Braid: At a hectic moment, Kenney finds time for High Level

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Jason Kenney had barely been sworn in as an MLA on Tuesday (he was already officially premier) before he headed to High Level in a chartered plane for a tour of the fire zone.

Kenney gets his first brush with natural disaster before his government is fully up and running. Let us sincerely hope this one never begins to equal the Fort McMurray disaster of 2016.

Former NDP Premier Rachel Notley was in office for a year before the Fort Mac monster hit. It dominated her schedule for weeks.

Like Notley, Kenney appears to be fully engaged and well-briefed on details of this shockingly intense High Level fire, and the efforts to contain it.

By Tuesday evening, the fire covered 80,000 hectares — far short of the 590,000 hectares consumed by the 2016 fire, but still very alarming for a fire so young. About 5,000 local residents have been evacuated.

Already, the photos and videos shot from vehicles and planes look frighteningly familiar.

Aware of the ominous potential, Kenney got himself airborne in a hurry, while being careful to avoid a premier’s-tour atmosphere that could divert attention and people from firefighting.

“They’re not taking any resources away from troops on the ground or people fighting the fire, so they’re getting a sense of it from the plane,” says his spokeswoman, Christine Myatt.

Kenny was to briefly visit the command centre in High Level. Also tentatively planned was a drive to the perimeter of the fire.

Albertans have come to expect such close personal attention from premiers when natural disaster strikes.

Premiers ignore this golden rule at their peril. Former PC Premier Ed Stelmach came in for intense criticism — and lost regional support for the PCs — when he went on vacation to Portugal in preference to visiting flood-stricken Medicine Hat in 2010.

By contrast, Notley was a model of leadership during the whole time the Fort Mac blaze ran out of control — from the beginning of May 2016 to the first week in July.

Former PC Premier Alison Redford was certainly on the spot during Calgary’s massive 2013 flood. Her own Calgary-Elbow riding was in the impact zone. But the really outstanding local leadership came from Mayor Naheed Nenshi.

After a CP train derailed on a river bridge during the flood and city firefighters responded, Nenshi famously said: “How is it that we don’t have regulatory powers over this, but it’s my guys risking their lives over this?”

Natural disasters unify people in support of the victims, across party lines. Notley allowed then-Wildrose leader Brian Jean, whose own house was destroyed, to stay in Fort McMurray and help, even though residents were supposed to evacuate.

Wednesday afternoon, Kenney will be back in Edmonton for the legislature opening and throne speech.

Bipartisan harmony will vanish in a hurry with introduction of the UCP’s first bill, An Act to Repeal the Carbon Tax.

On Tuesday, the legislature also chose a new speaker, Olds-Didsbury-Three Hills MLA Nathan Cooper, widely respected as the most skilled parliamentarian in the last legislature.

As a UCP partisan who’s now obliged to be fair to both sides, and limit his political contacts, Cooper might soon see the truth in a remark the late Gene Zwozdesky made to me after he’d been speaker for some months.

“This is the loneliest job I’ve ever had,” said the man they called Zwoz, one of the most irrepressibly social people I’ve met in politics.

Jason Kenney’s political universe is still forming day by day, with hundreds of details to attend to. It must have been momentarily tempting to postpone the trip to High Level.

But he got up there and showed those frightened people the province is behind them. That’s the job.

Don Braid’s column appears regularly in the Herald

dbraid@postmedia.com

Twitter: @DonBraid

Facebook: Don Braid Politics