Ready for Change - Appendix 1.F (Kenney Shadow Cabinet of the 42nd Canadian Parliament)
CanadianTory
Progressive Conservative
- Location
- The Loyalist Province
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Being Leader of Her Majesty's Official Opposition is a pretty sweet gig. Your primary job is making fun of the government, which is pretty easy considering that as the Official Opposition you're likely already ideologically opposed to just about everything the government says and does. You get a pay bump on top of your standard pay as a Member of Parliament, get to live in public housing, and you get an excellent seat in the House of Commons. Problem is, if you're Leader of the Opposition that also means that your party probably lost the most recent election, the press will be more than eager to remind you and Canadians of the various reasons why your party ended up in there (rather than simply keeping the government accountable), and being in opposition carries with it many of the same headaches of government minus any of the benefits of power. Keeping those obstacles in mind, since Confederation only fifteen Leaders of the Opposition managed to get themselves promoted to the top job in Canadian politics, the most recent being Tom Mulcair. Jason Kenney - disciplined, hard-working, fiercely intelligent, and one of Harper's best fixers in cabinet - wanted to be the sixteenth.
By 2015 most voters had decided that Stephen Harper was too angry, too reclusive, and too out-of-touch with the rest of the country. With the election having handed the New Democrats only fifteen more seats than the Tories however, conventional thinking suggested that the Conservatives didn't have to reinvent the wheel when it came to the policies on offer, they simply had to rejig they way in which they offered them. Tone is important in Canadian politics, at least important enough that Stephen Harper worked really hard on it back when his party was winning elections. He'd just slap on a sweater vest, pretend to mingle with Canadian families, and occasionally smile. Just human enough to reassure voters. Jason Kenney's selling proposition as Conservative Party leader was that he could offer the kind of Harper-continuation that the base wanted, but appeal to swing voters and minority groups that had abandoned the party in the previous campaign. Many within the party had credited Kenney's outreach to various minority groups historically sympathetic to the Liberals to the Conservative's success leading up to and including their majority victory in 2011. According to Kenney, that winning coalition of voters could easily be replicated again, just so long as the party didn't veer too far into the kind of extreme rhetoric that it had begun to dabble with during and after the election. Unless the Conservatives led on pocketbook issues, they would only lose more ground to the NDP. Part of that makeover involved the new 'Shadow cabinet' and leadership team to take on the government during Question Period. Lisa Raitt, who finished fourth in the leadership race that elected Kenney, was named as the party's new Deputy in the hopes that pairing the single and relationship-less Kenney with a woman from Ontario would help make the new leader more appealing to voters. Erin O'Toole, the party's former interim leader who won accolades from party MPs and insiders for his ability to keep the various factions of the party united during his brief stint as head of the party, was named Foreign Affairs critic against Megan Leslie. Leading the charge against Finance Minister Nathan Cullen would be Gerard Deltell, the former leader of the now-defunct Action démocratique du Québec, who was also subsequently named as the new leader's Quebec Lieutenant. As a consolation for missing out on the finance portfolio, Max Bernier would instead get assigned to shadow Alexandre Boulerice and Kenney's old job in Employment. Several other new faces, like Parm Gill, Effie Triantafilopoulos, and Dianne Watts also received promotions. A clear attempt to appease both moderates and the more right-wing base of the party. Trouble was that many in the base of the party, including those who had voted for Kenney, weren't exactly interested in pursuing the Stephen Harper strategy of incrementalism and restraint. They and their activist friends had felt abandoned by Harper, and were eager to push the party in a more ideological direction.
There was also the fact that defeating a government after a single term in power is a tough ask under even the best of circumstances. Canadians are usually willing to give the new government time and the benefit of the doubt. Even Stephen Harper needed at least two kicks at the can to take down Paul Martin, and his premiership could be best described as a deer in the headlights. The last government to fail to get re-elected under the leader who had gotten them elected in the first place was Joe Clark way back in 1979. Tom Mulcair had his own share of flaws, but he had more in common with Brian Mulroney than Clark, so the comparison was largely moot aside from the expected chatter about the longevity of a new federal NDP government. Tory spin to the contrary, the New Democrats had (for the time being) united firmly behind Mulcair's pragmatic progressive strategy, and aside from a few hiccups like Veterans Minister Peter Stoffer's overly touchy behaviour, had avoided big scandals.
