Jason Kenney might have missed it, but Lyndon Johnson’s popular comment about how particular individuals weren’t approximately walking and chewing gum at the very same time was an observation about their lack of intelligence, not their ability to get away with stating inconsistent things at the exact same time.
Alberta’s premier is said to be a quite bright person, so probably he understands what the Democrat from Texas wanted when he pithily observed that Republican congressman Gerald Ford was “so dumb he can’t fart and chew gum at the same time.”
It was a different time, so the press kindly laundered Johnson’s observation to make it suitable for household newspapers. Both Johnson and Ford later worked as presidents of the United States, and the kinder gentler version of LBJ’s fracture was the one that went down in history.
Kenney, the present United Conservative Celebration premier of Alberta and a guy really much cut from the climate-change cloth of the contemporary U.S. Republican politician party, appeared to have something rather various in mind when he utilized the expression.
In an online question-and-answer session during the UCP’s virtual yearly general meeting Saturday, Kenney confessed, rather startlingly, that governments like his are going to need to be seen to be acting on the environment if they anticipate lenders to lend any money to the oil and gas industry to construct brand-new projects. Needless to say, this was a huge change from the days when he used to rail versus NDP premier Rachel Notley for saying the same example.
So, Kenney continued, “we have actually got to be able to walk and chew gum at the very same time when it concerns the energy and environment dynamic.”
Provided the backstory of the concern– about whether Kenney ought to have supported Erin O’Toole when the brand-new federal Conservative leader stated that he would devote to meeting Canada’s target for greenhouse gas emissions under the Paris climate agreement– it seems Kenney wanted the idea both he and O’Toole might say that and not actually mean it.
” I don’t think Erin is wrong to say that we have to find a way forward for our industry where we don’t stick our head in the ground and pretend that the goals behind the Paris thing are not extremely influential in how capital is assigned and how market gain access to decisions are made,” Kenney stated. (Emphasis added.).
Further proof existed when Kenney answered another concern about the so-called energy “war space,” the taxpayer-supported personal business run by three cabinet ministers and understood formally as the Canadian Energy Centre, saying it will soon be fully back in service after a brief COVID-19 lockdown hiatus, increase its pro-oilsands marketing effort again.
” I do expect that in the weeks and months to come, the CEC will return to Strategy A, which was to launch a number of big marketing campaign,” the premier stated.
AGM delegates, voting from their home computers, passed a range of controversial resolutions, consisting of the durable seasonal call to adopt an unconstitutional ” right-to-work” law in Alberta.
Likely to terrify the bejeepers out of larger numbers of voters, though, was the approval by the delegates of a resolution calling on the federal government to develop a parallel, personal, for-profit health-care system.
This is a long method from Kenney’s signed pre-election promise in February 2019 that he would preserve health-care funding and “a widely available, openly financed health-care system.”.
In the Westminster parliamentary system, obviously, a governing celebration has no responsibility to enact nutty policies just because rank and file members have enacted favour of them– “I’m the leader and I get to analyze the resolution and its significance to party policy,” Kenney said sharply back in 2018 when convention delegates passed an ill-timed resolution demanding that schoolkids who sign up with gay-straight alliances be outed to their moms and dads.
But as the Calgary Herald’s Don Braid explained last night, the premier’s action to the AGM health-care resolution was as clear as mud, sounding a lot like the musings of a
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