Jason Kenney has urgent business to conduct with Shirley Bond but he came to Prince George on a week when she's rather busy in Victoria.
Kenney, the federal jobs minister, and Bond, the provincial jobs minister, need to sort out how to make the Canada Job Grant program work in B.C. Currently, none of the provinces are happy with what the feds are proposing. There have been months of negotiations between Kenney and his provincial colleagues but federal finance minister Jim Flaherty added some urgency to the proceedings last week. During his budget presentation , Flaherty said if the provinces aren't on board by April 1, the federal government will do their own thing on the job creation front and not partner with the provinces.
So Kenney rather quietly came to Prince George Monday, after a stop in Terrace to announce some federal funding for aboriginal skills training and a visit to Kitimat to see the site of a proposed LNG port facility. The minister met with the mayor and then went out for dinner with some local Conservatives.
On Tuesday, he spent the afternoon at the Immigration and Multicultural Services Society, as well as the Welcome PG advisory committee, talking about multiculturalism, which is part of his current portfolio, and immigration, the minister job he previously held for five years. As IMSS executive director Baljit Sethi told The Citizen, the meeting was initiated by Kenney, not the other way around.
Meanwhile, Bond was in Victoria, as the B.C. Liberals unveiled their budget Tuesday afternoon.
No doubt, Kenney was in northern B.C. as part of the selling job cabinet ministers do after budgets, both at the provincial and federal level. They fan out across the land to sell aspects of the budget to regions that stand to gain from aspects of the budget.
There's still time for Bond and Kenney to get together, of course, but it just seems a little odd that Kenney would come to Bond's backyard at the most unavailable date on her calendar this year.
Odd but opportunistic.
He's sending a clear signal to Bond that Flaherty wasn't fooling around. This flies in sharp contrast to the Ottawa pundits who thought that Kenney and Flaherty weren't on the same page and their differing approaches on this issue showed a split within the Conservative caucus. Clearly, they're working together, with Kenney backing up the message with dollars in Terrace that The Canada Jobs Grant program is leaving the station and it's up to Bond to make sure B.C. gets on board.
Bond is facing a formidable political player in Kenney, 45, who has been a sitting MP from Oakville since he was 29. He is a major reason why Stephen Harper and the federal Conservatives enjoy a majority government in Ottawa. Kenney saw what was happening in Oakville and across suburban Toronto with their surging communities of immigrants and new Canadians. Historically, those communities voted Liberal but Kenney recognized that they were actually small-c conservatives, with their new-found patriotism combined with their beliefs brought from home in hard work, fiscal responsibility and traditional social values. He made it his mission to convert them to upper-case Conservatives and that mission was accomplished in the 2011 election.
Kenney's work may be what ultimately sinks the federal Liberals for good. In Justin Trudeau, the federal Liberals turned back to the past, to a time when Ontario and Quebec, English and French, defined the nation. To a large degree, immigrants and first-generation Canadians are reflect Canada in the 21st century - more cosmopolitan, more entrepreneurial, more individualistic and more Western Canada in their politics. They don't recognize, never mind respect, the grand vision of Canada, with bilingual Ottawa at its glorious centre, once preached by Lester Pearson, Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chretien.
Fortunately, Bond shares Kenney's politics to a large degree, despite the misleading name of her party. In each other, they no doubt recognize astute politicians who produce results.
Now, if we could just get them in the same room in the same city real soon...
