So, Jason Kenney Wants to Save Alberta Now?

He may be ready for Alberta, but is Alberta ready for Wild Jay Kenney?

You can just tell when guys in cowboy hats and neckerchiefs haven't spent much time in the saddle. You just know they couldn't hogtie a kitten or shoot a lampshade, let alone a silver dollar off a fence post.

Every year during the Calgary Stampede, Canadians play a game that could be called spot the doofus -- a cringe-worthy exercise of picking out the real cowpokes from the rhinestone variety, the ones who are "all hat, no cattle" as they say on the Prairies. These city slickers are there for one reason only: to flog a personal agenda or two.

The lamest of these greenhorn wannabes is the campaigning politician. They're as common as ants at a picnic and engender snickers as they work the crowds, pretending there's nothing like the smell of horse dung to sharpen the appetite for a plate of pancakes. Who can forget the infamous photo of Stephen Harper in his form-fitting leather vest and glistening lips, hands firmly on hips like an angry schoolmarm?

As I write these words, the MP for Calgary Midnapore is marketing himself at the Calgary Stampede in his run for the leadership of the province's Progressive Conservative party. Think of it as the Second Coming of Jason.

Jason Kenney is taking part in a parade -- riding in the back of a 1958 Ford Fairlane, with an army tank behind him, and a gas-guzzling 1959 Caddy in front carrying fellow-delusional Michelle Rempel. I guess the cars were interesting. (At least Premier Notley rode a Pinto that wasn't made in Detroit -- the kind with four legs, not an explosive gas tank.)

The Harper years created more MPs suffering from the curse of the half-talented than any other political era. Once Canadians had put an end to politically barbaric practices in this country by ousting the Conservatives, you would think that people like Kelly Leitch would realize they are probably never going to be the rage. But the top dogs of the party that just got pole-axed after a decade of one-man misrule are lining up for the job. There must have been a stash of Kool-aid in the bunker.

King of the chameleons

There was a time when I thought that Harper was the ultimate identity chameleon -- an Easterner who had managed to convince the country he was a cowpuncher. I was wrong. Kenney may not be King of the Cowboys, but he is definitely king of the chameleons. Like his former boss, who was a son of Leaside, Kenney was born in the wilds of Ontario -- Oakville to be precise. Home on the range meant the stove to Jason.

As for his resumé, Kenney left university to work for the Saskatchewan Liberal Party. That led to an odd post for a guy who would one day run the right-wing Canadian Taxpayers Federation, and after that, spend so much time at Harper's side dismantling Canada: Kenney became executive-assistant to Ralph Goodale, now Canada's public safety minister in the Trudeau majority government.

Later, Kenney bounced around like a rubber ball, from Liberals, to Reform, to Canadian Alliance and finally to the CPC. He then entered a decade of celebrity and someonehood as cabinet minister, organizational Machiavelli, and heir apparent in the event Harper had died of fright reading political polls in 2015.

And then Kenney changed course -- though I doubt it had much to do with wanting to save Alberta from the socialist hordes or anything else.

Kenney wasn't the first Conservative to realize that the Harper era was coming to an end. He was virtually invisible in the last election campaign. Politicians with less nerve than Kenney jumped out of the covered wagon before the axle broke and the whole shooting match slid over the cliff in a cloud of dust.

For their perspicacity, both John Baird and Peter MacKay didn't have the crushing defeat of 2015 on their CVs. Instead, they cashed in their political chits and watched from the sidelines to see if October 2015 would really be a General Custer moment. It turned out that it was ugly, but there were survivors. Kenney was one of them. The only question for a man who runs on ambition was what to do now that the keys to the Ponderosa had been repossessed.

That's when Kenney decided to become Wild Jay, beating a hasty retreat back to what Harper recently called "the beating heart" of Conservatism -- an odd description of a place that had just handed the reins of power to Rachel Notley and the New Democratic Party. But then Steve never did have much trouble ignoring facts that got in the way of his pronouncements.

Despite his obligatory claim that the Conservatives could win federally in 2019 (a necessary statement to deflect inevitable charges of political cowardice for leaving Ottawa -- though he hasn't yet given up his seat as an MP, nor the paycheque that goes along with it), Kenney clearly saw what his future at the federal level would look like.

At best, 10 years in Opposition with only a modest chance that he could wait it out in the relative comforts of Stornaway. At worst, he would be one step above a garden variety MP, in a shadow cabinet filled with shadows -- ex-Harper ministers a universe away from the perks and pleasures of power.

Conversion on the road

Finally, is there anyone who believes that Kenney on his best day could take out Justin Trudeau in any forum or in any event? True, they are both celebrities. Trudeau is a world-class attraction around whom state dinners are planned. Kenney's celebrity is the kind bestowed on game show hosts who give away washing machines and trips to Puerto Rico.

After years of entitlement, and no chance of much low-hanging fruit in federal politics, it is easy to see why Kenney has transferred his political ambition from national to provincial politics. If he could unite the right in Alberta and become premier, he would avoid a decade in the wilderness with his hapless federal colleagues trying desperately to come up with a way to bring Justin Trudeau down from the political stratosphere.

It is far less easy to see why Alberta would greet him with open arms.

Kenney's conversion on the road to being a mere MP smacks of the worst kind of political opportunism. Someone should ask Kenney when he decided to save Alberta -- before or after the Harper government's crushing loss? And what will he tell the voters of Calgary Midnapore? They thought they were voting for a federal MP. Will they really believe that he always wanted to be a provincial messiah for a discredited Conservative party but just forgot to tell them about it when he was soliciting their vote? What would he have done had Dear Leader won the federal election -- returned to Alberta to perform a by-pass operation on the beating heart of Conservatism, or settled down into some jammy ministerial post in Ottawa?

On the face of it, there is monstrous presumptuousness operating here, exactly the kind that consigned the Alberta PC's last carpetbagger, Jim Prentice, to the ash-heap of political history. Does Kenney really think that Albertans will swallow the story that the carnage in the oil patch is Notley's doing? And why would Wild Rose want to unite behind a man whose party couldn't get a single pipeline built after a decade in power, and which aligned itself with a PC party in Alberta that mismanaged one of the greatest resources on earth and then told Albertans they were the problem when the bitumen hit the fan?

How delusional is Wild Jay Kenney? He still thinks it's a good thing to be endorsed by Stephen Harper.

Me? That's a hand of aces and eights.