liability. And I mean, I could go on. So there's a long range of issues where we actually got things done by working cooperatively. But then there are a bunch of other things, the retail carbon tax, Bill C-69, the Impact Assessment Act, which is just a brutal and gross violation of our jurisdiction over the regulation of natural resources. The emissions reduction plan, which we think is absurdly

unfeasible. But where we can, we find common ground. And I kind of think that's how it's supposed to work in the Federation. I do also want to ask you about another federal figure, which is Chrystia Freeland, who was put to the post of Intergovernmental Minister after the 2019 campaign. And I'm just curious, what was it like working with Christia Freeland in that capacity? Very good. She was appointed to that right after the 2019 election. And if you had heard or seen public opinion data about an increase in support for separation in the spring of 2019, well, an increase in support for separation in the spring of 2019, well, it kind of went off the charts in the fall of that year because of the re-election of the Trudeau government itself, A, but B, because of the way he ran that campaign. And he started to play a very explicitly anti-Alberta

message, primarily in French and in Quebec, but, you know, guess what, that does filter out here. And it was, you know, attacking the Les Grands Petrolières Albertains and all that stuff, sounding like he was from the Bloc Québécois. And so that resonated very deeply here. And support, notional support for separation started to take off. And so I think that's one of the reasons the prime minister appointed Chrystia, who, while being a downtown Toronto MP, originally comes from Alberta, from northern Alberta. And so to her credit, she got on a plane immediately, came down and sat down with me for several hours. And we had, as they say, a frank and full exchange. as they say, a frank and full exchange. And I can say that on a bunch of issues,

she was helpful. Helpful in taking us seriously, for starters, understanding the predicament that Albertans were in in our economy, the huge displacement of people from the energy sector, the human social consequences of that. By the way, I think I would say other premiers would agree that she was very constructive in her respectful approach to the provinces. In part with her help, we started to make some progress on the fiscal stabilization program. And as I say, as we got into COVID, things like the well reclamation program. But she wasn't in that position for a long time. She wasn't in that position for a long time. But it was, you know, I don't think it's any secret that on issues around energy and the environment, the economy, that there is an ongoing tension in the Trudeau government. And I can say that we've had certain federal ministers who are much easier to work with constructively than others.

Stephen Guilbeault would be in the less constructive? You have a firm grasp of the obvious, Paul. Okay. Let me push that grasp of the obvious. You talk about the decisions that you had to make after the 2015 federal election. Another big thing that happened after the 2015 Canadian federal election was that Donald Trump got elected president. I've always thought one of the great shows that I didn't get to see was Stephen Harper trying to run a federal conservative government while Donald Trump was president. I think that would have been a hard puck to handle. How much do you think Donald Trump's election changed Canadian politics?

I actually think a fair bit. On my side of Canadian politics, on the right of centre. I mean, we know that Liberals and New Democrats love, just think they're just addicted to dabbling in U.S. politics, trying to lever whatever's happened in U.S. politics to scare Canadians or whatever. That's just a given. That's just part of our political culture, unfortunately. But on my side of Canadian politics, here's my take, Paul.

I think that most people who are broadly right of center have, over the past several years, developed a deep distrust for mainstream legacy media broadly. And I actually, I'm one of them. Yeah. But the further you go on the spectrum to the right, the more that goes from skepticism to outright hostility. So you have a significant share of the population, which would be larger in Alberta than the rest of Canada, who will not consume any information coming from legacy mainstream media outlets. So where do people get their information? you see mainstream media outlets. So where do people get their information? Well, I think some of those people, the further you go to the right, curate their own sources of information, often through social media. And the further you go down that spectrum, folks who would not have been able to publish outlandish conspiracy theories 10 years ago, or 20 years ago, can now

self-publish, of course, on social media. And now, of course, there have been entrepreneurs who have created alt-right media platforms to cater to that audience. We have them here in Canada. They're typically web-based. And so now you have a cohort of people, almost all of whose political information comes from their own curated social media or alt-right media sources. Then you add onto that Donald Trump, who, in my view, validated a lot of those more extreme views. I mean, this is a guy who couldn't conjure up a condemnation of QAnon. To his credit, he defended vaccines infrequently, but he did. To his credit, he defended vaccines infrequently, but he did. But broadly speaking, I think he kind of validated an unleashing of animal spirits on the far right end of the political spectrum that has been really problematic. And then you add layer on top of all of that COVID, where you've got government stepping forward to restrict people's freedoms in unprecedented ways. And, you know, if you're inhabiting those silos of information, I mean, I remember I was doing an interview with one of the

more mainstream alternative right platforms here, because I try to speak to people where they are. And I was watching the live feed of comments. Now, Paul, you know me. I mean, I was, I think, by reputation, if not the most, one of the most right-wing government, ministers in the Harper government. Most liberals would, you know, I think, regard me as a kind of Darth Vader of the right in Canada of some sort. That's their caricature of me, I think. And yet I'm watching this live feed

and you can see this on my Facebook page any given time. And Kenny, you will be executed following the Nuremberg trials for your crimes against humanity for promoting the vaccines. Kenny, you are a worthless POS globalist. You're a sellout to Trudeau, you federalist SOB. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these comments. And I'm thinking to myself, so one of

the founders of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, who has been attacked relentlessly by the left for being one of the few public social conservatives in Canadian politics, who, I mean, on just about every possible issue that matters to conservatives, has 25 or 30 years of a pedigree. And yet for that cohort, what I would call a kind of Trumpian cohort, I am a globalist stooge who, you know, is a waste of skin. And the depth of that hostility, I found astonishing. And I think so much of that coarseness is an indirect effect of Trumpism. When you see federal conservative leadership candidates lining up to swear that they would never show up at Klaus Schwab's World Economic Forum and lining up to welcome the truckers convoy protesters on Parliament Hill.

