Cracks in the Facade

How Jason Kenney Lost the Confidence of Alberta?

Source abfree.ca

Well into a grueling Covid pandemic and still 2+ years from a required election, Premier Jason Kenney is struggling through turbulent political waters that have completely changed the political tone of Alberta. Albertans are not happy and by Albertans we mean all of them. Luckily long gone are the days of guillotines and revolutions so for now Jason's head is safe, at least his physical one because the question and commentary running rife throughout Alberta is whether the boy from the east is the right leader for Alberta today. The voters in this bastion of all things distinctly western Canadian wield their anger at the ballot box and they have done so numerous times in the past. Nowhere do the electorate show their displeasure with politicians at the voting station more than in the province of Alberta. For now, Jason can be comforted that by the time an election is called, the pandemic will be behind us and the people of Alberta will return to their natural safe space of fearing the extreme CCP socialist big government policies of the NDP, or will they?

The Fickle Political Winds of Angst

Jason is without a doubt feeling more than just the ire of Alberta voters, he is also feeling the ire from inside his very own party. From the grassroots to the high inner sanctum of UCP power, the recently re-branded United Conservative Party has seen a growing momentum of disappointment, disengagement and opportunity for internal power struggles within the party as a rising majority of supporters and members openly question both Jason's leadership and the behind the scenes skulduggery of the imported and ensconced Ottawa Gang at the core of Jason's internal power base. The change has been so dramatic that open revolt within the party is no longer a possibility, it is a fact with members and MLA's of the UCP party threatening to support independence and a leadership review. Worse for Jason and the UCP are the plethora of disgruntled conservative voting Albertans who are simply choosing not to vote at all in the next election supported by rumblings of discontent that Rachel was no worse than Jason. While the votes of the 'angry malcontents' may have proved immensely unimportant in the past, in Alberta's more recent history of the prior election in 2015, the fickle political winds of the voting public have proven to be real and this has surfaced cracks in the facade showing just how divided the right wing of Alberta politics is and what the consequences of such angst and anger can be.

The Alberta Premier is attempting to side step these threats not with favorable conservative policies but with a heavy bispectrum split to the left toward social progressive politics in an attempt to shore up enough support to remain in power and by taking up residence well into the domain of the NDP. It is a distinctly Ottawa Liberal tactic to openly placate giant and growing public sector unions and wealthy government elites and it is causing the right of the political spectrum in Alberta to question which side of the fence Jason is really on or if he possibly is playing both sides at the same time. It has even been raised in the tin foil hat circles that Jason is an eastern Manchurian Candidate placed by the eastern power elites behind Justin to undermine Alberta. However the supporters of the NDP such as the public sector and health care workers are staunch and steadfast and not only unlikely to vote UCP regardless of what Jason does, Rachel and her ultra socialist backers positively and gleefully smell the blood in the water and are choosing to remain silent while letting the UCP unravel on its own. Jason's giant gamble of placating the large and powerful government unions while tossing his right wing base under the progressive bus is a very high risk bet comparable to his betting billions of Alberta tax dollars on the hope that President Trump would be reelected. Given his expertise and success as a gambler, most Albertans clearly understand why the UCP is shuddering at the core.

Common Sense Versus Virtue in An Era of Covid

Jason has undoubtedly stepped firmly, boldly and very confidently on a number of landmines over the past year and left a trail of disgruntled and dead Albertans in the wake of his attempts to reach out to what he perceives as the growing shift to the left in society. To the average working Albertan, the 'Ottawa Gang' has tried daily in the crisis to touch the hearts of natural NDP voters like health care workers while seemingly ignoring the rest of Albertans who are suffering. He has increased health care spending and lavished tax money on wealthy doctors in a complete reversal of his promises to Albertans to end the unbridled growth in government spending and tipped his cards even further to reveal an open and willing acceptance of MMT policy where government debt has no limits. At the time of writing this article, Jason has failed to completed his promise to reign in govt spending and has posted not only the largest deficit in Alberta history but will also produce the largest debt level on record in the history of the province of over $100 Billion, completely and forever obliterating Ralph Klein's 'paid in full' legacy.

