Jason Kenney's approval rating plummets in the wake of Alberta budget cuts
Kenney is now the third-least popular premier among the provinces included in the poll, a startling drop from September when he was third from the top

STUART THOMSON
Updated: December 12, 2019

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Alberta Premier Jason Kenney is feeling the political effects of budget cuts his government announced in October, with his approval rating plummeting 15 percentage points in a matter of months.

Kenney is now the third-least popular premier among the provinces included in the poll conducted by DART and Maru/Blue Voice Canada and provided exclusively to Postmedia. That’s a startling drop from September when Kenney was third from the top, behind Quebec Premier François Legault and Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe.

The slide in approval comes in the wake of a United Conservative government budget that plans to bring expenditures $1.3 billion below last year’s spending levels. Over the next four years, the government expects to cut $4 billion worth of provincial spending.

Kenney took a number of measures to buffer himself against political blowback, including forming an independent panel to analyze the province’s fiscal situation and giving a primetime address to Albertans on the night before the budget was unveiled.

The province has also suffered job losses in recent months, shedding 18,000 jobs in November and posting an unemployment rate of 20 per cent among young men.

Kenney and his “team Alberta” of eight minister and 11 deputy ministers returned Wednesday to Alberta after a trip to Ottawa to lobby for a long list of issues concerning the province. Kenney met with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Tuesday, asking for a boost to provincial transfer payments and a projected date of completion for the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, among other things.

The UCP leader may also be suffering from the political fallout of the decision to fire the election commissioner, a move that led to Alberta NDP leader Rachel Notley making an extraordinary call to the Lieutenant-Governor to block the legislation.

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Notley accused Kenney’s government of “breaking the rule of law” by firing the commissioner, who had issued more than $200,000 in fines relating to the UCP leadership race in 2017. In question period last month, Kenney said Notley is simply upset that her party lost the spring election which handed the UCP government a majority.

The poll shows Legault is still the most popular provincial leader in the country with an approval rating of 60 per cent and Moe is in second place with a 56 per cent approval rating.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford is in last place with 28 per cent approval, although that’s two percentage points higher than his approval rating in September.

The poll was conducted among a randomly selected panel of 5,035 Canadians who have signed up to receive polling surveys and is accurate to within 1.6 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

Prince Edward Island, Nunavut and both the Yukon and Northwest Territories were excluded from the survey due to extremely small sample sizes.