Jason Kenney will need to work his magic to unite Alberta Tories

[MP Jason Kenney announces he will be seeking the leadership of Alberta’s Progressive Conservative party in Calgary on Wednesday. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntosh]

Jason Kenney wants to unite the Alberta right.

It will be a tough, possibly even ugly, uphill battle. That is probably considered a pro, not a con, to one of Ottawa’s hardest working MPs.

After all, it was Kenney who was handed the impossible task of ingratiating Stephen Harper’s federal Conservatives to Canada’s immigrant and ethnic communities a decade ago.

And it was Kenney who pulled off the impossible with aplomb, boosting support among the very communities that seemed anathema to the party’s core supporters.

“Basically, I have been on a three year listening tour with cultural communities since January 2006,” Kenney, the then-minister of multiculturalism told Canadian Newcomer Magazine in 2009.

“And not only inviting people, but also attending events — hundreds and hundreds of events, like summer picnics or religious festivals — developing relationships. Now I can pick up the phone and talk, on a first name basis, with key opinion leaders and virtually all of the major culture communities in Canada. That network helps me to know what people are thinking, what their priorities are.”

As immigration minister from 2008 to 2013, Kenney simultaneously wooed immigrant supporters while tightening immigration policies.

He cut health benefits to refugees and reformed the immigration system to encourage economically advantageous newcomers.

That a Federal Court ultimately struck down the cuts as “cruel and unusual” only seemed to burnish Kenney’s Conservative star.

First elected to Parliament in 1997 in what is now Calgary Midnapore under the Reform banner, a fresh-faced 29-year-old who’d made a name for himself as the head of the Alberta chapter of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

In Opposition, he honed a reputation as one of the Tories most effective and informed attack dogs, and when the Conservatives won a minority government in 2006, Kenney was named Harper’s parliamentary secretary.

Kenney’s rise in the Conservative ranks was swift.

Less than a year after entering the House of Commons in February 2006, he was secretary of state for multiculturalism and by October 2008 he entered cabinet as minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism.

For five years he remained at the Immigration helm, introducing sweeping reforms. Under his guidance, immigration processing was expedited, with countries designated safe in order to reduce what Kenney described as “bogus claims.”

He fast-tracked highly skilled and employable immigrants and put a focus on language proficiency and cultural integration. The number of refugee claims decreased while the number of landed immigrants increased.

In 2013, he took on a two-year stint as minister of both Multiculturalism and Employment and Social Development.

His final months of a Conservative government were spent as minister of National Defence.

Wherever he hung his hat, Kenney made an impression.

In 2009, he was voted Best Overall Parliamentarian in a Maclean’s magazine poll of MPs. In 2011 and again in 2014, he was voted Hardest Working. In 2013, it was Most Knowledgeable.

Born in Oakville, Ont, in 1968, to Lynne and Robert Martin Kenney, he and his two older brothers moved at a young age to Winnipeg, then to tiny Wilcox, Sask., where his former air force pilot father became headmaster of the private Catholic boarding school Athol Murray College of Notre Dame.

It was in school that politics became Kenney’s chosen sport.

“When an election happened and all the other kids wanted to play baseball, I was trying to organize mock elections on the school yard,” he told Canadian Newcomer Magazine.

After graduating from Notre Dame, Kenney went on to study philosophy at the Jesuit-founded University of San Francisco.

While he left around 1990 without a degree, Kenney left an impression behind.

He was an outspoken supporter of renewing the religious dogma of the Jesuit founders of the school and became involved in anti-abortion activities, according to a lengthy profile in The Walrus magazine.

Back in Canada, Kenney was recruited to helm the Alberta branch of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

He spurred efforts to recruit him to the Reform Party fold until the 1997 election.

Reform leader Preston Manning appointed Kenney to his United Alternative effort that resulted in the Canadian Alliance, which ultimately merged with the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada under Peter MacKay to unite the right federally.

The French-language magazine L’actualité once described Kenney as a “minister on a mission, practically a missionary,” to whom Harper owed his 2011 majority.

He is religious and anti-abortion, but Kenney told the magazine “it’s not the reason for my involvement in politics.”

That interest lies in the competitive aspect of politics, he told Canadian Newcomer.

“What I love about politics as a vocation is that it is something that ultimately really matters. You are making decisions that affect people’s life – hopefully for the better.”