In this live recording, Jeremy tells us how Kenney has shaped Alberta politics, and expounds on his ideological commitments, his flair for conspiracy and his effective use of political stunts. We also learn of Kenney's taste in music and get Jeremy's response to the toughest question he's been asked since the book came out.
Alberta Advantage Podcast
Kenney vs Jeremy Appel
This was supposed to be a debate, I don't think you realize that. He's a coward who won't debate me, and, uh, fuck, where is I going with that? Oh, oh yeah, no extra charge for signature, and the best part of this, and Jason Kenny would be very proud, no GST. [DING] ♪ Max, no difference ♪ ♪ Where I go ♪ ♪ You're the best hometown ♪ ♪ I know ♪ ♪ Where I go Calgary ♪ ♪ Hello, Calgary ♪ ♪ You know we love you ♪ ♪ Max, no difference ♪ ♪ Where I go ♪ ♪ You're the best hometown ♪ ♪ I know ♪ ♪ Where I go Calgary ♪ ♪ Hello, Calgary ♪ ♪ You know we love you ♪ ♪ Where are we on? ♪ Let's try this. Check, check, oh, volume. I like that. Hello. It's nice to see you all. You're all looking great. [APPLAUSE] Give yourself a round of applause. You're on point today. You did a good job. Really hot. My name's Joel. I'm hosting today's live episode of the Alberta Advantage. Joining team advantage today. We have Dave. Howdy. Alyssa. Hello. Also joining us is Will. Hello. And last but not least, we have special guest Jeremy Appelle. Anybody heard of this guy? [CHEERING] Jeremy, say hello. How's everyone doing? Thank you all so much for coming out today. To partake in this very special event. I just want to expand on what Joel was saying about how great we all look and just give a shout out to Dave Taves, who is looking great. He looks like Carlos the Jackal meets John Wayne. I don't think it's back what I was going for. That's what I booked up this month. I said, I want to be Carl the Jackal Beach John Wayne. Both great icons of their national movements. Both true Albertans. Before we start, I want to make a quick note to remark that Canada began as an invasion. And so as a result, we are holding this event on the traditional territories of the peoples of Treaty 7, which include the Blackfoot Confederacy, the Tsutsina First Nation, and the Stoney Dakota. Calgary is also home to the Métis Nation of Alberta. Jeremy, I'm now going to hand the mic over to my talented team advantage panelists, who will be grilling you about your encyclopedic knowledge of Jason Kenney. Yeah, looking forward to it. And I see there was a baby in the audience. [CHEERING] I think that's great. And I am also so sorry if I traumatize them with my wealth of knowledge about Calgary's favorite carpet bagger. Anyways, bake it away, toys. Well, I think we're going to go through these questions, kind of based on the ones we're kind of interested in/also in order. It's been a long time since his podcast. It's really hit a chance to talk about Jason Kenney. Due to him getting booted out of office. And I'm excited to read the book. I have not read it yet. But I already feel like I know too much about Jason Kenney and all of the lore. And I feel for you who knows even more now. So I guess the question is why has Jason Kenney tickled your intellectual fancy so much that you need to write a book about him? I mean, we've had an awful lot of them from 2019, nor even before that, awful lot of him up until 2022. And now he's gone. Why the book? Well, you know, I was-- Danielle Smith became premier. And I was like, Jason Kenney is so great. And I want to relive those glory days where things were so much better and different in this province. No, in all seriousness. I took it upon myself to write a book about Jason Kenney because I realized once he lost his leadership review, or won it, barely, that nobody has written a book about him in that he is one of the most influential Canadian conservative figures of my lifetime. You save for Stephen Harper, Mike Harris, maybe Ralph Klein. But Kenney was there through all of it and playing an influential role, going back to when he was the head of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and cheering on Cretian and Martins and Clines and Harris's austerity from the sidelines to his time as this sort of fresh, young face of the Reform Party, along with some pals of his, like a guy named Ezra Levant and Raheem Jaffir, who I actually spoke to for the book, and Rob Andrews, who is like a total sicko now. I don't know if Andrews or Levant has gone more off the rails in recent years, but it's a close contest. And so even before he came back to Alberta, he played this really influential role in conservative politics in Canada. And when he came back in 2016 in an effort to unite the PCs and wild roads, he was almost doing a second run of what he did on the federal level. And I didn't realize before I got into researching and writing the book how key role he played in the process that led to the merger of the PCs in Canadian Alliance. Like soon after he was elected for the first time in 1997, Preston Manning tapped him to lead the-- what was called the United Alternative, which was to try and find a way to bridge this divide between the PCs and what was then the Reform Party that was leading to the liberals maintaining power and also implementing at least the economic aspect or large parts of the economic aspect of the Reform agenda. And so when he comes back to Alberta, there's a certain arrogance he has. I