Kenney's approach to recovery from the pandemic devastation is to lavish even more spending on wealthy government workers. It is these same government workers that are now being viewed by ordinary working Albertans as the new privileged '6figure' elite with gold plated pensions, platinum compensation packages and growing power and influence over the daily lives of ordinary Albertans. They get vaccines first, every govt news 'availability' mentions them in glowing terms and the UCP policies seem to be less negotiated as much as they are simply handed out like candy to avoid conflict. At the same time as Jason is kneeling at the alter of progressive change, he has disastrously courted offshore Asian (i.e. China) investment in coal projects in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in a complete betrayal of area ranchers, landowners and First Nations and those progressive environmentalists he seeks to woo as voters. The problem for Jason is that his right wing base not only see these actions but they feel the betrayal to their core. For now they are unable to capitalize on their angst to stop the spending spree as ordinary Albertans demand a recovery at any cost even if it means borrowing more from the wealthy elite to pay the mortgage. The problem for Jason is these economic chickens will eventually come home to roost and may already have arrived as the young flee the province in search of employment.

Along the way to $100 Billion in debt, Jason's lean toward progressive socialism has left a disastrous and impossible to escape legacy. He advocated for vaccines for healthy young health care workers at a time when elderly Albertans were dying in droves. Each agonizing death was a mother, father, husband, wife, brother, sister, uncle, aunt and cousin who left behind family who still deal with their grief and anger at the unnecessary loss of their loved ones. The deaths were preventable and when the agony, shock and mourning of those relatives wears off, the remnants of that anger will persist long into the future. To the dismay of Jason, for every one dead Albertan multiples of real voters will demand an explanation and a target for their anger to offset the very personal and painful loss of losing their loved one. Jason and Deena withheld critical information from Albertans during a catastrophe in which their loved ones were dying and made decisions that forever altered the fabric that was and is their lives. This was not just playing in politics, this was always about saving lives.

The UCP failed at the basics of leadership during the crisis stalling on the wearing of face masks, delaying the implementation of pandemic protocols in the facilities that housed the most vulnerable, failing to close the source of spread (schools) while shuttering local small businesses, demanding local churches close their doors while permitting weekly protests of various kinds to continue unabated along with everything from hockey tournaments and American tourists to Hollywood film crews and international vacation travel. Even the press release around a personal friend who had died came back to haunt Jason as it turned out his 'personal friend' who was close enough to eulogize was a suspected serial rapist, showing the depth of Jason's own lack of personal judgment. However all of this was not enough as the Premier of Alberta continued to poke his finger deeply into the eye sockets of Albertans while softly coddling Alberta's newly minted and traditional enemies like the Americans, Justin Trudeau, Quebec, Ottawa and even BC. By summer 2020, Jason Kenney was only getting started.

Politically Bispectrum

In Kenney's defense, times are changing and ultra conservative parties have fallen by the way none more dramatically than the Republican Party in the US. The shift to the left comes from a natural inclination of youth and new arrivals into Canada toward globalist and socialist views combined with decades of subversive socialist programming inside Alberta schools at the behest of heavily unionized teachers. Jason clearly understands this shift and in his attempts to reach for the political brass ring of the center while placating both his grassroots and the eastern powers in Ottawa who pull his heartstrings be it consciously or unconsciously, changes to the UCP core needed to be made. Slow shifts in the move away from the ultra right that would have been expected in the past gave way to frantic left leaning policies and the growing use of virtue signalling causing Jason to suffer from near pefect political bispectrum disorder, an affliction that affects most politicians today as they desperately claw at relevance in a growing climate of politician distrust & polarization.

On his ascension to the Alberta rightwing throne, one of his first acts as Emperor was to throw a bone to his ultra right Christian base that put him in power by terminating the NDP's previous protection of gay straight alliances in schools. He then rolled the dice in a grand massive scale using taxpayer money from Albertans in a disastrous high stakes Vegas style bet on the Keystone pipeline and the re-election of Donald Trump, thereby bailing out wealthy eastern elites like banks and pension funds that had originally invested in the doomed project. He canceled a long term coal development policy created by the venerable Peter Lougheed in order to permit Chinese backed Australian coal companies who sought to skirt China's public ban on direct Australian coal exports. In doing so he thereby gifted them the right to explore in the pristine foothills of the Rocky Mountains against the desires of local ranchers, landowners and First Nations and opening the threat to the watersheds of the drinking water for most of Western Canada. He squandered millions of tax dollars on an 'Oil Misinformation War Room' and stocked it with friends and supporters in a so called bid to 'fight oil disinformation' from outside environmental interests. The War Room ultimately yielded not a single success but did produced some hapless advertising campaigns for the media to profit from and a plethora of big salaries to the inner circle of Jason supporters. All of these were classic Ottawa political maneuvers designed for and accepted by mostly conservative supporters being fed a constant stream of fear inducing rhetoric by an Ottawa Gang that had cut their teeth in the aggressive political world now occupied by Justin Trudeau and his powerful henchmen. What Jason did next stunned them all.

