Jason Thomas Kenney PC ECA (born May 30, 1968) is a former Canadian politician who served as the 18th premier of Alberta from 2019 until 2022, and the leader of the United Conservative Party (UCP) from 2017 until 2022.

[7] Kenney attended the Athol Murray College of Notre Dame in Wilcox, Saskatchewan, a private Catholic high school of which his father was president.

He was a member of a group of Reform Party MPs that were known as the Snack Pack due to their habit of eating greasy food and ridiculing the ruling Liberals.

[20] In early 2008, Kenney posted an announcement on his website, declaring that the Canadian government recognized the flag of the Republic of Vietnam as the symbol of the Vietnamese-Canadian community.

[25] In 2013, Kenney said in his remarks on the end of the CHRP program that the government was "committed to recognizing and educating Canadians about the experiences of those pioneers who overcame such heavy burdens.

He later added in a letter to the Toronto Star that, "While I disagree with the nature of KAIROS's militant stance toward the Jewish homeland, that is not the reason their request for taxpayer funding was denied.

[38] In January 2009, Kenney made public statements critical of U.S. soldiers seeking asylum in Canada who were facing punishment for their refusal to participate in the Iraq War.

Unlike in the Vietnam era, Kenney said, the current asylum seekers were neither "draft dodgers" nor "resisters", but rather "people who volunteer to serve in the armed forces of a democratic country and simply change their mind to desert.

"Military deserters from the United States are not genuine refugees under the internationally accepted meaning of the term," said Alexis Pavlich, the minister's press secretary.

[44] As part of Kenney's Faster Removal of Foreign Criminals Act, introduced in June 2012, the Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism would have the ability to deny entry to Canada based on "public policy considerations."

The previous year, both the official opposition New Democratic Party (NDP) and Quebec's National Assembly had asked Kenney to exercise negative discretion, but no such ability existed under Canadian law.

[46] Earlier, in March 2009, the CBSA prevented British politician George Galloway from entering Canada, where he had planned to give a series of speeches against the War in Afghanistan.

The Federal Court found that Kenney's office had used "a flawed and overreaching interpretation of the standards under Canadian law for labeling someone as engaging in terrorism or being a member of a terrorist organization."

One of the changes instituted by the Government of Canada is the "first generation limitation", considered a punitive measure by some against naturalized citizens who reside abroad for lengthy periods of time.

[76] Later that month, Kenney defended the Canadian airstrike campaign against ISIS being extended into Syria, claiming that, among the coalition air forces, only Canada and the United States had aircraft capable of using precision guided munitions.

The soldiers, who arrived in September 2015, were from 2 Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group (2 CMBG) and were stationed in at the Ukrainian Armed Forces International Peacekeeping and Security Centre near the Polish–Ukrainian border at Yavoriv.

[81] Although the Conservatives were defeated at the 2015 federal election, Kenney was reelected in Calgary Midnapore, essentially a reconfigured version of his old riding, where he was named to the Special Committee on Electoral Reform.

[103] A leaked document alleged that Jason Kenney's team first approached Derek Fildebrandt in July 2017 about running a "dark-horse" campaign, but ultimately decided against working with him.

[104] An emergency injunction was sought to halt the probe into the financing of Callaway's UCP leadership campaign for the duration of the 2019 Alberta general election, but was denied by Court of Queen's Bench Justice Anne Kirker, who ruled it was in the public interest for the investigation to continue.

CBC noted that it is not clear how widespread the voting fraud is outside of their selected sample of suspicious domains, and it is also possible that common e-mail providers such as Gmail or Hotmail were used with fraudulent addresses.

[113] They announced their first provincial budget on October 24, 2019, which fulfilled their "promise of slight austerity" with "cuts to spending programs and the elimination of hundreds of bureaucracy jobs", according to The National Post.

[117] On April 7, 2021, 15 UCP MLAs, including former Minister of Municipal Affairs Tracy Allard and Speaker Nathan Cooper, signed a letter criticizing the Government's public health orders.

[120] During a three-hour caucus meeting following the release of the letter, Kenney reportedly threatened to ask the lieutenant governor to dissolve the legislature and call a snap election if dissidents did not support the government.

[124][125] On September 22, 2021, MLA RJ Sigurdson presented a motion of no-confidence at a UCP caucus meeting, after the government introduced new public health restrictions, including a vaccine passport, following a fourth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Alberta.

He then announced on the same evening his intention to resign as premier of Alberta and leader of the UCP, citing the clearly divisive nature of his leadership and a need for party unity.

[135] In 2018, a bill to create "no-protest zones" around abortion clinics was introduced to the Alberta legislature, following similar legislation in Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia, and Newfoundland and Labrador.

[136] Kenney voted against same-sex marriage as an MP, saying, "A majority of Canadians support the provision of benefits on grounds such as domestic partnership relationships, which are grounded on unions of economic dependency rather than relationships of a mere conjugal nature, and yet still two-thirds of Canadians, from every culture that exists in this country, from every corner of the globe who have come to this country to build a future for themselves and their families, recognize that marriage is, as the Supreme Court said the last time it spoke to this issue in the Egan case in 1995, 'by nature a heterosexual institution'.

Kenney addressed the audio clip by stating that he regrets the comments he made and that, since then, his record shows he supports domestic partner arrangements and benefits for couples regardless of sexual orientation.

"[24][148] According to The Globe and Mail, the Chinese–Canadian community nicknamed Kenney the "Smiling Buddha" in reference to his efforts to garner ethnic votes on the basis of what some perceive as commonly held conservative values.

[159] Also in 2014, Kenney was awarded the inaugural Benjamin Disraeli Prize by Policy Exchange, a centre-right UK think tank, in recognition of the successful outreach to Canada's ethnic and cultural communities.