think makes Kenny unique, even among like-minded ideologues. And I think we'll get into the ideology and due course. But there's certain arrogance he had. And I think part of that was a sense of-- I've done this before. This is why I did it on the federal level. How much harder can it be? And of course, a key distinction is that he united the right in Alberta in a year, 18 months or so, whereas federally, it was the product of a process that took like a decade to actually have a PC leader so wildly unprincipled that he would be elected leader on a platform of not merging the two parties, Peter McKay, of course, who got support from David Orchard that pushed him over the top in the 2003 PC leadership race. Under the condition, he wouldn't merge with the Canadian alliance. And then right after he got elected, he entered talks with Harper to merge two parties. But the point is this was a culmination of a long process. In Alberta, this happens on a truncated timeline. And I think that contributed to a lot of the fishers that opened up in the party during the pandemic. But always existed. I don't know if that answers your-- I don't even remember what your question was. Why did you write the book? Yeah, yeah, I think that explains why I was compelled to. Well, and also, God told me to. So as you mentioned, Jason Kenny was part of the Canadian Taxpayers' Federation. And that's an organization that's really known for pulling really dumb political stunts to get media attention. And kind of looking at Jason Kenny's career, he loves to do that. He loves to pull those political stunts. We all remember the beloved blue pickup truck. So like, to what extent would you call Jason Kenny's career a series of fabricated stunts? Well, yeah, I mean, stunts is one way of putting it. I think I would-- and it's not that that's a wrong way to refer to it. But I would call them gimmicks, right? And I've never thought of his career as a series of gimmicks. But that definitely plays a role, right? You see this with the CTF, right? He launches this big stunt once he becomes leader of the organization and isn't just their leader in Alberta getting screamed at by Ralph Klein in the cafeteria of the legislature before Ralph Klein just does everything he wants him to. But on the federal level, he went after the pensions of MPs, just like he went after in Alberta the pensions of MLAs, which is why legislators in Alberta don't have a pension anymore. That was a direct response to Jason Kenny's agitation in Alberta. And so he tries to do this federally. And he does this stunt where he lays out on the lawn of Parliament Hill, like a couple hundred pink plastic pigs representing the MPs who hadn't yet opted out of their pension. And now this pension, the targeting specifically of politicians' pensions and these generous gold plated perks that they get was itself a gimmick. And it was a gimmick that was designed to justify a broader assault on the entire public sector. But first, it would take the form as, oh, we're just going after politicians, entitlements, why are they making so much money? You know, this very populist mantra, right? That they should be serving us, the people. But they're making all this money. And never mind that people in the private sector make way more money, or that maybe the solution is that average Canadians should have stronger pensions than they do currently. But this was used always, and quite openly, like he told this to one of his many friends in the media, Ken White, who was at the Globe Mail at the time in the '90s. And then he became the founding editor of the National Post. And now he's on substack. So he's my competition, and I seek to crush him. Subscribe to The Orchard. Yeah, subscribe to The Orchard. I don't even remember Ken White's substacks called-- it's very inside baseball, like book industry stuff. Forget about it. Just forget his name. Doesn't exist. But anyways, Kenny told him openly, like, yeah. You can't just tell the public we're going to cut all this social spending for you, because you don't deserve it. It's government spending is out of control. And so we all need to play our part. So the government cuts its own pay in the form of pensions. And then that opens up the public to more, like, across-the-board cuts. And yeah, and he did this very early on when he became premier in Alberta. I don't know if anyone remembers this. I'm sure Joe does. Oh, he can't hear me. But that Kenny announced when he got elected. All right, we're taking a pay cut. I'm kind of the pay of MLAs, cabinet masters, the premier. And it was obviously a-- you do remember this. OK, yeah, yeah. There we go. And this was essentially a pretext for the larger cuts to the public sector that Kenny would wage outright war on in just the first few months in office. It was the summer of repeal. And that was when he really starved the state of revenue through the job creation tax cut. That actually eliminated jobs. Through getting rid of the carbon tax, which was the source of government revenue. And then through a series of anti-labored legislation, like rolling back the $15 minimum wage for people under the age of 18. And he-- in this quote, I'll never forget this quote. I think I began telling will this when we were talking before outside. And I didn't finish, as I went off on another tangent. But when he rolled back the minimum wage to $13 an hour for people under the age of 