Former Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, took a swing at the "alt-Right-wing" media recently in an interview, saying it was to blame for woes he had in power..Kenney spoke with The Hub’s new series The Business of Government, which is hosted by journalist and best-selling author, Amanda Lang, about how government works and, more importantly, why it sometimes doesn’t work..During the interview, Lang asked Kenney, "When you are premier, as you were in a time of great stress as you were in the pandemic, and issues come up that are polarizing as they did, I’m curious about your take on if there’s been a shift if it’s harder to do hard things now?".Kenney replied, "I think the answer broadly is yes; there’s greater polarization on social media."."I think it has obviously helped to amplify that. It’s harder to communicate. I mean, look, COVID was unique in pretty much every respect, okay? So I don’t think we can draw a lot of broader lessons about our political system or system of government from, hopefully, the aberration of COVID," Kenney said.."But it certainly highlighted. It magnified the growing polarization. And I found it, for example, in the COVID context, hard to communicate. And I think I’ve been credited through my 25 years in elected life, 30 years in public life for being a pretty good communicator, a fairly persuasive, but I found it almost impossible to persuade or even speak to some segments of the population in COVID.".Kenney then said he knew the interview was part of a "non-partisan series."."I’ll break this down into more political terms, which is to say there are large segments of the population that have broadly come to distrust mainstream legacy media outlets," Kenney said.."And I think mainstream legacy media have some responsibility for this. And so what’s happened is you’ve had the rise of alternative media, both on the Left and the Right. And often, their business model is the monetization of anger.".Kenney said he found out during COVID-19, there was a whole segment of the population that had opted out of mainstream institutional legacy media.."Who was only, in one case, listening to alt-Right media, and who just kept seeing stories about nurses doing TikTok dances in empty hospitals," Kenney said.."And that COVID was fake or massively exaggerated. And so those folks never heard what I had to say. And so they thought that these restrictions were done completely arbitrarily or for malicious reasons. So that’s an extreme example, but it’s one that certainly worries me.".Lang then asked Kenney, "Can we hope and assume that that was tied to the, as you say, we hope the anomaly that was a pandemic with all of the heightened fear and risk and everything that brought deep emotion to that, or is this a new era?".Kenney replied, "I do think there is a small sliver of the population, and it’s a little larger in Alberta than the rest of Canada."."That just seems incapable so far of getting past the frenzy of COVID anger on both sides, right?" Kenney said..Kenney announced he would be stepping down as the premier in May of 2022 at a private gathering the UCP hosted at Spruce Meadows in Calgary..Kenney actually survived the leadership review with support from 51.4% of members who voted “yes” to the question: “Do you approve of the current leader?”.And prior to the vote results, Kenney had repeatedly said he would stay on as leader if he received 50% plus one of support..But he took the stage at the UCP campaign event and said the result was not what he hoped for.."The mandate is not strong enough to continue," Kenney said as he announced his intent to resign as UCP leader..READ MORE: Shock and tears greet Kenney's resignation.Audible gasps came up from the audience, who had initially cheered when the results were announced..Kenney then asked the party to trigger a leadership race so Conservatives could unite and put the divisiveness of COVID-19 pandemic policies behind them..“Clearly, a large number of our members want to clear the air with a leadership election," Kenney said in May 2022..Kenney concluded his speech by saying it's time to get to the real news of the evening — the battle of Alberta..There were 34,298 votes cast in the review..Kenney has helmed the party for the last five years, after he merged the Progressive Conservative Party and the Wildrose Party under the UCP banner..Albertans handed the UCP a majority mandate in 2019, just four years after the right vote-split resulted in Rachel Notley and the NDP’s shock victory. At 64%, the election saw the highest voter turnout since 1982, and marked the first time an incumbent government failed to win a second term.
