Jason Kenney is Canada's least popular premier.

When you add in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, he's also Canada’s least popular first minister.

I'm not going to belabour this point, but Jason Kenney is Canada's least popular premier.

Actually, I am going to belabour the point. I'm just not going to provide a lot of smarty pants analysis. That's because while we can speculate, it's too soon to say why Jason Kenney is Canada's least popular premier, or what that might mean.

Unfortunately, there are caveats. Far too many.

As far as we can tell, Jason Kenney is Canada's least popular premier. Maybe there's a less popular premier in Atlantic Canada, because the Campaign Research Inc. poll that indicates how unpopular Kenney is doesn't include the Maritimes or Newfoundland.

But who can imagine any Atlantic premier being less popular than Kenney? So I'm just going to keep on saying Kenney is Canada's least popular premier until somebody proves otherwise.

How unpopular is Kenney? Well, Kenney has both the lowest approval rating of any first minister about which the Toronto-based pollster asked questions in its monthly omnibus poll and the highest disapproval rating of any premier on the list.

Mind you, another caveat, the Alberta sample appears to be pretty small, tiny even, a mere 181 souls out of the 2,007 who responded to the firm's online panel on May 1 and 2. And, in this province, who knows why people might disapprove of the guy?

Still, even with all those qualifiers, it's nice to be able to say that Jason Kenney is Canada's least popular premier, and considerably less popular than Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to boot!

The poll was published yesterday under the heading COVID-19/Coronavirus Study, so you might have missed it. The bit about Jason Kenney being Canada's most unpopular premier is buried rather deep, starting down on page 36 of the explanatory slide show. It's one of those online panel thingies, so all of the usual negative caveats about that apply too.

Just the same, according to Campaign Research, Canada's three most popular premiers are Quebec's Francois Legault with an 83-per-cent approval rating and 13 per cent disapproving, Saskatchewan's Scott Moe (80 per cent/16 per cent), and British Columbia's John Horgan (73 per cent/13 per cent). Ontario's Doug Ford was fourth (76 per cent/17 per cent).

I suppose because they're a Toronto pollster, Campaign research threw in Toronto Mayor John Tory (75 per cent/17 per cent). In fairness, though, Toronto's population is more than twice those of Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and a bit larger than both combined, so fair's fair.

Plus Campaign Research added the prime minister (65 per cent/29 per cent).

Canada's second-least popular premier, according to this, was Manitoba's Brian Pallister (51 per cent/37 per cent).

And then came Kenney, in a distant last place with an approval rating of 44 per cent, and a disapproval rating of 48 per cent, the only leader on the list with a higher disapproval rating than approval rating.

Have I read too much into this? Almost certainly.

But who cares? It's just nice to be able to say … Jason Kenney is Canada's least popular premier.

David Climenhaga, author of the Alberta Diary blog, is a journalist, author, journalism teacher, poet and trade union communicator who has worked in senior writing and editing positions at The Globe and Mail and the Calgary Herald. This post also appears on his blog, AlbertaPolitics.ca.

Image: Chris Schwarz/Government of Alberta/Flickr

On March 23, UN Secretary-General António Guterres appealed to G20 leaders: "I am encouraging the waiving of (economic) sanctions imposed on countries to ensure access to food, essential health supplies, and COVID-19 medical support. This is the time for solidarity not exclusion ... Let us remember that we are only as strong as the weakest health system in our interconnected world." At the same time, AP News reported, ambassadors of eight countries currently affected by economic sanctions -- namely, Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, Syria, Nicaragua, China, Russia and North Korea -- petitioned the secretary-general for "the immediate and complete lifting of those measures to enable nations to respond to the coronavirus pandemic." 

Regrettably, so far the wealthy and powerful countries of the world haven't heeded the secretary-general's call to loosen the screws on the weaker and poorer ones. They also ignored a similar appeal by Pope Francis in his Easter address. On the contrary, President Trump actually weaponized the pandemic by instituting further sanctions on both Iran and Venezuela, countries already targeted for regime change. 

In Canada, however, two peace groups, the Hamilton Coalition to Stop the War and le Mouvement Québécois pour la paix, sent an open letter signed by 100 prominent Canadians to Trudeau asking him to lift all of Canada's economic sanctions now. 

Unknown to most Canadians, Trudeau's government maintains economic sanctions regimes against 20 countries of the world, including nine African countries. In fact, under the Harper government in Ottawa in June 2013, Canada co-ordinated economic sanctions for the U.S.-led coalition of countries participating in the regime change operation against Syria. Similarly, under the Trudeau government, Canada helped lead the Lima Group in organizing multilateral sanctions against Venezuela. 

Canada typically applies five types of sanctions: arms embargoes, asset freezes, import-export restrictions, financial prohibitions and technical assistance prohibitions. Not all sanctioned countries feel the full weight of all five. However, some countries do: Iran, Syria, North Korea and Libya. 

The effect on the targeted country is crippling. The first result is usually a drastic decline in its currency's value, which translates into ordinary people being unable to put food on the table for their children. Then follow other crises for working people: unemployment due to closing markets for the country's exports and the inability to get spare parts; inability to receive payments from relatives abroad because the international banking system excludes the targeted country; the closing down of whole industries, such as tourism, because access to credit cards or even air access to national airports, as in the case of Syria, is turned off by the sanctioners.

Supporters will point out that sanction regimes generally exclude food and medical supplies. However, international trade requires financing through banks which are subject to penalties in the U.S., for example for trading with Iran, even though the participating bank may be domiciled in a country that has lifted its sanctions on Iran. This practice by the U.S. is called extraterritoriality.

