It was bitter medicine. And nary a drop of sugar to help it go down. Premier Jason Kenney’s address to Albertans Tuesday night was perhaps the most sombre and downright bleak speech ever delivered by an Alberta premier, certainly the darkest among the televised “fireside chats” that began with Peter Lougheed in the early 1980s.

When it comes to investing billions of public dollars in private companies, Alberta politicians like to talk about former premier Peter Lougheed. Nobody likes to talk about former premier Don Getty. This week, when Premier Jason Kenney defended his government spending $1.5 billion of public cash and $6 billion in loan guarantees to prop up the Keystone XL pipeline project,…

It acted like a thief in the night. When the Alberta government announced what is surely the largest mass layoff in provincial history, it didn’t hold a news conference or even have one cabinet minister available to answer questions. Instead, it slid the devastating news under the door — via a brief news communique on a Saturday afternoon. And, in…

If politics makes for strange bedfellows, politics during a pandemic makes for shocking bedfellows. I give you Alberta Premier Kenney and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. After years of bickering, and outright hostility on the part of Kenney toward Trudeau, the two have become allies. Pandemic pals, if you will.

“As the pandemic grew day by day at an alarming speed, the only thing keeping pace has been the increasing acrimony between the United Conservative government and the NDP Opposition.”