EDMONTON - The only explanation seems to be that when Jason Kenney, the
federal immigration minister, hit the button on his personal email
account, he accidentally hit “reply all.”

Why else would he
declare to the world in an email that he thinks Alberta’s deputy
premier, Thomas Lukaszuk, is a “complete and utter asshole”?

Kenney
wrote the invective last Wednesday at 5:02 p.m. in response to an email
sent from the office of MP Blaine Calkins, chairman of the federal
Conservatives Alberta caucus, who wanted to know if Kenney and other MPs
from Alberta would meet with Lukaszuk.

“Honourable Thomas
Lukaszuk, deputy premier of Alberta will be in Ottawa on Thursday, June
21st, 2012 and is requesting a lunch or dinner with caucus,” says the
email written by Calkins’ legislative assistant at 4:57 p.m. “Mr.
Calkins will not be able to host this event as he has prior commitments,
but would like to see if there is any caucus member who would be
willing to host this event for the deputy premier.”

Kenney shot
back a response just five minutes later, but instead of sending it only
to Calkins’ office, he inadvertently sent it to everyone in the
26-member federal Alberta caucus, plus assistants: “I say a definite
‘no’ to Lukaszyk. I don’t think it makes sense to create a precedent to
do a special caucus meeting for every visiting minister from the
provincial government. Plus he is a complete and utter asshole.”

Adding insult to injury, Kenney also managed to misspell Lukaszuk’s name.

It
is an email that is making the rounds of political circles as a
testament to just how bad things have become, on a personal level,
between Alberta Conservatives, provincial and federal, who most recently
tussled in the Alberta election when a number of the more right-wing
federal MPs supported the Wildrose party in defiance of the Progressive
Conservatives.

Most of all, the email has created a
public-relations nightmare for Kenney and the prime minister’s office
which have descended into the no-comment bunker awaiting the all clear.

The
only comment from Kenney on Monday came via his press secretary, Alexis
Pavlich: “We do not comment on private communications.”

Requests for comments from the prime minister’s office and Blaine Calkins’ office went unanswered.

The
first part of Kenney’s email actually has a valid argument. Ottawa is
facing something of an invasion of government politicians from Alberta
trying to build bridges and patch over differences with the federal
government. Premier Alison Redford has paid a visit, so too the
environment minister and the minister of intergovernmental relations.
Finance Minister Doug Horner is in Ottawa the first part of this week
and Lukaszuk will be there the latter part.

Kenney has a point
when he says if the MPs say yes to a formal gathering for one provincial
minister, they’d have to say yes to all of them.

But resorting
to a personal insult against Lukaszuk undermines the sincerity of
Kenney’s own argument. Is he saying “no” to Lukaszuk as a matter of
principle or of pettiness?

And why does Kenney harbour such a low opinion of Alberta’s deputy premier?

The
answer to that might lie in Lukaszuk’s constant lobbying, and
occasional criticism, of federal immigration policy last year when he
was Alberta’s employment minister. Lukaszuk wanted Ottawa to open the
door to allow more immigrants to come to Alberta to alleviate the
province’s shortage of skilled trades.

He decried Kenney’s
reliance on temporary foreign workers as “costly,” “cumbersome” and
“unfortunate.” That the two bumped heads was no secret but Lukaszuk said
he had no idea Kenney was so thin skinned or held him in such contempt.

“My
feelings towards him are actually rather positive,” Lukaszuk said
Monday when told about Kenney’s email. “I have nothing negative to say
about him.”

Lukaszuk stuck to the high road and would only
characterize Kenney’s email as “an unfortunate choice of words” and
joked that “we’re probably not going for a latte any time soon.” He said
he would not be asking Kenney for an explanation or an apology and
won’t be spending any time worrying about it.

Which is what you would expect him to say.

The
fact is the Alberta government is worried about its relationship with
its federal cousins. Despite the fact Stephen Harper is onside with the
Alberta government’s aspirations to ship more bitumen from the oilsands
to Asia and the United States, many of his federal caucus members from
Alberta would dearly love it if the Alberta government was run by the
Wildrose under Danielle Smith, not the Progressive Conservatives under
the more moderate Redford. It doesn’t seem to matter that the PCs won a
decisive victory in April’s election.

That’s the big undeclared
reason why Redford announced last month she was opening a provincial
office in Ottawa. Officially, it’s designed to “help forge stronger
relations in Canada’s capital and advocate Alberta’s perspective on
important intergovernmental matters.”

Unofficially, it is
Redford’s personal pipeline to the federal government, a way of getting
information to and from the federal government while circumnavigating
the very people supposedly elected to do that for Alberta.

More
than a few Alberta MPs have their noses out of joint that Alberta feels
the need to open what amounts to foreign trade office in our nation’s
capital. But reading Kenney’s email puts things in sharper perspective.

It
doesn’t really matter that he intended the email to be a “private
communication.” That somebody so senior in the federal government from
Alberta should harbour such contempt for the province’s deputy premier
calls into question just how Kenney and others in the federal caucus are
doing their jobs and who actually represents Alberta’s interests in
Ottawa.




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