18, he rationalized it at a press conference by saying, well, $13 an hour is a hell of a lot better than $0 an hour. And I just can't get that out of my mind. This idea that it's like either we create this two-tiered minimum wage for the exact same type of work based on age, or we bring back child slavery. Like, there's no in-between there. And that-- again, I mean, Penny's been very media savvy throughout his career, except, of course, when it all came apart during the pandemic. And that has allowed him to sort of use these gimmicks in these symbols to forge a popular consensus for the policies he pursued throughout his career. That made everything worse for the majority of people, except for a small elite who made a lot of money. All right, so in 1999, as a young reform member of Parliament, Jason Kenny took a public vow of chastity when he esteemed Rob Anders. It takes a lot of courage to get up in front of the nation, publicly say, I will never have sex. So as far as you know, did Kenny remain as enthusiastic about his chastity through the years? Through your research, have you found any evidence that Jason Kenny has had sex since 1999? Jeremy, the people want to know-- Wow. Does Jason Kenny fuck? So this is the toughest question I've been asked since the book came out. And what I will say is that-- it was both him and Rob Anders, who-- they called up Glenn McGregor, who was a reporter at the Ottawa citizen at time. Now, I think he's on sub-stack also. Was that CTV news for a while? Does some stuff for the National Post? And yeah, they just called him up and were like, yeah, we're a celibate. And I don't know if that's exactly how it went down, but somehow it came up. Like, they told Glenn McGregor, yeah. We're a celibate. We're-- you know, they were the chastity caucus of the Reform Party. Has Jason Kenny had sex since? Like, probably-- well, I mean, it really depends, you ask. But I-- no. Because there is-- no. And I do mention this early in the book that there is this sort of shroud of mystery surrounding Jason Kenny, particularly as it pertains to his personal life, right? He's never been connected to anyone publicly, romantically. He's always been, as far as we know, single. And he's really cultivated this image of himself as this stodgy loner who is just hyper-focused on politics. And there was a McLean's article I found from back in the day when he was his inshipping immigration minister. And it talked about how he would stay up late in his office in Ottawa, blaring Gregorian chants while going through immigration files, right? Kinky. Yeah, yeah, I mean, but-- I was so-- and, of course, there were rumors about his sexuality. I-- in the book, when I first started writing this book, it was like, I'm going to get to the bottom of the shit. But then, as I talked to more people, as I started researching and writing, I realized it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. I mean, that's a gimmick, right? Like, we're talking about Kenny's sort of cheap stunts. I mean, this image is cultivated for himself in questions that are related to that. I mean, it doesn't really matter, right? It doesn't make way he did any worse or better, especially if you're going back to his student activist days in San Francisco when he played a role, not as big a role, as he initially boasted, but a role in overturning San Francisco's domestic partnership by law equivalent. Or when he launched a jihad against the Women's Law Students Association for their temerity to promote access to abortion on a Catholic University campus. I mean, whatever he's into or not into is it almost serves as a distraction from the real damage that he did. All that is to say, I don't know. I don't know that, honestly, it's hard. You can't get people talking about that. And it's so hard to prove, right? Like, it all just becomes rumors. And yeah, I mean, there are lots of rumors that I mean, you don't need to hear from me. I mean, you can read about them in like McLean's or other publications, or Katie Lang's Twitter feed. And yeah, I wish I could give you the goss on that. And I hope this doesn't discourage anyone from reading the book because you're like, oh, it doesn't do-- it doesn't do all the gay stuff. I do think that his sexuality or lack there of, which I think it's possible that he's never had tax, that he's just asexual, that he's just not into that. He gets his kicks through cutting taxes or deporting failed asylum seekers or deporting temporary foreign workers who have overstayed their visa, right? And I do think he is like single-mindedly focused on fulfilling his political agenda and sort of bringing this rigid hierarchical ideology he has into practice, which makes me wonder-- I know what he's doing now, which is collecting money from Bennett Jones and Atgo and all these other boards to do what certainly amounts to fuck all, more or less. But it does make me wonder if-- what is he going to do in the long run? Because I don't think he has much of a life besides from politics. This personal weirdness you bring up is kind of this interesting contrast to-- particularly when he was uniting the right in Alberta and then becoming premier of Alberta was this sort of cultivating this populist image. And of course, like Alberta and Western Canada, this is a very rich history of populist politics. But Jason Kenny is a man who likes Gregorian chant. He likes to go