Then there was the media. Conservatives had long made distrusting the media and their journalistic emissaries a cornerstone of their movement. The whole lot of them were Liberal sympathizers. When pressed to explain how they knew that, Tories would just point at journalists blatant admiration of Justin Trudeau. It was just so obvious. Jason Kenney was as close to Harper as anyone in the party could get, but he was always more comfortable than his boss in his handling of the media. Much as he had as a minister of the Crown, Kenney engaged in long scrums with reporters, eschewing the former Prime Minister's preference for only answering five questions per day from the media. Like the fictional Arnold Vinick from the American political drama the West Wing, the Tory leader would routinely answer question after question until journalists simply ran out of things to ask him. Problem was that Kenney, who could exhibit charisma at times, was still at his heart a policy wonk, and suffered from delivering overlong answers that often failed to make it into the evening political recaps over at CTV or the CBC. When Kenney tried to stick to message, he would get ridiculed for refusing to offer more detail. Catch twenty-two.
Kenney's response to all this? A little more Ralph Klein and less Stephen Harper. King Ralph (as he was commonly referred to in the press) was a politician of the people, unafraid to make cuts to the public sector, pay down the debt, and speak bluntly about issues facing Alberta. He was happy to become the villain for environmentalists or Chretien's Ottawa, and Albertans rewarded him for it, electing him to four consecutive majority governments and the longest stint as Premier since Peter Lougheed. Kenney wanted to take that sensible populist blueprint and apply it nationally. Gone were the suits and ties that had been the style for much of his previous two decades in Ottawa, and in their place were blue jeans, rolled up sleeves, and the blue pickup truck ablaze with the Conservative Party logo. Cue mockery from the Laurentian media in the Ottawa bubble. It didn't matter whether it was a prayer breakfast in Kitchener, a Sikh event in downtown Toronto, a rodeo in Calgary, or a policy announcement in Vancouver, Kenney would pull up in his truck wearing blue jeans, all smiles. He'd claim that the NDP were prisoners to environmental extremists, that Mulcair was punishing the energy sector and taxpayers. Canada wasn't the largest green house gas emitter in the world, so why did it make sense that Canadians had to pay the price to cut their carbon footprint when places like China or the United States refused to play by the same rules? If you asked Kenney and the Tories, that kind of logic didn't make any sense. In a lot of ways the Tory strategy began to mimic that of the BC Liberal Party under Gordon Campbell and Christy Clark; a party of free-enterprise and pipelines versus a party of socialism and bloated bureaucracy. To the reluctance of some within the party, the Conservatives even appeared poised to adopt a carbon 'levy' that punished major emitters, with the money raised going towards a green technology fund. Not enough to please environmentalists, but certainly a more credible approach that other conservatives were advocating (Which amounted, quite frankly, to do nothing).
In this way Jason Kenney's leadership of the Conservative Party was not that dissimilar from that of Prime Minister Mulcair's of the New Democrats. Both parties were built on an ideologically motivated base of volunteers that scared the crap out of most voters. Whereas the NDP had to deal with union leaders, socialists, environmentalists, and maybe the odd communist here and there, the Tories had to deal with social conservatives, the religious right, homophobes, climate-deniers, and conspiracy theorists. The job was to keep those motivated volunteers in the tent but make sure the average Canadian never saw heads or tails of them. Who else was going to man the phone lines, mail out donation requests, and nail-in the campaign signs for the local party candidate? Certainly not the other ninety-eight percent of Canadians who didn't go out and buy a membership with a political party. They have better things to do. So, like Stephen Harper before him, Kenney threw the odd piece of red meat to the base, like on tax cuts for families who homeschooled their kids or for the inclusion of anti-abortion groups in Canada's summer job program. If there were any grumbles from within the tent, Kenney could just point out that he had received a historic mandate from the membership for his leadership. He had won on the fifth ballot in an eight candidate race, beating his closest competitor by thirty-points. You had to go all the way back to the 1942 PC leadership race that elected the populist John Bracken for anything remotely similar in conservative politics. He'd never legislate on issues like abortion or same-sex marriage, and hoped that the movement's desire for revenge against the New Democrats would be enough to keep the party united going into the next federal campaign. Six months out from having won the job, Kenney's leadership was still stuck. For all of his work, Canadians didn't appear to be responding to the party, and poll after poll placed the Tories firmly in the mid-to-high twenties, with government well ahead. Not exactly a ringing endorsement. Unless Kenney turned things around, his time as leader of the Conservative Party seemed poised to end much the same as Bracken's; defeated by a popular government that he decried as socialist and rendered a footnote in the history books.
