DEAR WAR ROOM: I realize you’ve called yourself the “Canadian Energy Centre” since opening shop last fall, but we all know you’re the War Room as promised in the United Conservative Party’s platform during the 2019 provincial election campaign. And you have declared war on what Premier Jason Kenney has called the “campaign of lies, of defamation and disinformation based…

We should have seen it coming. The first inkling that controversy would dog Jason Kenney’s victory in the 2017 United Conservative Party leadership race came not during that contest but a year earlier, when Kenney ran for the leadership of the Progressive Conservatives.

I have always tried to avoid getting into arguments with Alberta premiers. After all, as a journalist it’s my job to question politicians, not quarrel with them. But sometimes premiers seem to want to get into arguments with journalists.

If nothing else, Alberta’s UCP government has proven itself remarkably efficient. This week it passed a piece of legislation — Bill 22 — that managed to infuriate teachers, upset democracy and prompt a warning from the province’s ethics commissioner. And the government did all this in a matter of days. Hours, really. Opposition leader Rachel Notley called Bill 22 an…

Politics in Alberta is taking a turn from the bizarre to the surreal to the dangerous. On Monday, the UCP government announced its new Bill 22 would eliminate Lorne Gibson’s job as the province’s independent election commissioner. The news hit like a bombshell. Gibson has been investigating fiscal wrongdoing in the UCP’s 2017 leadership race, and has so far levied…