flying, dining, restaurants. But he recasts himself as somebody who can enjoy the sort of image of Albertans as like cowboy hotwares, driving trucks, and eating red meat, and drinking beer, and all that sort of fun stuff. But how does this come off as convincing? To an extent, it seems to have worked in that people bought this. Like I just remember when he was uniting the right, driving around rural Alberta in that blue track of his, he was talking to some form of farmers. And he wanted to talk to them about Edmund Burke, like this 18th century, like British conservative philosopher. And the farmers are just like, no, we just think Rachel not only is trying to like destroy the family farm, he's like, yeah, sure. And it's like, how does this work? How does this like act be convincing? Like what does Jason Kenny think about populism? Well, that's a very good question. And what I would say about that is nobody actually thought that he was this blue truck driving cowboy who was an Alberta patriot like Danielle Smith, right? No one actually bought that. But they didn't care. They didn't care about these glaring populist deficiencies because he was seen as a means of delivering electoral victory to this rural quasi-separatist, if not outright, separatist base. And seen as the most effective way of getting rid of the NDP government, which was the major priority of these forces at the time and cutting their taxes. And so as long as he was able to do that, it didn't really matter that this guy-- you compare him with someone like Danielle Smith or Brian Jean, who would fit in in like a bar in Fort McMurray, just talking to your average person. But what is Jason Kenny have to say to your average person who doesn't care about Ludwig von Mises, or the Queen, or William Wilberforce, or Dostoyevsky, right? But again, it was all for show and there was this sort of-- I don't know if you've heard this term applied to professional wrestling, but neo-K-fabe, right? A great book on Vince McMahon by Josie Reesman called Ring Master that talks about this. And I'm not going to start talking about wrestling, only bringing it up in the context of this neo-K-fabe where everybody knows now that wrestling stage. But then there are parts of it where it's like, well, hold on a second. Is that actually real? And it disrupts this traditional K-fabe. And so I think there's an element of that, of this willingness among his supporters to be deceived for the purpose of gaining electoral clout that the wildros didn't have under Danielle Smith originally, didn't have under Brian Jean. But by fusing themselves with the PC party and starting a new-- like under a new name, it gave them this legitimacy that meant it didn't matter that this guy was the very embodiment of the Ottawa elite that he raged against. Literally, another thing about Kenny's gimmicks-- and I'll let you ask more questions, but this just popped into my mind-- is him coming back to Alberta and saying that he is so generously going to forgo his pension as an MP while he seeks the PC leadership and then UCP leadership, because he's still elected as an MP. I mean, in Calgary, he's as safe a conservative see as it gets, right? He didn't spend much time there. He was mostly in Ottawa and in the Toronto and Vancouver suburbs trying to get votes for the federal conservatives. So we made this big show, oh, I'm going to-- I'm not even going to take my MP salary while I'm seeking another office. Like, aren't I such a great steward of taxpayer dollars? But then it was like, well, actually-- I'm going to stop taking my MP salary after the sitting of parliament in September. So I can say goodbye to all my friends in Ottawa. So it went from, you know, again, this was like a headline that credulous media outlets were willing to run, that Jason Kenney was foregoing his salary that he is entitled to as a public servant. And it's like, oh, yeah, by the way, he's still collecting a paycheck until pretty close to the PC leadership race. Yeah, I mean, that's just another Kenney gimmick, and it's another example of this neo-K-fabe he was engaged with in relation to his supporters. So Jason Kenney, he comes into power as our premier, and a huge push behind that is this conspiracy theory that environmentalists that are funded by a rock feller and elites, they're scheming against our precious oil. But then, a few short years later, he finds himself up against people, telling him he's working with the World Health Organization, or it's like another barrel of conspiracy theories that take him down. So is this a case of a conspiracy theory revolution devouring its own children? I think the short answer to that is yes. And I think it is a glaring example. And one of the major arguments I make in the book, which was that Kenney, when he returned to Alberta, he cultivated these forces, said all the right things to get them on board for his broader ideological project. But he ultimately couldn't control them because he wasn't who he claimed to be. And again, they knew he wasn't who he claimed to be. But as long as he was going to cut their taxes, at least say things they wanted to hear about how we're being persecuted by Ottawa under an equalization formula that his government wrote and how these environmentalists are out to get us. And he's going to fight back against them. You know, they were willing to ignore what was obvious, these obvious populist deficiencies. But