The War On Boycotts

Jason Kenney is borrowing from Israel’s anti-BDS playbook to take down environmentalists who threaten Alberta’s oil industry.

- Michael Bueckert

“ Alberta will no longer be a soft target,” declared Jason Kenney. “We will fight back for our economic survival.”

Kenney, the leader of Alberta’s right-wing United Conservative Party (UCP), was giving a keynote address at the party’s founding annual general meeting in May 2018. In his provocative speech, which he expanded on during an October 2018 conference hosted by New West Public Affairs, Kenney detailed his plans to go after the so-called “green left” – environmentalists – using “every tool available.” Painting a picture of an Alberta energy sector under siege by anti-tarsands campaigners, Kenney explained that Alberta must aggressively defend the tarsands from its critics – by cracking down on dissenting views.

Alberta’s current NDP government is already spending millions on a propaganda campaign to pump up Alberta’s oil industry, but unlike the NDP, Kenney has made environmental activists and organizations his explicit target. If his party is elected in 2019, he could put these plans in motion.

Kenney’s “fight-back strategy” against what he called a “foreign-funded campaign of defamation to land lock Canada’s oil” is not unique. Many of its elements – a “war room” to monitor online activity, targeting the charitable status of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), using the courts against critics – have already been field tested by the Israeli state and its supporters as part of their own anti-boycott initiatives.