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.