By 2015 most voters had decided that Stephen Harper was too angry, too reclusive, and too out-of-touch with the rest of the country. With the election having handed the New Democrats only fifteen more seats than the Tories however, conventional thinking suggested that the Conservatives didn't have to reinvent the wheel when it came to the policies on offer, they simply had to rejig they way in which they offered them. Tone is important in Canadian politics, at least important enough that Stephen Harper worked really hard on it back when his party was winning elections. He'd just slap on a sweater vest, pretend to mingle with Canadian families, and occasionally smile. Just human enough to reassure voters. Jason Kenney's selling proposition as Conservative Party leader was that he could offer the kind of Harper-continuation that the base wanted, but appeal to swing voters and minority groups that had abandoned the party in the previous campaign. Many within the party had credited Kenney's outreach to various minority groups historically sympathetic to the Liberals to the Conservative's success leading up to and including their majority victory in 2011. According to Kenney, that winning coalition of voters could easily be replicated again, just so long as the party didn't veer too far into the kind of extreme rhetoric that it had begun to dabble with during and after the election. Unless the Conservatives led on pocketbook issues, they would only lose more ground to the NDP. Part of that makeover involved the new 'Shadow cabinet' and leadership team to take on the government during Question Period. Lisa Raitt, who finished fourth in the leadership race that elected Kenney, was named as the party's new Deputy in the hopes that pairing the single and relationship-less Kenney with a woman from Ontario would help make the new leader more appealing to voters. Erin O'Toole, the party's former interim leader who won accolades from party MPs and insiders for his ability to keep the various factions of the party united during his brief stint as head of the party, was named Foreign Affairs critic against Megan Leslie. Leading the charge against Finance Minister Nathan Cullen would be Gerard Deltell, the former leader of the now-defunct Action démocratique du Québec, who was also subsequently named as the new leader's Quebec Lieutenant. As a consolation for missing out on the finance portfolio, Max Bernier would instead get assigned to shadow Alexandre Boulerice and Kenney's old job in Employment. Several other new faces, like Parm Gill, Effie Triantafilopoulos, and Dianne Watts also received promotions. A clear attempt to appease both moderates and the more right-wing base of the party. Trouble was that many in the base of the party, including those who had voted for Kenney, weren't exactly interested in pursuing the Stephen Harper strategy of incrementalism and restraint. They and their activist friends had felt abandoned by Harper, and were eager to push the party in a more ideological direction.
There was also the fact that defeating a government after a single term in power is a tough ask under even the best of circumstances. Canadians are usually willing to give the new government time and the benefit of the doubt. Even Stephen Harper needed at least two kicks at the can to take down Paul Martin, and his premiership could be best described as a deer in the headlights. The last government to fail to get re-elected under the leader who had gotten them elected in the first place was Joe Clark way back in 1979. Tom Mulcair had his own share of flaws, but he had more in common with Brian Mulroney than Clark, so the comparison was largely moot aside from the expected chatter about the longevity of a new federal NDP government. Tory spin to the contrary, the New Democrats had (for the time being) united firmly behind Mulcair's pragmatic progressive strategy, and aside from a few hiccups like Veterans Minister Peter Stoffer's overly touchy behaviour, had avoided big scandals.
