It is not too early to see in Jason Kenney’s government the shape and direction of one of Canada’s exceptional and enduring political regimes.
Kenney is cast in the same political mould as Joey Smallwood, Maurice Duplessis and William Aberhart, premiers who towered over Canada’s 20th century by reaching beyond their provinces to shape the nation.
Smallwood was the last Father of Confederation who narrowly won the 1948 referendum that brought Newfoundland into Canada on the strength of a massive rural majority.
Smallwood wanted to make Newfoundland economically self-sufficient on its energy with the development of the biggest hydroelectric power project in the world at Labrador’s Churchill Falls.
Blinded by this obsession and in order to secure financing from the Bank of Montreal, he agreed to terms that allowed Hydro-Québec to buy the generated electric power at prices so low that Hydro-Québec was able to make a profit selling the power to American customers.
The learning that Kenney can take from Smallwood is to avoid the trap of energy obsession by ensuring that Alberta gives away less than it takes for gaining access to oil transportation.
It was Maurice Duplessis, premier of Québec from 1936 to 1939 and 1944 to 1959, who bested Smallwood on the power deal.
Duplessis, like Kenney, create his own party – for Duplessis it was the Union Nationale – and plunged Québec into the Grande Noirceur (Great Darkness), with his religious and cultural politically-based nationalism, symbolized by the creation of the blue and white the fleur-des-lis flag.
Duplessis was a social traditionalist and a political conservative who supported economic and social development based on Catholic family values, support of private property rights, hostile treatment of labour unions, and opposition to communism, secularism and feminism.
William Aberhart, Alberta’s premier from 1935 to 1943 and founder of the 36-year Social Credit dynasty, created western alienation, inherited Louis Riel’s antipathy to the federal government and was the great foe of federal constitutional superiority in Canada’s 20th century.
He lost his legal constitutional challenges but persuaded Albertans that Ottawa would never be Alberta’s friend.
In an alliance with Premier Mitch Hepburn of Ontario, Aberhart sabotaged the Rowel-Sirois Royal Commission, Prime Minister Mackenzie King's political initiative to unite Canadians behind a Liberal vision of Canadian unity.
King refused to add a western Canadian to the commission leadership and did not take seriously Aberhart’s “Case for Alberta” submission which analyzed control of Alberta’s coal reserves as an argument for a fairer Confederation.
Smallwood, Duplessis and Aberhart stand out as premiers who understood the Canadian constitution and Confederation differently than the elites who tried to co-opt them into a “peace at any price” federalism.
What is happening in Alberta this winter of discontent has echoes of bloody guerre des patriotes in 1837 Lower Canada that cost 130 lives and the uprising in Upper Canada where two rebels were hanged.
Jason Kenney’s first challenge in his odyssey to become one of the strong men to be a provincial premier is to temper the anger and establish himself with the malcontents as the answer to their political questions.
Frank Dabbs is a veteran political and business journalist and author.
