I stand before Guernica, the familiar canvas of dismembered bodies, dead babies and soldiers; a weeping mother, a shrieking horse; once remembered for its chronicle of carnage, warnings of mass murder to come, enough to move the dial from tragedy to statistic, now forgotten. Silence has settled upon the world, snuffed out by apologists for the sacred State’s need for human sacrifice.

Kenney, Smith, and the UCP are the symptom of a failure of Alberta’s entrenched political class to deal with the province’s deeper problems. This failure takes the form of demands that the Alberta state be given more power; that is, that those who have held power in the province going on forty years be given even more power. But nothing ever changes.

Like so many of the Kenney government’s actions, Bill 1 may be just more red meat thrown to its angry base or, as the Edmonton Journal contends, “an expensive and unnecessary public relations exercise.” Nonetheless, the threat is real and shows in stark terms the authoritarian animus motivating the UCP government.

Except for the information that he is unmarried and a devout Catholic, Kenney’s personal life beyond politics is a black box. Don Martin describes Kenney as “brilliantly analytical,” “flawlessly bilingual,” and “tirelessly energetic,” noting further that he “keeps his social conservative beliefs under a kimono that’s never to be lifted.”

Alberta’s protests began as street protests, but gained traction on December 19 when some Yellow Vests joined a convoy of 1,200 trucks. These vehicles driven by oil patch workers and their supporters had assembled just south of Edmonton. Blocking traffic as it went, the convoy drove slowly to the capital and made known its demand that oil pipelines be built to “free” the resource from its land-locked status.