Then there was the media. Conservatives had long made distrusting the media and their journalistic emissaries a cornerstone of their movement. The whole lot of them were Liberal sympathizers. When pressed to explain how they knew that, Tories would just point at journalists blatant admiration of Justin Trudeau. It was just so obvious. Jason Kenney was as close to Harper as anyone in the party could get, but he was always more comfortable than his boss in his handling of the media. Much as he had as a minister of the Crown, Kenney engaged in long scrums with reporters, eschewing the former Prime Minister's preference for only answering five questions per day from the media. Like the fictional Arnold Vinick from the American political drama the West Wing, the Tory leader would routinely answer question after question until journalists simply ran out of things to ask him. Problem was that Kenney, who could exhibit charisma at times, was still at his heart a policy wonk, and suffered from delivering overlong answers that often failed to make it into the evening political recaps over at CTV or the CBC. When Kenney tried to stick to message, he would get ridiculed for refusing to offer more detail. Catch twenty-two.
Kenney's response to all this? A little more Ralph Klein and less Stephen Harper. King Ralph (as he was commonly referred to in the press) was a politician of the people, unafraid to make cuts to the public sector, pay down the debt, and speak bluntly about issues facing Alberta. He was happy to become the villain for environmentalists or Chretien's Ottawa, and Albertans rewarded him for it, electing him to four consecutive majority governments and the longest stint as Premier since Peter Lougheed. Kenney wanted to take that sensible populist blueprint and apply it nationally. Gone were the suits and ties that had been the style for much of his previous two decades in Ottawa, and in their place were blue jeans, rolled up sleeves, and the blue pickup truck ablaze with the Conservative Party logo. Cue mockery from the Laurentian media in the Ottawa bubble. It didn't matter whether it was a prayer breakfast in Kitchener, a Sikh event in downtown Toronto, a rodeo in Calgary, or a policy announcement in Vancouver, Kenney would pull up in his truck wearing blue jeans, all smiles. He'd claim that the NDP were prisoners to environmental extremists, that Mulcair was punishing the energy sector and taxpayers. Canada wasn't the largest green house gas emitter in the world, so why did it make sense that Canadians had to pay the price to cut their carbon footprint when places like China or the United States refused to play by the same rules? If you asked Kenney and the Tories, that kind of logic didn't make any sense. In a lot of ways the Tory strategy began to mimic that of the BC Liberal Party under Gordon Campbell and Christy Clark; a party of free-enterprise and pipelines versus a party of socialism and bloated bureaucracy. To the reluctance of some within the party, the Conservatives even appeared poised to adopt a carbon 'levy' that punished major emitters, with the money raised going towards a green technology fund. Not enough to please environmentalists, but certainly a more credible approach that other conservatives were advocating (Which amounted, quite frankly, to do nothing).
In this way Jason Kenney's leadership of the Conservative Party was not that dissimilar from that of Prime Minister Mulcair's of the New Democrats. Both parties were built on an ideologically motivated base of volunteers that scared the crap out of most voters. Whereas the NDP had to deal with union leaders, socialists, environmentalists, and maybe the odd communist here and there, the Tories had to deal with social conservatives, the religious right, homophobes, climate-deniers, and conspiracy theorists. The job was to keep those motivated volunteers in the tent but make sure the average Canadian never saw heads or tails of them. Who else was going to man the phone lines, mail out donation requests, and nail-in the campaign signs for the local party candidate? Certainly not the other ninety-eight percent of Canadians who didn't go out and buy a membership with a political party. They have better things to do. So, like Stephen Harper before him, Kenney threw the odd piece of red meat to the base, like on tax cuts for families who homeschooled their kids or for the inclusion of anti-abortion groups in Canada's summer job program. If there were any grumbles from within the tent, Kenney could just point out that he had received a historic mandate from the membership for his leadership. He had won on the fifth ballot in an eight candidate race, beating his closest competitor by thirty-points. You had to go all the way back to the 1942 PC leadership race that elected the populist John Bracken for anything remotely similar in conservative politics. He'd never legislate on issues like abortion or same-sex marriage, and hoped that the movement's desire for revenge against the New Democrats would be enough to keep the party united going into the next federal campaign. Six months out from having won the job, Kenney's leadership was still stuck. For all of his work, Canadians didn't appear to be responding to the party, and poll after poll placed the Tories firmly in the mid-to-high twenties, with government well ahead. Not exactly a ringing endorsement. Unless Kenney turned things around, his time as leader of the Conservative Party seemed poised to end much the same as Bracken's; defeated by a popular government that he decried as socialist and rendered a footnote in the history books.