The Seven Faces of Jason Kenney

He came rushing out of the gate almost five months before the starting gun sounds to announce the beginning of the Progressive Conservative leadership race.

He was hoping his arrival would create a sensation, that he would be greeted like a conquering hero come to liberate Alberta from the NDP usurpers.

But sadly for Jason Kenney, the excitement lasted for about a week. 

And his campaign is going nowhere.


With the would be conquering hero now reduced to doing interviews on the Oil News Network.

Where he rambles on about uniting the right, to restore the "Alberta advantage."

Begs people to get involved, and send money.

Only to sound like that other snake oil salesman Preston Manning...



Just as sanctimonious and just as boring.

And growing more desperate with every passing day...



Brian Jean's Wildrose party is still collecting more money than Kenney's PCs, and still ahead in the polls.

Stephen Harper's endorsement did him more damage than good.

And the would be liberator of Alberta seems to have forgotten that Albertans, like other Canadians, remember him in other roles.

For as the Tyee's David Beers points out, there are at least seven Kenneys,



Each one more disgusting than the other.

The refugee basher, the hack legislator, the scaremongering demagogue.

When, as immigration minister, Kenney “took aim at the 500-plus Tamils who washed up off the shores of Vancouver Island, there was method to the near-hysteria about terrorism that he helped to fuel. He rushed through a bill, ostensibly aimed at human smuggling, that was so sweeping a BC Supreme Court judge later sent it back to Parliament for redrafting, pointing out that it could have convicted human rights workers.”

The anti-abortion crusader, the holier than thou Kenney, the religious fanatic.

“[T]he biggest threat to Kenney’s aspirations,” wrote McDonald in 2014, is “his own social conservative convictions… a deeply ingrained moralism and religiosity that have won him the mantle of his old boss, Stockwell Day, as leader of the party’s disgruntled religious right. While that wing may constitute the Conservatives’ most reliable voting bloc, it also represents their most problematic constituency, one with a history of scaring off mainstream swing voters, and the potential to topple the very edifice of big-tent conservatism Harper has spent more than a decade cobbling together.”

And of course, the good friend of the ghastly hate monger Ezra Levant...



“‘He’s not a Generation X do-nothing guy,’ Levant told Maclean’s enthusiastically. ‘He’s out there changing the country.’

Which as I've pointed out before, is not a pretty picture. But should tell Albertans all they need to know about Kenney.

And give us a pretty good idea where his campaign is going.

Flipping like a pancake.

And heading for a pig roast...

Please click here to recommend this post at Progressive Bloggers.