Kevin O'Leary, the guy who got famous playing a successful investor on Dragons Den, was musing aloud on CBC recently about how he might be the right fit for the leadership of the Conservative Party now that Big Steve has been put out to pasture.
The unilingual O'Leary immediately set out to showcase his political acumen by picking a fight with NDP premier of Alberta Rachel Notley. She and her neophyte lefties simply aren't the right people to manage Alberta's resources, he informed us. These are tough times, and tough times demand tax cuts on the oil industry, not tax hikes. She should resign, he said, and if she did, he would personally invest a million dollars to revive Alberta's energy industry.
Notley promptly rejoindered that the last time affluent businessmen fanned the flames of her demise she was elected premier a few days later!
Here's a headline from the Financial Post, five months before Notley was elected; Almost $60 billion in Canadian projects in peril as collapse in oil investment echoes the dark days of 1999.
$60 billion! And O'Leary's gonna turn around the Alberta economy by investing one million on the condition that Notley quits?
What kind of a moron is this guy?
At the time that headline was written, Alberta and its resources had been managed by right-wing parties for 80 years. Notley inherited an empty cupboard, not to mention a depleted sovereign wealth fund and a collapsed global commodities market.
Pinning the current mess on the NDP after eight decades of right-wing mismanagement is certainly a gutsy launch for the political career of Canada's next right-wing leader!
Nothing boosts the popularity of an Alberta premier more than a one-punch knockout of an ill-informed (and bad mannered) Ontario know-it-all. I suspect that Mr. O'Leary is unaware of how regional power struggles play out in the federation.
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