FRONT POLITICALINTERFERENCE
Ricardo Acuña // RICARDO@vueweekly.com
'No news to report'
Conservative leader Jason Kenney continues taking shots at Rachel Notley and the NDP
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ast Friday, on the second anniversary of the election that swept Rachel Notley and Alberta New Democrats into power, Conservative leader Jason Kenney called Alberta’s legislature media together for a press conference. The assumption, as news of the press conference began spreading on social media, was that Kenney would be making an announcement about progress on the 'unitethe-right' negotiations that have been going on between Alberta’s Conservative and Wildrose parties. You see, May 5 was not just the anniversary of the 2015 election, it was also the deadline that Kenney set six weeks ago for when unity talks between the two parties would be completed. It turns out, however, that Kenney had absolutely no news to report about the unite-the-right negotiations. He also had very little to say about the fact seven board members of Alberta’s Progressive Conservative Party have resigned since he became the party’s leader, with the most recent resignation coming just the day before his press conference. In fact, despite it being his first actual press conference or scrum in six weeks, Kenney didn’t actually seem to have anything new or newsworthy at all to share with the media. He took the usual shots at Notley
DYERSTRAIGHT
and her government, repeating the accusations about the price of oil, lost jobs, and economic slowdown that you can read daily from any number of ultra-right-wing trolls on Twitter and Facebook, but did not address the numerous economic indicators and reports pointing to renewed economic growth and job creation in the province. He did, however, do one thing that I am constantly surprised more Albertans aren’t more troubled by and with which the media seem happy to let him get away with. In his assessment of the New Democrat government’s performance, he referred to their tenure thus far as “ideological” and “socialist.” The use of the word “ideological” by a politician to describe another politician, although patently absurd, is nothing new or particularly troubling. Every politician brings ideology to the table with them—if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be in politics. Some, like Kenney, have historically brought a more extreme and
entrenched brand of ideology than most, including his clearly fundamentalist views on lgbtq+ issues and his rabid and extreme neoliberal economic tendencies. So while it’s highly hypocritical for someone like Kenney to accuse anybody else of being driven by ideology, it’s neither particularly concerning nor exclusive to him. What should be of more concern to Albertans is Kenney’s repeated
The basic premise of socialism is collective ownership of the means of production as the ultimate representation of democracy and the only way to secure the social and economic wellbeing of workers. A socialist party in Alberta would advocate nationalization of the province’s entire oil and gas industry, ensure that all workers earned a living wage, and make post-secondary education free for anybody that wanted it. As far as I can tell, in the last two years we have had a government in Alberta that has consulted with the energy industry on almost every major decision it has made, entrenched some of the lowest energy royalties in the world, boasts about having the lowest taxes in the coun-
try, and has dedicated a ton of energy and money to secure pipelines so that private industry in Alberta can increase its profit. No political scientist or analyst in their right mind would ever look at how this government has governed in the past two years and call it socialist— most wouldn’t even call it left-wing. Kenney’s branding of the NDP as socialist is especially perplexing given his assertion to the Toronto Star a few years back that he studied “political theory, classical political theory and started reading much more broadly” while he was in university. Assuming he’s being honest about his studies, therefore, raises a third possibility for Kenney’s constant misuse of the word “socialist”: that he’s purposefully misrepresenting the NDP’s policies as a way of fearmongering and scaring conservative Albertans into supporting his rightwing views and agendas. But no aspiring political leader who presents himself as honest and respectable would do that, would they? It’s high time we started calling him, and others, on their use of the word “socialist” to describe the Alberta government. Ultimately, though, it doesn’t matter whether it’s out of ignorance or to mislead and fear-monger, neither one speaks particularly well of Kenney’s ability to lead this province.
