UCP leader Kenney talks BC/Alberta, pipelines and climate during stop in Lethbridge

“If we form government, we’ll talk to municipalities about what their infrastructure priorities are, and we’ll continue to fund infrastructure. There’s a provincial grant to municipalities called the Municipal Stabilization Initiative, very boring name, but basically it means they can bank on a certain amount of money coming from the province,” Kenney said.

Kenney believes that as much as possible municipalities should have the discretion on where the money they receive from the province is going.

“In a world where we have scarce tax dollars and the government is running a huge deficit, they’re quadrupling the debt, and interest rates and taxes have gone up,” he continued. “There’s not going to be money for everything that people would like to have, so we’re going to have to be careful stewards of that money.”

“I don’t want to politicize how infrastructure dollars are spent, I just want to come up with an objective way of assessing the priorities and if an expansion is in the local interest it would be on our list.”

Another pressing issue in Lethbridge is the opioid crisis.

Recently a spike in overdose calls have prompted emergency service personnel to issue a warning to the public and beginning today the Safe Consumption Site has opened its doors in Lethbridge.

Kenney says his focus would be on empowering the RCMP to be able to deal with the dealers and supplies funnelling drugs into the community.

“There’s been no reduction in drug overdoses or fatalities in the downtown east side of Vancouver since they brought in their drug injection site 10 years ago. We shouldn’t be focused on helping people addict themselves to poison, we should be focused on nailing the dealers and throwing them behind bars for the rest of their natural lives as far as I’m concerned,” Kenney stated.

“We also need to stop the importation of fentanyl and other poisonous opioids, much of which is being produced synthetically in China,” he continued. “This notion that we should just throw up our arms and surrender as people are dying is pathetic.”

Echoing a statement made by local police, Kenney believes that clearly a particularly toxic version of an opioid has been brought into the Southern Alberta market.

“Why aren’t the police doubling their efforts to nail the dealers? The Canadian Border Service Agency and the RCMP need to be working to nail the dealers and then tracking back to the people who are importing this stuff from overseas,” he said.

“Unfortunately, the federal budget laid out by the Prime Minister yesterday has funding for a number of Liberal pet projects, but nothing new for Border Services or the RCMP to be able to go after these guys.”

Kenney thinks law enforcement is a critical part of this because it doesn’t matter how much treatment you have, or how many injection sites, as long as the dealers continue to bring the product in.

“I’m all for treatment, don’t get me wrong, but that’s literally dealing with the symptom when we have to deal with the cause,” Kenney said.

One of the biggest provincial stories over the past month has been the ongoing feud between B.C. and Alberta about the Trans Mountain pipeline.

When asked about the issue, Kenney said the fight between the B.C. and Alberta New Democrats looked a bit like a pro wrestling match.

“One of those things where everyone knows what the next move is going to be and a little bit fake. Here’s the deal, the B.C. NDP is completely committed to doing everything they can to stop the Trans Mountain pipeline. They’re propped up by the Green Party and there are a number of environmental organizations, many of them foreign-funded, who are engaged in civil disobedience,” Kenney added.

He laid out that he believes the B.C. NDP’s strategy on this issue is death by delay.

“They want to create enough uncertainty and enough delay that Kinder Morgan just decides to walk away from the pipeline,” Kenney continued. “If that happens we will lose, perhaps forever, the opportunity to sell our resources at a fair global price.”

Kenney also referenced a point that has been made by a number of federal legislators on the dispute, which is Canada selling oil to the United States at $33 a barrel, while they turn around and sell their oil to the rest of the world for $61.

“We’re turning ourselves into a bargain basement and we’re leaving potentially trillions of dollars on the table to subsidize Donald Trump’s economy. This could all stop today if Justin Trudeau declared the Trans Mountain pipeline as a project in the national interest under the constitution section 92(10)(c). That would stop any provincial obstruction,” Kenney said.

In a report put out by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers this morning, CAPP said that Canada is falling behind in attracting capital.

Around the world capital investment in the oil and natural gas sector increased globally in 2017 but was down in Canada according to CAPP.

Total capital spending on Canadian oil and natural gas was $45 billion in 2017, down 19 percent from 2016 and 46 percent from 2014.

In comparison, capital spending on oil and natural gas in the United States last year increased by 38 percent to $120 billion.

Kenney was pressed on the role of Canada in the energy sector moving forward.

“The International Energy Agency projects that there will be a growing global demand for oil and gas through at least the year 2045, so the question for Canada is whether we will be part of supplying the global demand.”

Kenney added the demand could yield hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth.

“That could be used to pay for hospitals, schools health care and supporting our seniors, or we can land lock resources and allow dictatorships from around the world, like Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and Iran, to benefit from selling oil because they are not turning off the taps,” he said.

Canada has high environmental standards when it comes to oil and gas production, and Kenney says we also have the most rigorous regulations, and the highest labour and human rights standards of any major oil producer in the world.

“Not only is this essential for our economic future, but there’s also a moral case that we want to displace conflict oil. I say to the enemies of Alberta’s energy industry that they’re helping, perhaps unintentionally, some of the world’s worst regimes by bottlenecking our resources” Kenney said, adding those people don’t like Donald Trump either but they’re subsidizing his economy too.

The most contentious issue in the province and one that Kenney has repeatedly hammered away at even before becoming the leader of the UCP is the carbon tax.

A potential UCP government, he says, would make repealing the carbon tax their number one legislative priority.

Why is that?

“British Columbia brought in a carbon tax over a decade ago, and emissions of carbon are substantially higher than they were then. Australia brought in a carbon tax a few years back, but it didn’t affect emissions and hurt their economy, so they repealed it,” Kenney said.

Kenney doesn’t believe that punishing consumers is not an environmental strategy.

“A senior on a fixed income when it’s 30 below outside can only turn the heat down by so much at home. I saw a Lethbridge College poll done by Faron Ellis’ group that showed here in Lethbridge a majority of residents oppose a carbon tax, even though the city is represented by Environment Minister Shannon Phillips who has been arguing strenuously for it.”

The federal government has stated that if the provinces don’t implement their own price on carbon, they would force the implementation of one.

On the topic of climate policies, Kenney says as a brand-new party they won’t be adopting a policy until their founding convention in May.

“From there, I’ll be consulting more broadly with Albertans about policies. Right now I would say I’m in favour of what the previous government had in place.”

That was a levy on the major emitters, companies not consumers, that supported a technology fund to focus on reducing the carbon footprint of oil and gas developments.

“It’s through technology that we’ll find 1,000 small innovations that will help us to bend the curb down on carbon emissions,” Kenney said.

The Alberta legislature is set to resume sitting on Mar. 8, and there Kenney will take his seat as the leader of the opposition for the first time after winning a bye-election in Calgary-Lougheed back in the fall.

by Aaron Mahoney (@Mahones93 on Twitter)

UCP leader Kenney talks BC/Alberta, pipelines and climate during stop in Lethbridge

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