Separation, Covid and the Rise of Alberta Anger

No policy showed the true nature of the power of the newly entrenched Ottawa Gang in Edmonton than Jason's steadfast refusal to permit a referendum on separation and his government's handling of the Covid pandemic. One is now proving to be a threat to his hold on power and the other a devastating outcome from which he may not survive politically. At the start of the pandemic all the way back in December 2019 in China as videos of people falling dead in the streets of Wuhan began circulating on the internet, Alberta Health Services didn't even acknowledge the existence of a fierce global pandemic until well into February of 2020. By this time. countries around the world had closed their borders and grounded all direct flights to China and were beginning to stockpile N95 face masks and protective PPE gear. AHS chose to take another direction by publishing on their website the unfortunate and now patently false information to Albertans that face masks would not protect against a viral epidemic and were more likely to 'increase the risk of infection'.

As baffled Albertans questioned the government, their newly minted Alberta media celebrity and darling Dr. Deena Hinshaw, Alberta's Chief Medical Officer (CMO), assured them that she was a doctor and was to be trusted on all matters they didn't understand because 'science' and because she wore a dress with the periodic table on it proving her vast intellectual superiority above the common people and because in 2021 that's how the press still measured women. It was at this time that the cracks in the facade begin to appear as covid cases, which had been in Alberta since January, spread as an unending direct pipeline of flights between China and Calgary brought in tourists and visitors to and from the most infected areas directly into the heart of Alberta. Unlike the SARS and MERS epidemics when borders were immediately closed, this time the Chinese govt hid the outbreak behind a veil of denials and censorship. The cases didn't become an issue in Alberta until the most severe began to show up in hospitals and morgues in March. Prior to this, AHS was openly denying the existence of cases while not even testing for the disease. Soon Pandora had vacated the Covid pandemic box and the rest was fate with just shy of 2000+ dead and still counting at the time of this article. The Kenney govt through AHS and Deena had left a trail of unnecessary devastation, death and broken lives across the entire province through inaction and poorly thought out policies including many dead who had voted UCP when alive but the best was still yet to come.

As the UCP floundered in their attempts to keep up with Hinshaw and her NDP loving team of medical staff who fought to comprehend just exactly what this thing called a pandemic was all about while they reread their old textbooks searching for anything about immunology that they may have missed or forgotten from their schooling, a new and disturbing trend was beginning to develop. In the spring of 2020, AHS began to notice that the most severe cases they were seeing in hospitals were the elderly coming from congregate living facilities or age care homes. Further these cases were moving from severe to death in a very short time indicative of massive viral loads. AHS's response was to 'begin the process of gathering information'. That's it. There were no pandemic plans at the ready to dust off and implement, just a child like bewilderment at the carnage they were seeing in hospitals and an inability to make decisions followed by Deena's weekly robotic delivery of her condolences to the families of the dead.

AHS's first real response was to protect the health care workers by desperately hoarding PPE equipment that had long disappeared from the market even going so far as to accept a plane load of faulty PPE from none other than China who had been astutely hoarding PPE from around the world en masse back in January (including a large donation of PPE from Justin Trudeau) while blocking the rest of the world from obtaining any 'on the ground' information about the virus. The Kenney/AHS 'masks don't work' PR campaign was part ignorance and part panic as they sought to outrun the public who were now buying 3M masks to save their own families. While what little supplies the govt had on hand were redirected to front line health workers, a vast majority of 'second class' health care workers in age care facilities were not on the list of PPE beneficiaries. They were deemed by Deena and AHS to be 'not real health care workers' due to their status in semi private health facilities. The catastrophic result was the most at risk, or the elderly, were now being fed a steady diet of the virus from a constant never ending rotation of age care health workers and attendants moving between infected facilities.

