Kenney Vows Oil Fight as Conservatives Reconquer Alberta
Kenney Vows Oil Fight as Conservatives Regain Power in Alberta
(Bloomberg) -- Alberta returned to its conservative roots, electing United Conservative Party Leader Jason Kenney premier after he vowed to fight harder for the Canadian province’s beleaguered energy industry.
In a landslide victory, Kenney defeated center-left incumbent Rachel Notley, 55, whose New Democratic Party snapped four decades of conservative rule in 2015. His UCP won 63 seats in the provincial legislature, against 24 for Notley’s NDP, according to preliminary results Wednesday.
Kenney’s election may herald big changes for Alberta’s energy industry, which produces more oil than most OPEC members and has the world’s third-largest petroleum resources. He’s vowed to get stalled pipelines built, scrap the province’s carbon tax, and create a “war room” to hit back at anti-oil-sands campaigners. He also pledged to cut corporate taxes and balance the province’s books in his first term.
Kenney, 50, a former Cabinet member under Prime Minister Stephen Harper, tapped into voter frustration over the failure to get pipelines completed, which has battered oil sands prices and sparked an exodus of capital by energy firms like Kinder Morgan Inc. Alberta, traditionally one of the richest provinces in Canada, now has among the highest jobless rates and one of the weakest economies in the country.
“Albertans have elected a government that will be obsessed with getting this province back to work, a team that will do everything in our power every single day to create tens of thousands of good jobs,” Kenney said at a victory rally in Calgary.
Landlocked Province
Some of the challenges facing Alberta’s oil-sands industry have no easy fix, and they are outside Kenney’s jurisdiction. Increasing pipeline capacity to ship crude from the landlocked province to ports means overcoming opposition from environmental and indigenous groups in other Canadian provinces and south of the border, in the U.S.
“The reality is we need to work with the other provinces,” Jonathan Wright, chief executive officer of Calgary-based oil and gas explorer Nuvista Energy Ltd., said in an interview. “This is a federal issue so we definitely need to get the support of the federal government. And to the extent that Jason Kenney is going to champion that, we cheer that, but it is still going to take some time.”
Aware of the uphill battle ahead, Kenney used part of his victory speech to emphasize the need to turn First Nations into partners of pipeline projects, saying that’s owed to the original inhabitants of the lands the conduits will cross.
Message to Quebec
An even longer bit of the speech, alternating French and English, was addressed to Quebec, where strong environmental and political opposition led TransCanada Corp. to abandon Energy East, it’s most ambitious ever pipeline project. Kenney asked the French-speaking province to support an oil industry that makes the entire country more prosperous.
“The new government coming in probably had a bit of a bolder vision on what it took and the changes that are needed,” Ian Dundas, CEO of producer Enerplus Corp., said in an interview. “So that’s a bit of a positive. I think it could be quite positive for sentiment as well.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Kevin Orland in Calgary at korland@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: David Scanlan at dscanlan@bloomberg.net, Carlos Caminada, Jacqueline Thorpe
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