Rex Murphy: Trudeau damned Notley. He was Kenney’s strongest argument against her. If the PM had worked with the same zeal he exerts on “global warming” for Alberta jobs and a pipeline she would have had more than a chance.
Early on in her tenure she entered a “grand bargain” with Trudeau. She worked with him. She gave the illusory “social licence” deal — backed the dread carbon tax, tightened environmental oversight — on the promise of vigorous leadership on a pipeline to the coast and real attention to Alberta’s hard times in the downturn. The deal was pure vapour; call it a downstream emission. Alberta oil is still landlocked, and “social licence’ is now a phrase you have to look up in the newspaper files.
And then, with Alberta’s election just about to begin, there was the political fury over the prime minister’s attempted interference on behalf of SNC-Lavalin. He, in effect, was risking his government to protect “9,000 jobs in Quebec” (an incorrect number as it turned out). The furious irony of this claim — that he was endangering his own government over Quebec jobs, in contrast to virtual somnambulism over Alberta’s massive losses for the full three years of his government — was a whole lot of salt in a very big wound.
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