As the initially ignored pandemic finally became something to attend to in late spring of 2020, the UCP government floundered in trying to fight battles on multiple fronts. The first was a growing list of dead & dying Albertans from Covid and the rising shouts from Albertans that the government wasn't doing enough. Rather than step up and take charge, the Kenney govt and Ottawa Gang continued to play politics with the lives of Albertans opting to shut down only 'non essential' businesses, refusing to accept enforced mask wearing and social distancing while withholding accurate and comprehensive data about the virus from the people of the province including exactly who was dying and why. Instead a siege mentality started to permeate both the government and AHS with long periods of silence followed by blunt poorly thought out directives, like the reopening of schools in September while openly denying the obvious spread of covid in those same schools by mid October.

As Christmas approached and the number of dead increased, lack of action was beginning to take its toll as now angry and exasperated Albertans railed at Kenney online. While Deena dug in her heels and steadfastly refused to close all schools, senior high students were eventually sent online in early December and a broad shutdown of restaurants, hair salons & bars was implemented. The December 2020 lockdown was far more muted and thought out than the panicked spring shutdowns and reopenings that closed stores of all kinds while permitting giant foreign owned companies like Walmart and Costco to remain operating (i.e. selling clothes and goods) due to their sales of food. In late 2020, Jason had felt the sting of Alberta small business owners from his last shutdown and modified the orders to avoid claims of favoritism of the globalists like Walmart over locally owned businesses. As Christmas approached, Deena continued to deliver lines in her theater of the absurd by claiming there was 'no transmission occurring in schools' while forcing closed the businesses that she had just recently claimed were 'not spreading the virus' according to her own data. Suddenly she was forcing closed those same businesses as Albertan's trust and hope in all things AHS began a slow agonizing death along with the ever increasing numbers of elderly. Deena was no longer the darling of Alberta as the realization that a medical doctor in a periodic table dress was not a scientist and that a PhD was no substitute for common sense.

The Death of Trust in Alberta

By January the multi week break of schools had the right impact and the case numbers unsurprisingly began to stabilize and fall. Christmas yielded no expected massive jump in cases as had been voraciously pushed by so called experts, governments, Deena and media alike and had in fact begun the long road down. This despite the continuing dissemination of misleading pandemic 'data' like the widely quoted and misused 'positivity rate' or the number of positive cases divided by the total number of tests run on a given day inclusive of testing ordered and managed by AHS itself. However, a dribble of vaccines had finally arrived in Alberta but instead of injecting the people who were dying, or the elderly, Deena instead grabbed the first vaccines for her own people or the young health care workers and doctors in AHS run hospitals. AHS and Deena pitched the spin that these people were the 'most at risk of transmitting the disease to the vulnerable' thereby completely ignoring the common sense notion that not only should a hospital be the one place where pandemic protocols were the highest level but that covid wards, which should have been air segregated, were already full of people infected with covid long before they even entered the hospital rendering the whole 'nurses needed the vaccine to protect the people' argument foolish at best.

Piled on top of the PR spin was a lack of clear directives and mandates about even the simplest and most obvious pandemic management elements like full collection of data to determine which deaths were actually caused by covid and which deaths were caused by other factors in people who just happened to also have covid. Even the act of contact tracing failed miserably. Further the source of spread in age care facilities was by health provider staff but they were not included in the initial vaccine rollout thereby causing more unnecessary deaths over the coming months. AHS had created an environment of inconsistent data, ineffective policy and outright misrepresentation and misinterpretation of actual data. Albertans, who Deena believe were too stupid to know any different, had finally came to the realization that our best and brightest doctors were incompetent at best and deadly ignorant at worst. Truth and honesty in Alberta had become just one more victim of covid.

