Kenney, at a 2018 gathering of his United Conservative Party, pledged a “fully staffed rapid-response war room in government to quickly and effectively rebut every lie told by the green left about our world-class energy industry.”

That line worked well in a room full of pro-oil partisans who felt their province’s main industry under siege. And it surely felt familiar to Kenney himself, who’d spend so many federal elections in the Conservative Party war room, pumping out attack after counter-attack against the Liberals, NDP or any other would-be threat to his own faction.

It tried to take down Big Green. It instead picked fights with Bigfoot Family.

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    And this week Premier Danielle Smith abandoned the idea, dissolving the organization into her own government, making it a lesser tool in her own fight on behalf of the oil and gas sector.

    Kenney, at a 2018 gathering of his United Conservative Party, pledged a “fully staffed rapid-response war room in government to quickly and effectively rebut every lie told by the green left about our world-class energy industry.”

    And it surely felt familiar to Kenney himself, who’d spend so many federal elections in the Conservative Party war room, pumping out attack after counter-attack against the Liberals, NDP or any other would-be threat to his own faction.

    And while Kenney pitched it as a $30-million-a-year operation that would outduel the climate-activist PR machine, it instead became notorious for an  abortive social-media tirade against the New York Times and going after a Netflix cartoon film for its anti-development themes.

    Kenney and even some allies within the energy sector believed this provincially run — albeit arms’ length — organization could succeed where the industry’s own advocacy groups had struggled to spread a good-news gospel about Alberta oil.

    Smith quietly made the change this week, pulling a few staff from the stand-alone Energy Centre into the provincial government’s intergovernmental relations division, which falls directly under the premier’s own supervision.


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