The carbon tax hadn’t even been dead for a week when KenneyMedia tossed its latest, and greatest crumb to its salivating-for-public-service-slashing base.

And is it ever a crumb. Bigger than any crumb you’ve ever seen. Perhaps the biggest crumb ever.

The NDP lied to Albertans, KenneyMedia insists. The deficit is a billion or more higher than the NDP said, KenneyMedia says, quoting Kenney.

But Kenney doesn’t want KenneyMedia to tell Albertans why.

It wouldn’t be KenneyMedia if they did that.

It happened when Albertans wanted to celebrate the removal of the carbon tax but didn’t like the optics because the province was on fire.

It happened when UCP MLAs, and anyone in Edmonton, were choking from the smoke as Bill 1 was signed.

It happened while High Level was evacuated due to wildfires.

You see, Alberta, even though two-thirds of you really, really hated the carbon tax and saw it as a “tax grab”, that money fed government coffers.

At the end of the 2017-2018 year, the carbon tax had provided $1.23 billion dollars in revenue that Alberta wasn’t seeing from the almighty royalties that normally pay our way.

At the end of the 2018-2019 year, it was supposed to provide an additional half billion on top of that: $1.785 billion.

And now that the carbon tax is gone, Kenney has to be the one to tell Albertans that there’s a hole in the budget that’s bigger than the hole that was there before.

And Kenney wants Albertans to think it’s because the NDP lied to them.

Because Kenney always finds someone else to blame.

KenneyMedia laps it up because they’re no longer critical thinkers but birds of a feather, waiting for the next crumb.

As Kenney learned, cutting your revenue will make the hole in your budget bigger; by about a billion and a half dollars.

This post contains fact and an in-your-face-you-lying-pandering-asshats argument.

Deirdre Mitchell-MacLean

contact: [email protected]

Twitter: @Mitchell_AB for all the commentary, @thisweekinAB for posts.