When the House Wins as Usual

By this time, Joe Biden had moved into the White House and his first act as President was to ensure the failure of Jason's taxpayer funded, billion dollar bet and bailout of the wealthy on the Keystone pipeline as well as to surface a deeply held disgust of the people of Alberta by the American public more consistent with PM Justin Trudeau's personal view. Billions of taxpayer dollars were squandered while giant eastern banks and pension funds happily cashed out. When the Dakota dust had settled, Jason and the Alberta taxpayers were left holding the bag. He had failed to get a single pipeline built anywhere, his war room produced no wins, the millions spent lobbying the US govt had failed and Trudeau was operating with impunity against Alberta following up new carbon taxes with gun legislation to seize firearms from law abiding gun owners. The very same gun owners who demanded Jason do something and who were ardent supporters of all things conservative. Jason's answer was to do next to nothing other than a soft legal challenge even when Trudeau end ran the provincial government and handed federal gun seizure powers onto the municipalities of the province thereby sidestepping the higher power of a constitutionally mandated government in favor of lower 'governments' that are not even constitutionally mandated (i.e. outside the responsibility of the federal government). Ottawa was no longer staying in their lane but Jason refused to take an aggressive public stance on behalf of Albertans. It began to appear to Albertans that Jason liked Ottawa more than he liked the people of Alberta. Suddenly Albertans realized that long gone were the days of Peter Lougheed and Ralph Klein.

Trudeau was winning and loving every minute of it and Jason was seemingly driving his support base toward separation parties like the newly formed and half resurrected Wildrose Independence Party. The move was a massive win for Rachel and Justin as the NDP simply sat on the the sidelines with popcorn in hand while Jason's UCP train careened off the rails at full speed. The die was cast for a repeat of the 2015 election and the return of Rachel 2.0 when the same Wildrose inspired groups split the conservative vote permitting the NDP to walk through the center void and take power. As well, subtle rumors and comments in Alberta and inside the UCP were beginning to emerge to question if Jason was really working for the UCP party and Alberta or the devastation of it. In response the Ottawa gang did what politicians always do, they ignored the peril and the online shouts and moved ahead with only minor changes to the pandemic war front including a shift in PR promoting vaccines for the elderly first while continuing to more silently vaccinate young health workers including non front line administrative staff.

For Deena, who was placed into her office by Rachel, the reasons and bias for giving vaccines to health workers were clear but many in Alberta were beginning to ask uncomfortable questions like why so many elderly were not vaccinated earlier leading to real deaths while almost no health care workers suffered the same fate and yet were given priority? Even workers in meat plants were at a higher risk than nurses and doctors. Albertans demanded that Jason and the Ottawa Gang acknowledge that the lives of their elderly parents were more important than health workers who were not at risk but by this time Jason had begun to enter long stretches of hiding from the public only periodically showing up when the firestorms were raging, like when numerous of his ministers and staff took vacations outside of Canada during the height of the pandemic. Although he responded to the events with demotions and the odd firing, the damage was done. Albertans had moved the needle from angry to beyond furious as the political elites from the east flaunted their privilege and power while Alberta businesses went bankrupt.

Soon protests both in person and online grew and people began to lose interest in worrying about their inbred fear of Rachel and all things socialist. To Albertans, there seemed to be little difference between the policies of Rachel and Jason except that Rachel was at least a true born and bred Albertan. This became more evident when Jason's budget grew the debt by the largest amount ever recorded in Alberta's history thereby eclipsing Rachel's previous record. What Albertans had voted for had not come to pass and even promises like the right of referendum languished until it became the only thing left for Jason to offer in appeasement and only on unimportant side issues like an Alberta pension plan, police force or daylight savings time but never on the dreaded and feared separation of Alberta from Canada. To Albertans, the UCP was becoming synonymous with the NDP and the only hope for conservative policies were the ultra right tin foil hat brigade running the separatist parties. The split was in and Jason was at a crossroads.

The Return of Rachel 2.0?

Today Jason's political future looks grim as #ResignKenney trends on social media and Albertans shift allegiance to other parties or simply vow not to vote. The fear of Rachel and her own disastrous east leaning policies is subsiding and Kenney's popularity has plummeted below that of the NDP leader. The question on Albertan's minds was did they really get anything different in Jason than Rachel? The answer for Jason was becoming an uncomfortable no. As the pandemic continued and young people began to accept that Alberta was not going to be the place to have a career or life unless in government, Jason continued alienating his base by attacking evangelical churches that remained servicing their flocks while permitting schools to remain wide open spreading new covid variants deep into the community. Further he was facing another uncomfortable trend. As seniors were slowly vaccinated, the case counts dropped off a precipice proving that he had squandered vaccines on young health care workers at the expenses of hundreds of elderly lives and thousands of members of their devastated families. The reality of the personal devastation of Albertans, facilitated by yet another failed policy based on ignorance and a lack of science and simple common sense, was clear and evident. The question now is can Jason outrun all that has happened with so little support from within the province and his own party?

