Before he even took office, Alberta premier Jason Kenney had made it clear that he has a penchant for conspiracy theories about fantastic, powerful enemies. In the run-up to his election victory in April 2019, Kenney and his United Conservative Party (UCP) vowed to fight the “green left” and blamed the bitumen-rich province’s ills on foreign-funded environmentalists.

But Kenney’s investigation into these dark otherworldly forces has descended into farce, so he has now shifted to accusing Hollywood elites of corrupting the minds of young children. This latest tempest in a teapot involves the Netflix children’s feature Bigfoot Family.

The film tells the story of an oil tycoon who schemes to blow up an Alaskan nature reserve in order to get at the oil underneath. The UCP’s sensitivity about the movie may partly stem from a real-life Alberta parallel: in the 1950s, the province seriously considered nuking the oil sands in the boreal forest to extract oil.