In 2015, the Wildrose Party was outraged the NDP didn’t meet the late U.S. Senator at the airport with a brass band and a bouquet of roses

Lest we forget, fellow Canadians, the late Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, was so unnerved by Donald Trump that in 2016 he admitted he almost wanted to move to Canada!

It must be acknowledged that Sen. Graham, who died suddenly on Saturday after returning from a visit to Ukraine, said he was equally unnerved by Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton in early September 2016, as that year’s U.S. presidential election neared. 

“Trump unnerves me to my core, and Hillary Clinton’s performance last night was equally unnerving,” Sen. Graham told the New York Daily News the day after a presidential candidates’ debate. “It makes me want to move to Canada.”

This was after Sen. Graham had given up on his own presidential ambitions at the end of 2015, but obviously still before his experience on the metaphorical Road to Damascus when he realized that Donald Trump was “not far behind God,” or at least the key to his own political survival. As for the literal road to Damascus, Sen. Graham recommended bombing it. 

No doubt Sen. Graham’s acknowledgement of Canada as a sane safe haven was spoken rhetorically. Nevertheless, it is said here that we have former Alberta NDP environment minister Shannon Phillips to thank for his fond impression of Canada. (This is the part of this story that used to known in the newspaper business as “the local angle.”) 

Clearly Sen. Graham was impressed by the very nice reception Ms. Phillips put on for him and a couple of other “lightweight” American politicians, Democrat Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and former Republican South Carolina Representative Tom Rice, in August 2015, four months after the election of the NDP here in Wild Rose Country. (The characterization of Sen. Graham as a lightweight, by the way, was Donald Trump’s, not mine.) 

Alas, that was not the view of the Opposition Wildrose Party, which went absolutely crackers over the fact Ms. Phillips and premier Rachel Notley didn’t show up at the airport with a brass band, a bouquet of red roses, a bottle of Scotch, and a red carpet to greet the South Carolina Senator when he got off his plane for a quickie tour of oilsands operations near Fort Mac.

With a little help of the elves of mainstream media, the precursors to the United Conservative Party managed to gin this up into a huge brouhaha for a few days – now completely forgotten, as these things tend to be, by everyone except me. 

Sen. Graham could become the President of the United States, the furious ’Rosers sputtered, claiming in a news release that they actually published that the newly elected Dippers were “letting Alberta down by almost blowing off top-level delegation.” (Almost blowing off … The Wildrose press release has been lost to history, or at least to the Internet, so I cannot provide a link for readers’ amusement today. This is a pity.)

To be fair to the Wildrose Party, led at the time by Brian Jean, they considered it important enough to get Fort McMurray-Wood Buffalo MLA Tany Yao to offer to drive out to the airport – no mean feat, presumably, since no one has ever accused Mr. Yao of being a real firecracker when it comes to performing his duties as an MLA. 

The tarsands tourism trio were “top level decision makers in Washington and a visit by them is a big deal,” Mr. Yao grumped in the release. “Yesterday, they spent the day with Premier Brad Wall being shown Saskatchewan’s energy innovations, whose government took their visit seriously,” he complained. 

At the time, the NDP was still getting used to being in power and seemed somewhat bemused by this weird Wildrose performance, not having realized it was going to turn out to be standard Wildrose/media operating procedure no matter what they did or said.

The Wildrose Party later alleged that Ms. Phillips only showed up because of their press release, a dubious claim that was nevertheless handled as if it were completely credible by the media. A reporter for The Edmonton Journal, to her credit, tried to contact Sen. Graham for a comment, but her calls were not returned. Apparently it didn’t occur to her to ask Mr. Trump, who had Sen. Graham’s cell phone number and didn’t mind giving it to reporters.

Senator Graham was not a complete stranger to Fort McMurray, having also visited in 2010 and declared  the region’s bitumen mining operations to be “acceptably clean” after a half-day tour.

Sen. Graham will not be remembered for his fear of Mr. Trump, his assessment of Canada, or his visits to Fort McMurray, though. As a wise and anonymous commentator observed on Substack yesterday: “You do not get to schedule your last chapter. It gets scheduled for you, sometimes on a Saturday night with no notice at all, and whatever you were doing when the music stopped, that’s the exhibit.”