Political Battle Royal: A No-Holds Barred Slam on Jason Kenney
Zachary Thompson Reviews Jeremy Appel’s Kenneyism
July 29, 2024
Kenneyism: Jason Kenney’s Pursuit of Power. Jeremy Appel. Dundurn Press. $27.99 CDN, 312 pp., ISBN 9781459752658
Readers who are still more concerned with the inevitable future Canadian federal election, as opposed to the upcoming U.S. presidential election which has completely taken over our media and social landscape, would be well advised to read Jeremy Appel’s Kenneyism: Jason Kenney’s Pursuit of Power. Appel’s new book skilfully analyzes many of the prevailing trends in 21st century conservative politics, using former Alberta Premier Jason Kenney as the prism through which to view a myriad of disturbing policies. Appel’s experienced journalism combines with his deft writing style to make for a highly focused, as well as highly readable, journey through Kenney’s professional ups and downs. Appel widens the scope of the book just enough so that the reader can understand how Kenney’s bizarre and theatrical approach to politicking was informed by—and helped further inspire—a growing movement of regressive policies and chauvinist bravado in Canadian and U.S. politics alike.
The book’s narrative follows Jason Kenney from his highly politicized upbringing (his grandfather Mart was elected to town council in Mission, British Columbia in 1985, and his father was the longtime president of a prestigious boarding school in Wilcox, Saskatchewan), through his great success in uniting the Reform and PC parties in 2003, to his disastrous run as premier of Alberta during the Covid-19 pandemic. Appel lays the groundwork for the book’s theoretical arguments in an opening chapter, appropriately entitled ‘Defining Kenneyism.’ Taking the term “Kenneyism” from the 2017 PhD thesis of scholar John Carlaw, Appel extends Carlaw’s 2017 thesis into the current political scene of 2024, agreeing with Carlaw that “the symbiotic relationship between neoliberal economics and neocon[servative] sensibility is a defining feature of 'Kenneyism',” and that Kenney “provided a clear example of neocon means in pursuit of neoliberal ends.” In short, like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Regan before him, and like Donald Trump, Doug Ford, and Pierre Poilievre since, Jason Kenney was able to pursue violently repressive social policies under the cover of seemingly legitimate economic policies.
The most violent examples of such policies came to the fore during the Covid-19 pandemic, during which Alberta’s case count and death toll skyrocketed while Kenney continued to pursue an agenda of privatizing healthcare and major cutbacks in healthcare spending (Kenney had outlined plans to cut 10,700 full-time healthcare jobs in the summer of 2020). These policies would ironically end up being his political undoing, as the Covid death toll eventually forced Kenney to pursue stricter public gathering policies, a move Kenney’s own hyper-conservative base saw as a betrayal of its own “No More Lockdowns” approach to so-called rights and freedoms (all of which is covered in gruesome detail in Chapter 10, ‘The Plague’).
Appel sees Kenney’s downfall as the result of his inability to effectively walk the political tightrope of what he calls Authoritarian Populism, a by-now very familiar framework of policy and rhetoric wherein the populist, working-class voter base is manipulated into supporting the very upper-class “elites” they claim to despise. As Appel puts it, “despite [Kenney’s]ultimate failure, [he] provided a template for future leaders to pursue damaging policies with popular support from the very people they harm.” Kenney’s push for fewer healthcare workers and more privatized, expensive healthcare services certainly didn’t serve the interests of Albertan voters, who died in the hundreds from Covid during Kenney’s time in office; nonetheless, they eventually refused to support him any further, feeling that the Covid precautions he eventually did install were far too strict.
