Women of ABpoli short shorts

It's like a weekend update of things I thought notable over the weekend that could seem inconsequential by Friday.

Just in case Alberta Premier Danielle Smith blows everything up at 3:00pm MT today and forces us to change focus…

Pierre Poilievre runs home

Toronto Marathon, May 4, 2025; photo credit: unknown

Much of the election 2025 post-mortems, including mine, have been overly kind to Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Conservative Party of Canada. Far more kind than a fourth loss, and the embarrassing mismanagement of losing one’s own seat after 20 years would have suggested possible.

I’ve likened it to the Alberta NDP’s 2019 loss against Jason Kenney’s United Conservative Party. Supporters didn’t hold NDP leader Rachel Notley accountable for the loss, and she certainly didn’t seem ready to give up. The difference is that Rachel Notley was more popular than both her party and her opponent.

Her second loss, against Danielle Smith in 2023, also had some similarities. The Alberta NDP received a boost in support during the pandemic, especially as Jason Kenney’s popularity continued to slide amongst his own supporters. After barely squeaking by with 51.4 per cent support in his leadership review in 2022, Mr. Kenney saw the potential for a split in the party he had united and stepped down to allow the “lunatics” to take over rather than allow the possibility of another NDP government.

I once wondered if he later regretted that rash decision to step down immediately after the results were known, but when I put it that way, I’m not so sure. I feel as if the most hardcore supporters would rather a bad leader create massive instability in the province, and the country, than have to question their identity again.

Pierre Poilievre was more popular than his former opponent, Justin Trudeau, but struggled to “bring it home” against a new leader. He also had to run home for a safe seat in the ‘Berta wilderness of Battle River-Crowfoot, where the lack of big city perks like 24-hour dry-cleaning, let alone posh pre-schools, would be a culture shock of several orders of magnitude for his family.

Rumour has it that the Damien Kurek will remain the locally-accessible representative in Alberta so Mr. Poilievre doesn’t have to do any work to maintain support in a new riding either. I’m kidding — no conservative has to do that in rural Alberta.

It may also be an interesting experiment of dual-member proportional; where a local candidate is elected and stays locally to represent constituents, while someone else who wants nothing to do with the riding heads to Ottawa.

Setting expectations

Former MP and Alberta Premier Jason Kenney returned to social media to fight the good fight against MAGA-aligned conservatives and separatists trying to weaken our country. Maybe it was because he’s an unapologetic Canadian federalist, or maybe it’s because someone in the conservative camp had to address it and it wasn’t going to be the guy who went out of his way to attract those people to support his bid to be the next Prime Minister.

In a recent post, Mr. Kenney made a statement that raised the bar entirely out of reach for the new Prime Minister, and to a height he never would have placed on his former caucus mate.

Mr. Trump’s latest nonsensical tariff — 100 per cent on all foreign-made films that came just days after UCP backbencher Nolan Dyck used his puffball during Question Period to allow the government to pat their own backs on the film production tax exemption policy — was personal for Mr. Kenney. It was his UCP government that repealed the NDP’s film and production incentives and re-introduced them as a conservative initiative, after all.

He glossed over half of that, obviously.

“Mr. Carney was elected to stop Trump’s arbitrary application of tariffs,” the former Premier wrote on the old bird site. “Reversing this attack on our creative industries must be a priority.”

As I said, it was an expectation he would never have put on Mr. Poilievre — had he not lost the election, and his seat — because Mr. Kenney has enough political acumen, and has certainly paid close enough attention to know that Mr. Trump is a stupid man who has no idea how anything actually works in the real world and will not be stopped/reasoned with/educated by the Canadian Prime Minister.

It would not be politically favourable to put unreasonable expectations on the person you want to succeed. I expect Mr. Kenney knows this well, but perhaps he will need to keep his partisan preferences in check until the danger of failure no longer threatens that which he actually holds dear: his country.

Separatists unite

On Saturday, a few hundred people from Alberta, a province known for electing dynasties spanning three or four decades, got together to demand Albertans relinquish their citizenship because these people didn’t like the election results. One woman even went so far to spell it out: “we'll never be represented in this country and there's never a chance of changing the government.”

It’s a bit rich for anyone from a province that has had a conservative government for 86 of the past 90 years, to whine that their party hadn’t formed government — at the federal level — recently enough.

Apparently 40 per cent of Albertans would rather be their own country, or part of another country; so long as they don’t have to change anything else in their lives to make it happen.

It’s unfortunate that the only people who have found a way to monetize conservative entitlement are their political party namesakes because I think we have far bigger deposits of that than than oil and gas.

Too bad only one of them is a finite resource.

NDP convention

Naheed Nenshi received a strong show of support at his leadership review at the NDP convention over the weekend with 89 per cent support. I wasn’t there, so I recommend Dave Cournoyer’s account.

Members also agreed to an “opt out” option when faced with forced membership in the federal party when becoming a provincial party member. It’s a nice way of saying they realize people vote differently at different levels of government — at least in Alberta.

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