Alberta’s Jason Kenney Bet the Political Farm on Keystone XL — and Lost
Jason Kenney’s government seems increasingly desperate, conjuring up dark conspiracies to explain its own failures. Beneath the lurid rhetoric, there’s a last-ditch effort to keep the fossil-fuel industry profitable and prop up a conservative “success story” that couldn’t endure.
Railcars loaded with pipe for the Keystone XL pipeline, which Joe Biden recently cancelled. (Eric Hylden / Canadian Press)
Alberta’s premier, Jason Kenney, bet big on the Keystone XL pipeline in the spring of 2020, and it didn’t pay off. The situation in Canada’s bitumen-rich province now seems to be descending into a paranoid farce.
Just as the price of oil was going negative, Kenney’s United Conservative Party (UCP) government invested C$1.5 billion in the pipeline and pledged $6 billion in loan guarantees. Within a month, US presidential hopeful Joseph Biden had pledged to cancel the pipeline.
Kenney, surrounded by fans of Donald Trump in his own cabinet, apparently assumed that Trump would win reelection, removing the threat to Keystone XL. He has now lost a colossal bet wagered with Alberta’s public funds. To protect himself from responsibility for his own failures, Kenney is now in search of a scapegoat.
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