As the highly contagious Omicron variant sweeps across the province, people who know about the disease are strongly recommending a more effective COVID response from the government, including re-imposing sensible gathering limits and providing supports for burned out health care workers. Will Mr. Kenney listen? The smart bet is that whatever he does, he’ll get it wrong.

Jason Kenney and his strategic brain trust have proved themselves to be either sympathetic to that caucus or too fearful of raising its ire to act decisively in dealing with the COVID situation. This is what happens when you let the tail wag the dog. Will O’Toole have the stuff to rein in a caucus loaded with members who answer to the loud-mouthed minority? I’m not optimistic.

Whatever the case, Alberta Premier Jason Kenney’s failure to implement even the most basic of measures required to deal effectively with the pandemic suggests a weak leader who’s lost control of government to the looniest of conservative loons in his caucus. The question for Canadians ahead of the upcoming federal election is would a Prime Minister Erin O’Toole be any different?

It’s now late August, and Kenney’s ‘best summer ever’ looks bleak enough. After enduring grueling climate change induced heatwaves and smoky air caused by out of control wildfires since early July, Albertans are eyeing warily daily COVID case counts as infections once again spike across the province. Hospitals are overwhelmed. Non-acute surgeries are being cancelled. Healthcare workers are burnt out.

What Albertans deserve is honesty on issues both big and small. What Albertans (and all Canadians for that matter) cannot allow is for this sort of altered reality-twilight zone to become the new normal. Politicians saying the earth is flat when it’s clearly round is, and must be, weird. Politicians claiming they didn’t say or do something when they clearly did is, and must be, weird too. It might even be dangerous.

Last month, Alberta’s Advanced Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides instructed the province’s comprehensive academic research universities to “pause” any new or renewed research partnerships with the People’s Republic of China. The reason? Nicolaides worries that such “research partnerships may be used by Chinese military and intelligence agencies,” presumably to the detriment of Alberta’s strategic international position.

Many on the social medias have given Alberta Premier Jason Kenney a nickname: ‘Bumbles.’ Reflecting on his government’s performance over the past year, I can hardly disagree. Scratch that. Reflecting on the United Conservative Party’s performance since it formed government just over two years ago, I can hardly disagree. Athabasca University professor Eric Strikwerda considers the evidence.

The United Conservative Party has already made Alberta a bumbling laughingstock, with its ‘war room’ attacking children’s cartoons, its massive investment in a pipeline to nowhere, its war on doctors and nurses in the middle of a pandemic, and its bungled response to the pandemic itself. Adding in an error-riddled social studies curriculum that would find a nice home in 1950 seems entirely on-brand.

Kenney’s position is a perplexing one for a self-described defender of western interests to take. John A. Macdonald was in fact no friend to the west. Strangely, the Alberta premier appears set to champion the very architect of the historical west’s subservient position as little more than a colony of central Canada’s financial interests.