once the pandemic happened, the sort of divergence in vision between this base, which was just like, COVID, who gives a shit? It's fake anyways. It's this like globalist conspiracy. It's the same people that are telling us that like climate change is real, in that we need to invest in renewable energy and protect parks and all these really mild like environmentalist policies that the NDP government introduced. And yeah, he just became another globalist to them, right? I mean, you know, he opened up for summer to try and please these people after bouncing back and forth between really mild restrictions for public health. That didn't make any sense. Like you couldn't meet your friends outside, but you could go to the mall. You could go to church, right? And so he did this open for summer thing as the sort of Hail Mary to get his base back. But then he's at the same time he's telling people but you need to get vaccinated for this to happen. And it was, again, it was 70% get their first dose, which was a very mild benchmark compared to what like Ontario and BC were doing. And the opening up was much sooner than Ontario and BC had planned. But once he opened for summer, the anti-lockdown protesters just became anti-vax protesters and they were protesting him in chandro, right? At Stampede after they had opened everything up and Kenny was reassuring people that we're not just opening up summer, we're opening up forever. We're never going back to any public health restrictions. And they just pivoted to being anti-vaxxers and I'll conclude my answer to this question, which I think is my favorite Jason Kenny moment. And it was when he did a Facebook Live after COVID cases started going up. As a result of this open for summer policy, he did this Facebook Live, which was his main method of communication. During the 2019 election, when Facebook was still a big way for politicians to communicate with their supporters, especially right-wing politicians like Trump. Though, obviously Twitter was his drug of choice and he does his Facebook Live ways back, right? He fucks off, goes on vacation for three weeks. No one knows where he is. Hospitalizations are increasing. ICU admissions are increasing. Cases are increasing. All these things he warned would happen if he just opened up willy-nilly for the summer. Right, yeah. And I mean, for summer, it was the best summer ever for, you know, the stampede board. It was probably the best summer ever because they didn't have to cancel stampede again, though the provincial government played a role in forcing them to go back to normal. But, so he does his Facebook Live event. And then, and he's talking about, you know, he's answering questions from reporters about why isn't he doing anything about this increase in cases. And he's just like, you have no idea how victimized I am by these people who don't want any COVID restrictions whatsoever. Like, do you know the things they're calling me? And he just reads the comments from his Facebook Live videos. You guys remember that? And it's just like, you are a dirty Muslim who is going to hell. You are working with George Soros and the World Economic Forum. You, you bastard, like just all these things that, and he was just reading them out. And I thought it was the funniest thing I've heard all year. But yeah, I mean, it was a clear case of the right devouring its own. - Some criticism of Jason Kenny would paint him as a hardened ideologue. I mean, he's a weird guy. He's got some beliefs. He's both a weird Catholic and a weird monarchist and however he resolves that. But he's also been able to be pragmatic in his political career when he was in the Harper government. You know, he managed to do this great deal of outreach to immigrants, like sort of working against the sort of throughlines of hard-right conservative politics. So, do you see Kenny as a as a zealots, an ideologue or slick operator or is he some mix of the two? - Well, I think the key to his success, like in the long term, as part of this long-term political project, was the fact that he was able to be both a hardcore ideologue and just a total freak, like a weirdo, but also to be pragmatic, and to understand, and he learned this along the way with reform and then alliance, to understand which aspects of his longstanding agenda could be, the public could be swayed on, right? So, right, I mean, he, I listened to an interview with him from a month ago on like the Daily Telegraph podcast and would you believe he did nothing wrong and was totally a victim of circumstances beyond his control? But he talks about how, yeah, he is vehemently pro-life and he's proud, right? And he's never wavered from that position, but really, it took Harper, becoming leader of this United Conservative Party federally, the Conservative Party of Canada, for the strategy, the shift to, okay, we're not legislating on these social issues, these cultural issues, like, forget about it, we're focusing on reducing the size of the state and its capacity to provide for its citizens, which is, of course, a common goal Kenny's had since the Canadian Taxpayers Federation days. And we're gonna focus on foreign policy, I think we'll get to talking about Harper and Kenny's foreign policy in the moment, and immigration, and not like the old reform party was explicit, right? It was, I mean, practically echoed like white replacement theory, right? That we can't keep