Some have likened economic sanctions to acts of war and compared them to sieges of medieval towns in which the besiegers hope to make life so difficult for the besieged that they rise up against their feudal lords and open the gates. The comparison isn't far off since the brunt of sanctions aren't felt so much by the targeted countries' ruling elites but rather their civilian populations. A monstrous example was the decade of UN sanctions against Iraq between the First and Second Gulf Wars. Between 1992 and 2000, 500,000 Iraqi children perished from lack of food and medicines. But Madeleine Albright, former U.S. secretary of state in the Clinton administration, famously quipped that it was "worth it."  It was worth it to Albright because sanctions were part of U.S. foreign policy to soften up Iraq in preparation for the Anglo-American invasion and occupation of 2003 which continues today.

Notably, coercive economic measures are not levelled against U.S. client states, no matter the enormity of their crimes. Israel, which turned Gaza into the world’s largest open air prison and is annexing the West Bank, and Saudi Arabia, which wages a bloody war on Yemen and murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi, don't worry about sanctions.

Under international law, economic sanctions are acts of war. That's why the UN charter restricts the power to level sanctions exclusively to the UN Security Council. That also explains why Canada's unilateral sanctions against 19 countries are illegal. Only in the case of North Korea are Canada's regime of a full spectrum of coercive measures explicable under international law.

While Trudeau tries to play the competent caring leader in his daily COVID-19 press conferences, he cannot ignore the damage he is doing to the efforts to fight the novel coronavirus in 20 of the world's poorest countries, and indeed to the global effort.

Ken Stone is a longtime peace, social justice, labour, anti-racist and environmental activist-resident in Hamilton, Ontario. He is treasurer of the Hamilton Coalition To Stop The War and executive member of the Syria Solidarity Movement.

Image: CanadianPM/Video Screenshot/Twitter

Now that Premier Jason Kenney has declared it "un-Canadian" to say oil is dead, I wonder if it's OK to admit Alberta's fossil fuel industry is on the ropes?

Probably. Kenney said as much himself in a remarkable rant yesterday directed at the parliamentary leader of the Bloc Québécois and the former leader of the Green Party of Canada.

But if you don't want to be accused of un-Canadian activities, you'd better make it clear none of these troubles are the fault of anything that's ever been done by any Alberta government, except perhaps the NDP's, and especially not by the United Conservative Party Kenney leads.

There is acceptable speech in Alberta, you see, and it doesn't include saying that oil is done like dinner, which is probably not true just yet, but is nevertheless a position that can be argued in respectable company almost anywhere else in the world, including a number of countries known for producing what Kenney rather sophomorically calls "dictator oil."

As has become his practice lately, Kenney took over Chief Medical Officer of Health Deena Hinshaw's daily COVID-19 briefing in Edmonton yesterday afternoon for the sustained blast of gaslighting he directed at Yves-François Blanchet and Elizabeth May.

Blanchet had dared to suggest at a news conference Wednesday that oil "is never coming back" (uttered en francais, bien sûr) and that Ottawa's bailout package should really be directed at "something which is more green." May, for her part, opined at the same event that "oil is dead."

Specifically, the MP for Saanich-Gulf Islands told the media: "My heart bleeds for people who believe the sector is going to come back. It's not. Oil is dead and for people in the sector, it's very important there be just transition funds." This may be wrong, but outside Alberta I doubt it sounds like a stab in the back or a curb-stomping.

Nevertheless, that is what sent Kenney over the edge, in a calculated sort of way, responding to a set-up question provided by Calgary Sun political columnist Rick Bell, who can be counted on to get the first question at one of Hinshaw's frequently hijacked news conferences.

"I just think it's deeply regrettable that we would see national political leaders piling on Albertans and energy workers at a time of great trial for us," Kenney said piously, opening what appeared to be a carefully rehearsed answer. "This is the opposite of leadership. Leaders should be seeking to bring us together, not to divide us."

This is a bit of an irony, of course, coming from a premier who has been ginning up an Alberta separatist threat for months while denying the oil industry had anywhere to go but up, but let's just take it as a lesson in gaslighting 101.

In his remarks, Kenney trotted out benefits he said have been conferred on Quebec by Alberta's oil industry, noted the province's equalization complaints, blamed "predatory actions" by OPEC countries that "want to dominate the world with dictator oil," reminded Quebeckers they like to drive cars and go on airplane trips, and totted up the medical equipment recently sent by Alberta to other provinces.

Having said it in English, he said it over again in French.

Tsk-tsking and shaking his head, Kenney declared, "I would say to Mr. Blanchet and Madam May: Please stop kickin' us while we're down!"

"These attacks on our natural resource industries are unwarranted, they are divisive, they're, I believe, in a way, un-Canadian at a time like this. It's like blaming the victim!" (Italics added for emphasis. And, yes, Kenney really said that.)

Premier Kenney also took particular umbrage at Blanchet's remark that Quebec receives a string of insults from Alberta -- although anyone who has paid attention to political discourse in this province for the last half century would have trouble refuting the claim.

After the news conference, backup was provided in columns filed by Bell and his Postmedia colleague Don Braid.

Bell pronounced Blanchet and May to be "the Bobbsey Twins of B.S." and the "deluded duo," and accused them of choosing "to kick Alberta when we're down" and indulging "in a little curb-stomping."

Braid, the Dinger's bookend of acceptable oilpatch opinion, charged them with "the foulest kind of cheap shot," to wit, saying "Alberta's oil and gas industry should be left prostrate in the dust with no help from the federal government."

Well, there you have it: the debased state of political discourse in Alberta in the plague year 2020. It's not reassuring.

David Climenhaga, author of the Alberta Diary blog, is a journalist, author, journalism teacher, poet and trade union communicator who has worked in senior writing and editing positions at The Globe and Mail and the Calgary Herald. This post also appears on his blog, AlbertaPolitics.ca.

Image: Screenshot of Government of Alberta video/YouTube