minal High Altitude Area Defense) system in South Korea before the election. It’s a system designed to intercept short- and medium-range ballistic missiles of the sort that North Korea might use to deliver nuclear weapons on South Korea (and maybe Japan) if it ever managed to make its nuclear weapons small enough to fit onto them. A reasonable precaution, perhaps—but THAAD was originally scheduled to be installed in South Korea between August and October of this year. Then suddenly it arrived in the country in March, and was “operational” (at least in theory) by last month. Jae-in will now have great difficulty in reversing that decision, assuming that he becomes president, and the North Koreans are predictably waxing hysterical about it. On the other hand, in April, Trump shocked the South Koreans by announcing that South Korea would have to pay $1 billion for the THAAD system, despite an
existing agreement that the US would bear the cost. He also declared he was going to renegotiate the existing free trade agreement between the two countries, which suggests there is no clever plan, just the usual stumbling around in the dark. Whether the US is deliberately manipulating events or not, Jae-in will be in a difficult situation if he becomes president. He quite rightly believes that there is no need for a crisis this year to resolve a problem that has been simmering away (but never boiling over) for at least 15 years, but unless he goes along with it he will find himself in a confrontation with Trump. Could he win it? He could if he has strong support at home. South Koreans are divided more or less evenly between a hard and a soft approach to North Korea, but they all agree they don’t want a war in which they would be the primary victims. Trump’s reckless style could frighten them into Jae-in's arms.
your average right wing Twitter troll, who cannot be expected to actually pay attention to public policy or understand basic political theory, they are not okay for the leader of a major political party who expects to become premier two years from now.
What should be of more concern to Albertans is Kenney’s repeated use of the word “socialist” to describe Notley and her government. use of the word “socialist” to describe Notley and her government. It is concerning because it shows, perhaps more clearly than any other thing he does or says, that either he’s not actually paying attention to what the government is doing or saying, or that he doesn’t really understand what the word socialism means. And while either or both of those possibilities might be fine for
GWYNNE DYER // gwynne@vueweekly.com
'Policy on the fly'
Weapons chatter intensifies in the United States and abroad
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part from US President Donald Trump’s need for a dramatic foreign policy initiative, is there any good reason why we are having a crisis over North Korea’s nuclear weapons testing now? If the Pyongyang regime is really planning an underground nuclear test soon, as Washington alleges, it will be the sixth bomb test it has carried out, not the first. That hardly qualifies as a new development that requires urgent action. The same goes for its ballistic missile tests, which have been ongoing for many years. Nothing new is going on in North Korea. In South Korea, on the other hand, things may be about to change a lot. The candidate predicted to win the presidency in Tuesday’s election, Moon Jae-in, favours a much softer policy towards North Korea. He has even promised to re-open industrial and tourist projects in North Korea that were financed by South Korea under the last Democratic (centre-left) government.
4 up front
A decade ago, when Jae-in's Democratic Party was still in power in Seoul, he was chief of staff to President Roh Moo-hyun and the socalled Sunshine Policy of reconciliation with North Korea was the order of the day. The goal was to create commercial, financial and personal ties between the two Koreas, and to that end, South Korea sent aid and investment to the North. It’s impossible to say whether that would eventually have led to a less tense and militarised situation in the Korean peninsula, because in the 2008 election the conservatives won and scrapped the Sunshine Policy. The past nine years under right-wing governments have seen North-South relations re-frozen and the investments in North Korea closed down by Seoul. In this week’s election, however, Jae-in is far in the lead, with the Eurasia Group, the world’s largest political risk consultancy, giving him an 80 percent chance of winning the presidency. If he wins, he
says he will reopen economic ties with North Korea in a policy his advisers call Sunshine 2.0. This runs directly contrary to Trump’s policy of tightening economic sanctions against North and even threatening military action to force Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear weapons programme. So the question is: Has the Trump administration pushed a military confrontation with North Korea to the top of its foreign policy agenda in order to pre-empt Jae-in’s new Sunshine policy? Given the chaos that reigns in the Trump White House, this may not be the case. It could just be that Trump is making policy on the fly, and that he neither knows nor cares about the domestic politics of South Korea. But some recent US actions point to a deliberate attempt to get the confrontation going before Jae-in takes office. One clue could be the sudden rush to deploy the THAAD (Ter-
VUEWEEKLY.com | May 11 – may 17, 2017