PC RACE GOES FROM GOOFY TO FARCICAL
Latest attempt to chase Kenney from contest would create spectacular mess
The Progressive Conservative leadership saga slides further down the slope from drama to farce. A party that ruled Alberta for 43 years now faces the end of days — unless Jason Kenney can some way, somehow, be kicked out of the contest.
And so, there’s a second formal challenge to Kenney’s candidacy within a week.
The party’s Calgary vicepresident, Darcy Schumann, has invoked his right as a board member to call a full meeting for Feb. 24 on a constitutional question: Is Kenney’s goal of ending the party’s existence, so it can merge with Wildrose, a threat to the party “brand”?
Well, damn, of course it is. This leadership campaign is the most logically absurd in provincial history.
The contradiction has always been obvious, even to Kenney. But the PC party, knowing his goals, decided last year that his bid is legitimate.
The leadership election committee agreed again this past Sunday, in a 9-0 ruling against an earlier complaint from lawyer Jeff Rath.
Rath sent a second angry letter (the Wrath of Rath, some call it) complaining of “abusive telephone calls and emails from Mr. Kenney’s supporters.” He suggested that the four PC MLAs who endorse Kenney are themselves defying the constitution.
In the new complaint, Schumann says the committee failed to consider the larger issue of damage to the party.
But Janice Harrington, a committee member, says that question was discussed and dismissed on Sunday. The new challenge “isn’t logical,” she adds. (Why would it be, when nothing else is?)
The party has always ruled, up to and including last Sunday, that members will decide the PC future, or the lack of it, in the March 18 leadership vote.
Many already have decided. That’s the reason for the increasing desperation. Last summer’s delusion — that party progressives would fight off the Kenney challenge — has long since shattered.
Kenney has been scooping up delegates at riding meetings around the province. Even Stephen Lougheed, son of the late premier, couldn’t win a voting delegate spot in Calgary-Elbow, an area teeming with old-school Progressive Conservatives.
There is a possibility, remote but real, that the full party board could vote Kenney out on Feb. 24.
His campaigners have created a lot of anger. They play hard, scrap for every delegate, sometimes treating party progressives with venom usually reserved for New Democrats.
The party policy conference in Red Deer last November, with its explosive allegations of harassment, didn’t exactly increase the love.
Kenney’s campaign buses in supporters, buys pizza, stacks meetings, wedges loyalists into PC youth groups to campus clubs. The party fined Kenney’s campaign $5,000 for setting up a hospitality suite close to a delegate selection meeting in Edmonton.
His campaigners are never apologetic. “It’s just how we do this stuff — you know that,” says one veteran.
Anger over all this is one impulse behind the late-campaign moves against Kenney. And yet, dumping him now would create a spectacular mess.
The Feb. 24 meeting would come just as delegate selection meetings are ending. Most delegates, nearly everyone agrees, support Kenney. If he’s gone, would those people suddenly support Richard Starke, or Byron Nelson?
Not likely. They’re far more likely to go to the convention and raise absolute hell. The default winner would have little legitimacy or credibility.
Then there’s money. Fifteen per cent of all funds raised by the leadership campaigns goes to the cash-strapped party.
Kenney’s team says it has raised $679,000 in the last quarter of calendar 2016. The party got $101,000 of that.
If Kenney is ejected, does he get it back? The PCs should hope not, because they’d need a bucket of cash to fight the inevitable lawsuit.
Some from the progressive wing of the party are already looking past March 18, to the proposed race for leadership of a united conservative party.
They’ll get their own horse in that one — a progressive who could snatch the movement back from Jason Kenney. This may never end.