Albertans face the obvious. Vaccines will arrive by the truckload as big pharma competes for profit and they will be shoved down the throats of Albertans whether they want them or not. The fact is the pandemic will eventually end by vaccine, self inoculation, time or the venerable herd immunity. No one believes Deena and her desperate heart wrenching claims that schools do not spread the virus while people on treadmills do and as Albertans smell the coming spring arrival of a flood of cheap budget vaccines, slowly the world and Alberta will return to a 'more normal' way of life despite Deena's frantic cries of 'think of the variants' and the MSM's desperate push for third, fourth and even fifth waves and their own relevance. Albertan's are numb, angry and are seeking a target for voter retribution.

Barring the appearance of god or aliens, that target will be Jason Kenney at the next provincial election and perhaps Naheed Nenshi this fall in Calgary. Sure people forget about policies between elections especially when the candy is handed out right before the vote but they will not forget burying their dead loved ones, the devastation of the loss of their businesses, homes and jobs and they will not forget the eastern boy who lived in Ottawa for more of his life than he did in Alberta. They will need a target for their ire and they will deliver that to the UCP with dramatic political flare as only Albertan's can. The people of Alberta have never been shy to clean house when it comes to their governments and should any of the other hapless parties find a charismatic Ralph Klein style leader before the next election, the future will indeed be dim for the United Conservative Party and Jason Kenney as anger and apathy hand Rachel another term when a party with Wildrose in the name and lack of interest amongst the voters yet again split the vote.

On the inside, the UCP party is not only facing down open rebellion against the pro Canada stance of Kenney and his Ottawa Gang but also growing and open support for a separation referendum and stronger stance against Ottawa from within the very party itself. Lockdowns have proven another sticking point as both rural & urban candidates hear loudly the displeasure of the removal of rights under the guise of the pandemic while elitist politicians took cross border vacations in Dec. Mix in the disastrous coal policy fiasco and rural Alberta is far more angry with the Kenney UCP than urban centers and they are also most likely to support Wexit's softcore separation stance instead of the ultra right hardliners currently trying to own the other separatist parties. Still when push comes to shove, rural Albertans are the first to jump ship and rural UCP MLA's are definitely feeling the heat. Inside urban ridings, the MLA's are also getting an earful on everything from unfair lockdowns to anti maskers rallying behind the banner of freedom while brandishing tiki torches in a stunning display what not to do in a protest. Like it or not, the tiki bearers are Jason's urban base and this along with the 'look down the nose' attacks on rural churches, rural residents and Albertans in general by an elitist Deena has only exasperated the angst.

Deep down in the grassroots membership, there are calls to replace Kenney and turf the Ottawa Gang as the only viable path to an election victory and these calls are steadily growing. Pitching Jason as an out of touch eastern elitist Ottawa plant, these rumblings are rising with each successive failure by the boy from Ontario to execute. Failed pipelines, increases in spending and debt, placation of NDP loving government workers, poorly thought out environmental policy and bispectrum political policy swings from right to left has everyone inside the party scratching their heads and Jason hunkering down in fortress mode. He's even borrowing a page from the Justin Trudeau political playbook going so far as to kick in the teeth of the grassroots by delaying a leadership review until it is too late (6 months before the election). The bad news for Jason is that leadership vacuums are often filled by more capable people and if and when the UCP smells the winds of defeat via a split vote, the tide will quickly turn on the Ottawa Gang and they will be the first under the UCP progressive bus. The war inside the UCP has only just begun and Jason Kenney has put his political future on one last giant bet. It's all in.

The question is not whether Jason Kenney will lose support because the support has already evaporated. The question is whether there is any gas left in the UCP tank to succeed in the next election under the leadership of Jason Kenney while dragging the graves of two thousand dead Albertans behind him and if not, can the UCP effectively clean house before the ghosts of 2015 come back to haunt the party and angry Albertans once again throw caution to the wind and force political change.

The difference this time is do the grassroots want to win the next election or lose while dying on the alter to their golden boy from the east?

Only time and an election will tell.

#VoteSmarter



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Full Disclosure: The authors of this article hold membership in the United Conservative Party of Alberta.