He is our own harbinger of doom. When Premier Jason Kenney turns up at one of Dr. Deena Hinshaw’s regular pandemic updates nowadays, we know we’re in trouble. On Friday, for the first time in many weeks, Kenney shared the podium with Alberta’s chief medical officer of health to discuss the rising number of COVID-19 cases in the province.

These days, Alberta Premier Jason Kenney must feel like he’s trapped in a multi-dimensional vise, being squeezed from all possible directions. He’s under pressure from a flailing economy, the miserable price of oil, a $24-billion deficit, frustrated voters, environmental groups, public sector unions, the Joe Biden campaign, and, of course, the NDP opposition. He’s even facing internal strain from his…

You have to wonder if Jason Kenney’s paranoia about the federal government is sometimes rooted in fact, not fallacy. Take this week, for example. On Tuesday, the Alberta premier announced a new and ambitious job-creation proposal to recycle plastics. But on Wednesday, the federal government announced a new ban on plastics.

Once upon a time, politics in Alberta was such a relatively tame affair that the leader of the Opposition was kicked out of the legislative assembly for calling a cabinet minister a “mouse.” That was in 1991, when Liberal leader Laurence Decore used “unparliamentary” language to describe then-environment minister Ralph Klein.

It’s probably fair to say Premier Jason Kenney has a love-hate relationship with the new federal speech from the throne — meaning, he doesn’t just hate it, he loves to hate it. For Kenney, the Liberal government’s throne speech is too good a target to ignore with its talk of a carbon-neutral future, a “feminist, intersectional response to the pandemic,”…