The absurdity inherent to such a contradiction is not lost on Appel. Throughout Kenneyism, he draws attention to just how strange Kenney’s rise and fall from power was, and also to how genuinely strange a guy Kenney was himself, truly a uniquely weird Canadian conservative figure in the tradition of archetypal weirdo William Lyon Mackenzie King. There is, for instance, Kenney’s admiration for his Grandfather Mart’s jazz big band of the 1930s and 40s, an admiration which Kenney takes perhaps too far when he includes Grandpa Mart in his revised Grade 6 provincial music curriculum. There is also Kenney’s abrupt transformation from a suit-clad neocon to the cowboy hat wearing, big blue pickup truck driving maverick, a change in costumes which perhaps predicted his eventual rejection by the rural Alberta conservative voting base. There are also numerous mentions of Kenney and his entourage’s penchant for evading tough press questions by simply stating that they “reject the premise” of the question being asked, a blatant non-answer so vacuous and lame even the average social media troll can usually be counted on to deliver something of more substance. Perhaps weirdest of all, though most fundamental to Kenney’s uniquely reactionary vision of Canada, is Kenney’s obsession with the British Monarchy, a devotion to a supposedly divine authority which never seems to square with his pursuit of free market capitalism and anti-Ottawa elite-bashing.
In spite of all these contradictions (or perhaps because of the ideological cover they potentially offer), Kenney also has a tendency of ‘saying the quiet part loud’ when it comes to his most conservative leanings, betraying perhaps a clarity of thought one wouldn’t expect from a man being pulled in so many directions at once. It is a trait he exemplifies with a bluntness equaled by few of his neocon contemporaries, save for except perhaps the worst of the MAGA crowd themselves. “I don’t know any fiscal conservatives who also don’t happen to believe that marriage is a union between a man and a woman,” he’s quoted as saying in 1999, willingly offering up a confession of character that most so-called fiscal conservatives are reluctant to actually cop to on the record. Kenney also isn’t above applying his blunt rhetoric to his own written policy, such as when he institutes the “Faster Deportation for Foreign Criminals Act”, a name lacking in subtlety as much as it is in decency.
Kenneyism is both infuriating and funny, which you would expect from such twisted subject matter, but it makes for a rollicking road trip of a narrative, as though you are in the driver’s seat of Kenney’s blue pickup (which he never seemed to actually be able to drive himself), with Appel riding shotgun, explaining the campaign trail itinerary in an oversized cowboy hat and mustering his best Kenney impression.
Anecdotally, the most profound observation in Kenneyism for me was when Appel compares Kenney’s sudden shift into cowboy garb and ‘good ol’ boy’ theatrics to the type of bombastic presentations one generally sees on World Wrestling Entertainment. Appel is by no means the first thinker to find common ground between professional wrestling and the modern political theatre—Chris Hedges opened his best-selling Empire of Illusion with a long passage associating a segment from WWE Monday Night RAW with contemporary shifts he was observing in sociopolitical discourse. But having just finished watching all four episodes of Vice TV’s recent Who Killed WCW? miniseries, a docuseries chronicling the fall of once-unstoppable pro wrestling company World Championship Wrestling, I couldn’t help but see a direct parallel between the endless parade of sleazy talking heads in the Vice series with the endless catalogue of bullies and dullards in Kenneyism. The major fault of Vice’s Who Killed WCW?, as has been written about extensively by wrestling journalists and is way outside the scope of interest of this review, is that by not factchecking or better vetting their interview subjects, the Vice producers allowed all the parties most guilty for putting a multi-million dollar company out of business to manufacture their own false narratives publicly and exculpate themselves with impunity. Spoiler alert: everyone who was in charge of WCW blames the “suits” and “elites” at their parent company, Time Warner AOL, for the company’s downfall, almost to the word in the same manner Kenney and his circle of cronies endlessly blame their own (and seemingly all of Canada’s) poor fortunes on the political “elites” In Ottawa. Unlike Vice, Jeremy Appel does not let his depraved subject become author of his own absolution; Kenneyism earns its title by leaving no doubt as to whose shoulders carry the weight of the blame for the horrors recounted therein.
Zachary Thompson (he/him) is a writer living in Hamilton, Ontario. He received a Bachelor’s Degree in English Literature from York University, as well as a Certificate in Creative Writing from the University of Toronto. He has read from his fiction at the Lit Live Reading Series in Hamilton, and participated in a presentation at the 2021 Conference of the Comics Studies Society.