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.

He pits them against each other. Friends get funds, the rest, silence.

It’s dog whistle politics without the whistle. Alberta’s new UCP government doesn’t have to come out and admit it’s much less committed to Indigenous issues than the former NDP government—we can hear it from the silence.