Jason Kenney Is Calling in the Austerity Apparatchiks to Justify Attacking Alberta’s Workers
In the Canadian province of Alberta, the United Conservative Party has enlisted accountancy firms to promote its agenda of economic liberalization, cloaking its partisan policies in the bloodless language of efficient management and accounting practices.
Jason Kenney is premier and leader of the United Conservative Party in Alberta.(Government of Alberta / Flickr)
In September 2019, in the early days of the United Conservative Party’s (UCP) majority government, Premier Jason Kenney took a trip to New York City to meet with hedge fund managers and right-wing intellectual luminaries about the value of investing in and supporting Canadian oil and gas extraction.
While Kenny was in the United States, he received the honor of “An Evening with Premier Kenney” staged by the Koch-funded Manhattan Institute, a right-wing think tank dedicated to “developing ideas that foster economic choice and personal responsibility” — that is, deregulation and privatization. Kenney described Alberta as the “beating heart of free-enterprise values in the Canadian political culture,” and outlined his plans to institute “ambitious market-oriented reform.”
Austerity for the People
“Ambitious” is certainly one way of putting it. Among these proposed reforms were a cut in the corporate tax rate, making it one of the lowest in North America, a reduction in the regulatory requirements for oil and gas extraction, “bringing balance back to labor legislation,” and instituting aggressive cuts and wage rollbacks across the public sector. Kenney told his audience at the Manhattan Institute that Alberta’s public sector had grown bloated on the back of the hard-working private sector.
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