changing the demographic makeup of Canada, the OG reform party I'm talking about. And Kenny, I think, pragmatically, and 'cause there's no indication that Kenny doesn't like immigrants, he likes immigrants, I agree with him, and so it became a matter of changing the configuration of immigrants that are being welcomed into Canada in tying the immigration system more closely to the wishes of employers, right? In economic considerations, rather than reuniting people's families, that historically had played a greater role in decisions regarding like permanent residency applications, and so I think he, under Harper's tutelage, learned to pick his battles and to identify those key areas where he could sort of bring about his desired changes and to just go hard on them and fast and do the most damage possible so that his successor would struggle to roll it back. And I think, you know, ultimately, it blew up in his face purposely, but he really did. He shifted the entire contours of debate in Canadian politics towards the right, and we're still dealing with the consequences of that. I mean, obviously in Alberta today, but also federally. - So 10 years ago this month, Jason Kenny excitedly tweeted, he had purchased a soda stream, and the reason he had gone out and done this and was now telling his, at the time, probably 100,000-some followers this, is that people had been criticizing soda stream for operating its manufacturing in the occupied West Bank, taking advantage of Israel's apartheid system to exploit Palestinian labor. And he was buying this because he wanted to show his support for Israel, which of course is now flattening Gaza. Kenny said a long history of, particularly in his foreign policy, being connected to regimes such as Israel and Christian Zionism in Canada. So what's Kenny doing today with respect to talking about Israel, or even give us an overview of how he thinks about foreign policy? - Right, if there's one self-criticism I have of the book, it's that I didn't talk about foreign policy in sufficient detail, 'cause that is interesting. I mean, you have to understand that he is a neoconservative in the truest sense of the word, which in terms of domestic policy, and people don't often talk about neoconservatism in terms of domestic policy, it manifests itself as this very law-in-order approach to criminal justice issues, and a very moralistic approach at that too, that I think you see that he really innovated with his approach to harm reduction versus these private abstinence only, very religiously infused recovery centers that he's just showering cash on, and I mean, I just saw it yesterday, and I'd be remiss if I didn't make this observation, that there were two headlines I saw yesterday that I think really need to be considered together. The first is that the first 10 months of 2023 were the deadliest first 10 months of any year ever for drug poisoning deaths. The second is on the exact same day that that was reported, Red Deer City Council voted to shut down their only overdose prevention site, which wasn't even a supervised consumption site, it was an overdose prevention site, which is a lot more bare bones, I think causes perhaps a lot less discomfort for small business owners, but this moralistic approach, I think, is very emblematic of the neo-conservative agenda where it's you use drugs, you're a sinner, you're acting immorally, and so the state's role isn't to keep you alive, it's to force you into recovery, and you see Danielle Smith escalating on that with the Compassionate Intervention Act that she's going to introduce at some point this year. Now, what does this have to do with Israel? You may ask. Well, this same neo-conservative approach to domestic policies, that's very law and order, even when it masks itself as something else, right? Because Smith, following Kenny's path, is integrating law enforcement into this recovery-oriented system of care by empowering them to force people under recovery. Now, the same is true in terms of foreign policy, whereby neo-conservives, they don't see geopolitics, there's not geopolitics, there's no cause in effect, there's good guys, us, Israel, Ukraine, and there are bad guys, them, and we good guys need to kill the bad guys, and they talk about these rules-based international order, right? Does it make you want puke hearing that phrase with what we've seen out of Palestine for the past like five months? But that's not the rules-based international order. Is we make the rules? Because we are good, we are inherently good. And everything that goes wrong, every Palestinian child who's murdered, it's not our fault, it's Hamas's fault, or it's Russia's fault, or China, or whoever is outside of our geopolitical alliances. And so, Kenny's Zionism is very consistent. With that, I know there's a lot, there's less speculation that Harper, the Harper government's foreign policy, was really just a way to win votes among obviously right-wingers in the Jewish community and evangelical Christians, and Eastern European diaspora communities that were very anti-communist, if only there was another word to describe that. Too bad there, isn't it? But I don't think that's the case. I think that's a case of what I was talking about in response to the previous question of ideology intersecting with practical electoral realities. I think that this was one aspect of the broader neo-conservative agenda. That Harper