KENNEY IN NO RUSH TO WIN A SEAT AS A CONSERVATIVE MLA

Provincial leadership hopeful says his efforts are on uniting party with Wildrose

The Alberta legislature opens Thursday, but Jason Kenney has no interest in joining the club anytime soon.

The candidate for leadership of the Progressive Conservatives says if he wins on March 18, he won’t seek a riding for a byelection, at least not right away.

“No, I won’t,” he said in an interview. “I’m in no rush to get into the legislature.

“There’s no constituency that’s available to me now or in the foreseeable future. I see 2017 as a year of hard, grassroots political work, and a year of change and transition.

“So my emphasis would be on building the united party. We have a competent team in the legislature that would hold the NDP to account.”

Forging some kind of union with Wildrose could take many months. It’s possible Kenney would be a PC leader who never seeks legislature office as a PC. He could eventually end up running as the new leader (he hopes) of a renamed and united conservative party.

This is all premature, of course. The leadership vote is still more than two weeks away.

There’s fierce resistance to Kenney’s candidacy from many people on the party board, and a good number of PCs who support either Richard Starke or Byron Nelson. Both are credible candidates who want to reinvigorate the old party, not abolish it.

We should also remember that surprises do happen on the floor of leadership conventions — Pierre Trudeau’s Liberal leadership victory in 1968, for instance, or Alison Redford’s PC win in 2011. The final moments can be very unpredictable.

But Kenney has the edge in the retro format chosen by the party — a vote by convention delegates chosen from each riding, rather than direct voting by all party members.

The PCs chose this method last May 7 as a way to re-engage local party members. It was last used in 1985, when Don Getty replaced the retiring Peter Lougheed. After the 2015 thumping by the NDP, there was a lot of nostalgia in the tattered party for those lost days of total PC dominance.

But the traditional party activists didn’t count on the arrival of Kenney, with his deep federal experience and network of contacts, including the backing of exprime minister Stephen Harper.

From the start, Kenney was the only candidate with the organization and fundraising potential to fight in every one of the 87 provincial constituencies.

Two progressive hopefuls — Stephen Kahn and Sandra Jansen — dropped out. Jansen alleged harassment by Kenney’s supporters. She soon joined Premier Rachel Notley’s NDP caucus.

In these closing days, the competition has become a bitter battle between the remaining progressives and the man they call a radical wrecker.

Kenney rejects the whole premise that he’s an alien takeover artist.

“Some of these folks have very selective memories,” he says. “They seem to have redefined in retrospect the nature of the Progressive Conservative coalition that existed for four decades.

“It was a big tent coalition that included urban, self-styled progressives and conservatives of all hues and colours, and rural populists. It split in half 10 years ago. All I’m proposing is that we reconstitute that coalition.”

Kenney vows, as he has before, that he won’t legislate on contentious social issues. He has always been pro-life, he says, but he promises not to take any action that would affect access to abortion.

After we talked, I told a woman who is a longtime party loyalist I’d spent an hour with Kenney.

She said, “Oh, you mean the guy who wants to take away the party I worked for all those years, the guy who wants to destroy it and turn it over to those creeps in Wildrose? You mean that guy?”

And that’s the way it is, as the old party nears its decision day.

There’s no constituency that’s available to me now or in the foreseeable future. I see 2017 as a year of hard, grassroots political work, and a year of change and transition. So my emphasis would be on building the united party. Jason Kenney