Getting Jason Kenney to admit error, or at least a willingness to rethink old decisions, is easier now than it is with most politicians in mid-career. Perhaps it’s the luxury of knowing he won’t face an electorate soon.
Anyway, he was in mid-lecture on how the Liberals are not adequately funding the military when I asked him about Stephen Harper’s record on defence spending — including while Kenney himself was defence minister. It was substantially lower, as a fraction of GDP, than now under Justin Trudeau.
Kenney danced for all of a second or two before saying, “You know what? Mea culpa. One area where modern conservative governments didn’t live up to their own aspirations was in maintaining a sufficiently robust Canadian defence.”
So that was refreshing. It always has been. I met him when he was a rookie Reform Member of Parliament in 1997. He’s smart, erudite, not paralyzed with fear about the possibility of saying the wrong thing. So I don’t ever recall a conversation with him I didn’t enjoy. He’s also, perhaps not coincidentally, currently retired from politics. He’s on a bunch of boards and has a perch at the venerable Bennett Jones law firm.
I interviewed him in 2022 about the leadership vote that ended his career as premier of Alberta. I don’t even remember this 2015 conversation for a now-forgotten political magazine. This time I just wanted to chat. We’d run into each other at Brian Mulroney’s funeral, and Kenney launched into a rebuttal of my recent podcast guest William Thorsell, who’s had quite enough of the war in Ukraine and wants a negotiated peace with Vladimir Putin. I thought that was as good a place as any to start our next recorded conversation. Here it is.
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Jason Kenney's mea culpa