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An Interview with Stephen Harper's Right-Hand Man

Jason Kenney might just be the next Conservative Prime Minister you won't vote for if you're under 30.
Justin Ling
Montreal, CA

All photos via Flickr user michael_swan

If Stephen Harper has a right-hand man, it's probably Jason Kenney.

The 46-year-old ex-Reform Party wunderkind and top-ranking Conservative minister is the prime minister's go-to communicator for selling the government's low-tax, freedom-loving agenda.

The Calgarian is admired in his party for his tenacious dogma as much as he's reviled by partisans of other stripes. He's as gregarious as he is ruthlessly partisan. He's dangerously effective in political debates and notoriously hard to fluster.

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In his back pocket is no short list of achievements.

As Minister of State for Multiculturalism, he was a driving force behind Ottawa's harsh criticism of China, thanks to some close ties with Tibetan-Canadians. After moving over to the Ministry of Immigration, Kenney overhauled the system and sped up processing times. As the employment minister, he crafted a $15,000-per-worker training fund everyone has come around to, and he made changes to the generally terrible Temporary Foreign Worker Program, which had allowed employers to pay immigrants miserably without giving them a path to citizenship.

Throughout all of it, he's acted as the government's one-man outreach team to cultural communities—a key to the Conservatives' majority win in 2011. It's a job that keeps him flying around the country, glad-handing with ethnic and religious organizations for a good part of the year.

But Kenney's tenure as top-tier minister hasn't been without controversy. He once called former Alberta Deputy Premier Thomas Lukaszuk a "complete and utter asshole." He also introduced legislation that would allow for the detention and fast-track deportation of immigrants who arrive in Canada by boat, although he later bowed to criticism and softened the bill.

He retooled the immigration system to cut down on application times and appeals, leading many who deal with immigrants and refugees to accuse him of creating a system that more readily deports vulnerable would-be Canadians back to their home countries, where they could face jail, violence, and even death.

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But, considering he's been an MP for nearly 18 years—and a minister for six of them—he's escaped largely unscathed. He's largely well-liked by journalists on the Hill (he's one of the few ministers unafraid of doing interviews) and is at least generally respected by opposition parties. A good number of MPs from all parties can recount stories of Kenney calling their office to intervene personally when a constituent has an immigration problem.

It's also no big secret that he's well-placed to take over from Stephen Harper once the prime minister vacates the job.

His riding association in Calgary Southeast has turned into a fundraising juggernaut, with a bank account the envy of any sitting MP looking to the 2015 election. Should Kenney decide to run, that money could be transferred to the coffers of his leadership campaign. He's also been sending funds to cash-strapped riding associations across the country, which could curry a lot of favour when it comes time to vote. Of course, when you ask him about it, he laughs and brushes off the idea.

Whether or not he'd win is another question altogether. He's long been viewed as the captain of the religious right, and has had a hard time winning over moderates in the party. While he's spent virtually his entire time in government trying to play down his social conservative bona fides—he had opposed gay marriage and abortion access for women—he has largely shied away from the issues in recent years.

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He did, however, vote for a motion to crack open the debate about when life begins—a backdoor to the abortion debate—openly defying the prime minister.

But, with Harper taking one last kick at the can, Kenney is still a trusty lieutenant. He spoke with VICE to discuss nearly a decade in power, the next election, what it means to be a Conservative, and why only about 15 percent of Canadians under 29 want to vote for his party.

VICE: So you've been in power for nearly nine years. It'll be a decade by the next election. Looking back for you, what do you think you can say about this government's legacy?
Jason Kenney: Strong economic management, reducing the tax burden on Canadian families, a strong principled foreign policy, making our streets safer are the top things that come to mind. If you look at this from 30,000 feet, we've done a lot of really important reforms that have gone under-reported, like addressing the big demographic shift by changing the age of cut-off for Old Age Security—this is something that caused riots in Eastern European countries, but every other developed country is doing it because the math requires them to do so. We also achieved some fundamental root-and-branch immigration reform. It's actually been a pretty ambitious government.

Your party came to power after merging the very conservative right and the centre-right. After ten years of this unified Conservative Party, what can you say about the conservative movement?
I think generally we've managed to find just the right balance of making conservatism more mainstream and making the mainstream more conservative, in a sense. We've managed to change the debate. I know in the most recent Hamas-Israel conflict that our government's view—that Hamas is the aggressor and that Israel has the right to defend itself—has increasingly become conventional wisdom in the public debate in Canada. This was an idea, just 15 years ago, considered well outside the foreign policy consensus in Canada. Our immigration reforms in 2007 were condemned as anti-immigrant and xenophobic, yet, now I think they're broadly accepted. What I'm working on these days is re-tooling our vocation training and labour market training. Again, it seems to have pretty wide support across the spectrum. I think we've done a pretty effective job of moving the debate in the direction of mainstream conservative policy solutions and at the same time, I think we've demonstrated to our worst critics that we are not a bunch of wild-eyed ideologues. The worst fears about some ideological hidden agenda have proven to be really unfounded.