Do you worry that they're flirting a little too openly with those currents? Well, I would, let me just say on the WEF and Kloschow, I never would go to that, not because I believe they're part of some globalist conspiracy to inject people with a lethal vaccine to depopulate the world and pick your conspiracy. just think it's a i i've just always found davos man slightly ridiculous this gross act of hypocrisy by neoliberal corporate elites who fly their corporate jets to this little village and virtue signal i've always found that distasteful but i also find this notion that davos represents the the new illuminati right this globalist elite seeking to control the world through nefarious means i mean obviously that's that's uh kooky um and on you know the trucker convoy look my position was i think nuanced i was criticized for that i said i agree with a lot of what these people apparently are protesting i think the trucker vax mandate is dumb and pointless and not supported by the science.

And I totally understand the deep frustration of many people with COVID era restrictions and so forth. So I sympathized with a lot of the at least I think what motive what I think motivated some of the participants there. at least I think what I think motivated some of the participants there. But I also explicitly condemned expressions of extremism and the ongoing violation of the rule of law. And I saw Michael Chong give a speech that pretty much said that in Parliament. I don't think that holding those two simultaneous ideas in your head, I don't think it's very difficult. Conservatives believe in the rule of law.

We also sympathize with people who are eager to protect their freedoms. But that doesn't justify shutting down our capital or blocking our borders. I don't see why that would be a difficult position to articulate. Pierre Pauliev has a private members bill now before the House of Commons that would forbid any future vaccine mandates. Could you have gotten through COVID constrained by that private member's bill? Well, actually, I don't, I think, I guess I see he's talking about federal travel mandates, which I've been opposed to. I don't think there's a point in them. I will tell you here, Paul, that we actually passed a law amending the Public Health Act to remove a power of the government to compel people to be vaccinated, which had been in the Public Health Act since 1910.

Partly, Paul, to address the anxiety of people hostile to vaccines about government coercion, I tried to say, hey, folks, I get it. We're not going to tie anybody down and inject a substance into them that clearly violates security of the person, all sorts of common law and principles and constitutional rights. We're not going to do that. And for greater certainty, we will actually amend the Alberta law to remove the power of mandatory inoculation. In terms of proof of vaccination programs, we were the lightest in Canada. We always gave people an option to do a negative test, including our healthcare workers. So they either had to engage in certain kinds of occupations or certain discretionary activities for a few months.

Really during the fourth wave, we said, either show us a proof of vaccination or a periodic negative test. We thought that was a reasonable balance at a time when 90% of our ICU patients were unvaccinated. But on the flip side, again, Paul, I kind of, I know I'm sounding like on the one hand, on the other hand here, on the flip side, by the time we got into Omicron, it's clear that it's infectiousness and the declining protection against infection from the vaccines meant as we got into the first and second quarter of this year, that the argument for vaccine mandates was much weaker. And why the Trudeau government has kept a hold of these things, I think, is only explicable as a political tool. So bottom line is yes,

we never had hard mandates here, and I think we were right to avoid them. Not that I got any credit for that. Jason Kenney, where are you going to go now? I don't know yet. Look, I've got a full-time job and then some until probably mid-October. The leadership election is October 6th. There will be a transition period after that. So I'm giving it my all. I don't want to waste a day.

And it's currently my intention to stay in the legislature after that for at least a period of time, continue to represent my constituents. And I'm looking forward to new opportunities. I've got hundreds of unread books to get to, lots of personal projects I want to work on. And I'm sure I'll continue to speak to issues that really matter to me in the future. But I'll just close by saying, look, as I mentioned off the top, I only really expected to be in this position for a couple more years. I regret that I won't be able to completely land some more of the major big policy reforms we've been working on. But I am proud of what we've achieved. I'll be leaving this province much stronger than the province I inherited in pretty much every

respect. And it's been the greatest privilege of my life to serve as Premier of the best province in the best country in the world. So no regrets for me. Any chance you'll be coming back to Ottawa? I might pass through occasionally, but I do not miss Ottawa one bit. Certainly not in a professional capacity. Good enough. Jason Kenney, thanks so much for giving us your time today. Thanks, Paul. Thanks for listening to The Paul Wells Show. The Paul Wells Show is produced by Antica in partnership with the National Arts Centre

and the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. It's published by the Toronto Star and iPolitics. Thanks to our founding sponsor, TELUS,

and our title sponsor, Compass Rose. Our senior producer is Kevin Sexton. Our associate producer is Hayley Choi. Our executive producers are Lisa Gabriel

and Laura Reguerre. Stuart Cox is the president of Antica. Music is by Kevin Bright. And hey, whoever wins that UCP leadership race next week, anytime you want to talk, I'll be here. If you're enjoying this show, tell a friend. We'll be back next Wednesday. Thank you.