and Kenny saw they could actually move on and they could win over votes. And it's somewhat on its surface, this total undying support for anything and everything Israel does. And this increasingly hawkish disposition towards Russia via Ukraine, they did win over certain voting blocks that have a lot of resources financially and also a lot of voting power in particular writings that needed to be won to get this majority Harper gotten 2011. But it's also something I think they genuinely believe in. And I mean, that's the thing with Kenny too. I don't think any of this is for show. I think you also have to look at the role of religion, his Catholic faith plays in his political worldview, right, that his political opponents, people who support justice for Palestinians say, people who maybe don't want us to give every weapon in existence to Ukraine, people who support harm reduction, environmentalist. It's not just that these people are wrong, he disagrees with them. It's that they are wicked and sinful and that they need to be crushed to the extent permissible under this liberal democratic framework that he venerates as this moral value. And yeah, so I mean, his support for, I mean, is a core belief of his, and you see him, you listen to his media appearances this year. It's really funny, and maybe we could talk a bit more about how he's just aghast by this populist right represented by Trump that he has no idea, he doesn't know anything about it, right? He has nothing to do with it. He didn't appeal to these very same forces, no, no. But he also, he talks about how there's this far right media sphere that undermined his pandemic response, which again was totally not his fault. But then he says the left also, the far left also has TikTok. And then he talks about how anti-Semitic TikTok is because if you go on TikTok, you can see the absolute horrors that Israel's imposing on Gaza. And then you can see Israeli soldiers doing TikTok dances while like blowing up apartment blocks. But Kenny's never been on TikTok, right? Like it's Chinese, like first of all. So right there, I mean, they're the enemy. They're one of the baddies unlike us. But yeah, I mean, I think his Zionism is a key part of his system of belief too because it's also rigidly hierarchical. I think that's important too. And that's why you see him venerate these archaic, empty institutions like the Vatican or the British monarchy. Is because they promote this rigid hierarchy and give higher purpose to it. And I think Zionism and the regime of Jewish supremacy in historic Palestine that it created is very much in tune with this natural hierarchy that Kenny has a vision for. And this moralism, right? That Israel's preventing another Holocaust. Just like Ukraine is. We're preventing another holiday more, I guess you could say, right? So I think his views on foreign policy are very genuine. And I think they are in parcel of his broader political project. - After all this, has Jason Kenny completely disappeared? Has he vanished? What do you think we can expect in the future from this fascinating man that we know and love? - I don't think he's disappeared forever. I mean, there is a certain naked ambition he has. I had two people who knew him in high school. I interviewed for the book. Confirmed to me that he was saying in high school, they couldn't remember whether he said, "I want to be prime minister or I'm going to be prime minister." But the point is he has that ambition. And this view of himself, I think, as is very important, historical figure, that I don't think goes away after suffering a defeat. And so right now, he's sitting on these boards. He's in policy advisor to a law firm, even though he's not a lawyer. I'm sure he does lots of work for. You know, he works for the CD How Institute, 'cause I guess the Frazier Institute didn't have openings. You know, he sits on the board of Atco. He sits on the board of some tech company as well. And I do think he's biding his time and playing it by ear. I don't think he wants to be humiliated. Like Boris Johnson was. Remember when Liz Tross imploded and they were like, "Oh, the British commentary it." Was like, "Oh, who's going to replace her?" And Boris Johnson was like, "Well, I could." And then he was just ridiculed for like 24 hours and then went away. I do think any saw that and learned from that. And I think he is waiting for Daniel Smith to maybe implode. But I also don't think that he can return to Alberta politics. Like, I think he's a spent force. I think that he failed fundamentally because he had nothing but disdain for his own supporters. He thought that they were idiots who didn't know what was best. And they needed intrudio confashion that they needed to be like dragged by the hair to the promised land. And the grassroots guarantee, of course, was total facade. It was just a talking point he used to acquire spray. He had no intention of bringing that about. So it would be a tough sale for him to make a comeback in Alberta. Now, of course, if you asked anyone three years ago whether Daniel Smith could make a comeback, they would have said, "You've lost your mom." So I don't know, I would never say never. But I think from the outset, his time in Alberta was essentially an effort to burnish his resume so he could go back to Ottawa and fulfill his original ambition. He even said, and one of the, I mean, he only gives interviews to like total