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Your government came to power on a policy of improving transparency. But, since then, just about everyone who deals with this government says that transparency is at an all time low. How can you justify this government's record?
In terms of transparency, I honestly don't understand where the critics are coming from. I was a bit taken aback to hear the widely-held view about the lack of accessibility and transparency in this government. That's not been my own experience, I keep putting more and more data online proactively, departments for which I'm responsible keep processing ever-growing volumes of access to information requests, and we try to be responsive as possible in a timely way to media requests. We can't do all that perfectly. In my own gambit, we try to push the dial to greater transparency as much as feasibly possible. Look, it's fair to say that sometimes media relations in this government have been, in my view, a little too risk averse. Responding in a timely, professional way to requests only makes sense. I can't speak for every office around town.

Other conservative governments, like England's, have taken up the mantle of climate change. Yet our Prime Minister called pushing for more CO2 reductions right now: "crazy." Both on the public policy, and on the political side, how do you respond to the criticism that you're not doing enough to tackle climate change?
First of all, the PM didn't say more climate change initiatives are crazy. He said that unilaterally imposing significant costs on the Canadian energy economy during a period of low energy prices without coordinating such costs with the United States would be crazy, because our energy industry is completely integrated. If people sitting on Parliament Hill don't understand that, they should go down and visit the Bakken reserves in Southeastern Saskatchewan and North Dakota and see how integrated the industry is. If we were to unilaterally impose some carbon tax on gas producers, what would happen to the Bakken reserves? The rigs and production facilities would just pick up and move South of the border to drill the same oil in South Dakota. It would be completely shooting ourselves in the foot economically. Nevertheless, we managed to see a significant reduction of gas emissions during a period of economic growth. We've set stringent car fuel standards and regulated greenhouse emissions in the transportation sector, and set tough regulations around the coal sector, which is the world largest emitters of greenhouse gases. Yes, it's true, we have not unilaterally attacked one of the most vibrant parts of the economy, which is oil and gas, but I would argue that our record is a pretty good one. For some ideologues on the environmental left, they won't be satisfied until we virtually shut down our industrial economy. That's not our approach. Our approach is economic growth and a prudent environmental policy.

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Youth generally don't vote conservative. Part of the reason is that climate change matters more to youth, and this government doesn't look so hot on climate change. The same with transparency. Does this government need a make-over, or are you just not going to win those votes?
Look, there's no such thing as a monolithic youth vote. I'll tell you this, those hard-working kids who go through trade school and who are marking $40, $50 an hour in the oil patch are overwhelmingly voting Conservative. There are a lot of young Canadians who are more interested in finding a good career, a good job, and economic stability than in pursuing Elizabeth May's ideological fancies. Those are the youth who are more prone to support us.

In that same vein, your government has gotten clobbered recently on the privacy issue after introducing legislation to make it easier to obtain people's cellphone or email records without a warrant. Is this another image problem for your government?
On some of these things, yes they may be an image problem because they get misconstrued. We're not proposing to expand arbitrary search powers for police. Every government in the world is wrestling with the fact that laws designed in the 19th century don't apply to the modern world. We have no interest in compromising people's online privacy in any way shape or form, but if crimes are being committed online, law enforcement agencies need tools to address that. So, on some of these things we've done a very bad job of communicating this, we recognize that, which is why we suspended a couple of bills and narrowed the scope of some of these powers. But we disagree with this notion that, just because it happens online, it can't be illegal. One thing we challenge libertarians to do is to think seriously how to deal with the challenge of online crime, some of which may pose national security risks.

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The Prime Minister is facing someone much younger, someone much more dynamic. How do you continue knowing that Justin Trudeau is simply more likeable?
I think that Canadians are pretty civil-minded people. Most Canadians don't cast their ballot based on who has the nicest smile or superficial personality characteristics. Canadians realize this is a tough world with a very uncertain economy with all sorts of very serious security risks. That requires an experienced, competent leader. I'll tell you, I travel around the world to meet with political and business leaders—they really regard Stephen Harper as a star performer. I think we need to re-introduce this prime minister to Canadians in terms of the scope of what we achieved in the past nine years during some very difficult times.

After this Prime Minister, assuming he decides it's his last, what do you see happening to the Conservative Party post-Stephen Harper?
I think one of his greatest legacies, whenever he decides to leave, will be the creation of a broad unified, electorally-effective Conservative Party. We're not going to be a permanent government, we don't aspire to be anything as pretentious as a natural governing party, but thanks to Stephen Harper we will be a strong force in Canadian politics for the long-term. Hopefully we never step back to being a Tory party that's just an echo of the Liberals. Hopefully we're more than the pursuit of power for its own sake. I hope that our party will remember that, whenever Stephen Harper leaves, he was able to create this kind of mainstream party that is also deeply grounded in conservative principles. In the long-run, I'm pretty optimistic.

We're staring down the barrel of another election. Governments in Canada don't usually last a decade. How can you convince Canadians that change isn't necessary? What else do you actually intend to do?
Evidently the budget next spring will give some shape to that, and the platform too. One thing that cannot be said of this government by its critics is that we've lost our energy or ambition. We continue to be an activist government. We have kept virtually all of our election promises in some cases, we've had to modify them based on input or new realities, but we've established a pretty good reputation of keeping our word on our election platforms. Obviously, economic growth will continue to be job number one. There remains a lot of unfinished work for us to do. I would just say: stay tuned for 2015.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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