Driving Naari Programme launched in Chandigarh
At an Alberta New Democratic Party event in Calgary one early March day, anxious parents and children flanked Premier Rachel Notley as she waxed apocalyptic.
The writ had not yet dropped, but the province’s long-awaited election campaign was effectively already underway, and Notley was there to paint a dire picture of what would happen if voters elected Jason Kenney’s United Conservative Party. “These kids right here — these lovely kids — aren’t rubbing their hands waiting for a 33-per-cent cut in corporate tax,” said Notley.
That was the moment, Kenney would later tell the National Post, that he decided Notley “fundamentally misunderstands the province.”
The conventional wisdom is for the frontrunner in an election campaign to play it safe. When the election call came, however, Kenney — leading comfortably in the polls since he won the leadership of the united party — kicked off his bid to become premier with a big risk.
Slashing the corporate tax rate from 12 per cent to eight per cent, giving the province the lowest rate in Canada, became the focal point of the UCP campaign — and, after the official swearing-in on April 30, it will become the focus of Alberta’s new government.
It may seem eccentric to stake the farm on a massive corporate tax cut even as populist politicians around the globe are taking aim at big business, but Kenney believed he had an ace up his sleeve: The party’s internal polling on the issue was absolutely off the charts.
“It was like, shocking,” Kenney said in an interview with the Post. “I was even shocked. It was like 70-30 in favour of this. There’s like 25 per cent of the population that wanted us to go deeper, wanted us to go to a 50-per-cent reduction in the business tax rate.”
Long before the writ dropped, and long before Kenney completed his years long journey from federal cabinet minister to Alberta PC leader to uniter of the province’s splintered political right to premier-designate, he entered the process of building a UCP platform ready to question some of his own conservative orthodoxy — especially on economic policy. But, in the party’s internal polls, Albertans seemed happy to support some old-school, supply-side measures conservatives believe are vital to bringing investment back to the province.