dollars who won't ask him any questions, right? And he wouldn't, this was supposed to be a debate. I don't think you realize that. About Jason Kenny's legs, he lives around here. I don't, does anyone know where he lives? Let's do it, let's take the party to his lawn. No, but yeah, he's a coward who won't debate me. In probably the first retrospective interview he did where he talked about how like persecured he is by his own supporters that he thought were like the scum of the earth. Or lunatics, as he called them, if you remember that leaked audio before his leadership review. He went on the hub. Do you guys know the hub? It's this new, like totally novel idea. Well, if we had a news website run by partisan conservative staffers where we just published conservative opinion. Isn't that neat? That's not just the National Post. Well, exactly. Yeah, I don't know what the difference is. Well, National Post does sometimes do news reporting that isn't like totally skewed in a particular way, but decreasingly so. So yeah, I don't know. Conservative news outlets. You can't have too many of them. You really can't in Canada or elsewhere. Yeah, so he has this interview with Sean Spear, the founder of the hub. He got an interview with the founder who happened to be a former Harper advisor who was just telling Kenny how great he was. And he made the correct observation that he was one of the most influential figures in Canadian conservative politics over the past 25, 30 years. But there's one part in there and I actually use this interview throughout the book 'cause it's like, fuck, you'll talk to someone at least. I can get his perspective from somewhere. And he admits, he straight up admits. He's like, I didn't really plan on being premier of Alberta for that long. And I think part of that was like, you know, licking his wounds, oh, I'm not mad. Like, I'm perfectly happy, actually. 'Cause you remember that leaked audio I just referred to where he called his supporters lunatics. He was also saying, he's like, look, I don't even need to be here. I could just move to the private sector, make a lot of money, but I have a sense of duty to the party and the province and the country to stay on his leader. Anyways, now. And now, I mean, like a year and a half ago in this interview here, he's telling Sean Spear, yeah, my plan was to govern for a term, get reelected, stay on for another year or two, and then give someone else a chance to be premier. And he of course didn't say what he wanted, what was planning to do next, but I think it's pretty obvious if you talk to enough people who know him, and that was to go back to Ottawa. And I think he made a fatal error. In coming to Alberta, waltzing in like he was familiar with the province's political culture and pretending to be this like burn it all down populist that he wasn't. He should have done what Paul Yev did, which obviously I'm not a fan of Paul Yev or what he's doing, but it's effective. He waited in the wings, building up this social media presence, building up this like something with the trappings of a movement, just waiting, knowing the history of federal Canadian politics, you know that liberal prime masters can be in power for like eight years, 10 years, and then everyone's gonna hate them. And he waited. Well, Andrew Sheer faltered, though he increased the conservative share of the vote. Erno Tool faltered, again increased share of the conservative vote. And then Paul Yev jumped into action when it was his time, and my point is that could have been Jason Kenney, but it's not. And again, I mean, federally Calgary is so safe for the conservatives. Almost all of it. That if there is a by-election at some point and the stars, I could see him maybe trying to see if he's still got that luster and maybe able to weasel his way up into a cabinet post in the pure poly of government. But I would be shocked if he, you know, ran for the leadership of the conservative party of Canada at some point or the UCP like, I mean, it would be great for book sales because I would get an opportunity to write like a new forward about how everything I said in the book is still right, but there's some additional information you need to know. But my point is, it's obviously in the back of his mind. You don't just lose that ambition. It's just seeing whether it's practical. Jeremy, we've run out of interview questions. One last question. You're obviously a very busy man, very busy author. Do you have time to hang out with us and drink beers after or do you have to run away immediately? I literally have nothing else to do. So let's party. (audience applauds) And thank you all so much for coming, especially the baby. (audience cheers) ♪ There's a feeling in the air ♪ ♪ That you can't get anywhere ♪ ♪ Except in Calgary ♪ I'd say something. You can buy a Kenny-ism wherever it is that you purchase your books. I would, of course, encourage you to shop local. If you go to the publisher, Dunder and Press's website and click the shop local tab, you can put in your postal code and it'll tell you the nearest independent local bookstore where you can either purchase the book or order it for purchase. And if you like the book, don't forget to post about it and rate it on Goodreads. Thanks so much. (upbeat music) ♪ Makes no difference ♪ ♪ Where I go ♪ We are the best, don't doubt I know! No Calgary, hello Calgary, you know we love you! [BLANK_AUDIO]