Alberta Party faces uphill battle to avoid becoming simply a historical footnote
What happened to the Alberta Party?
That was the opening line to a story I wrote back in 2011 about the province’s fledgling political movement that was promising to offer a different style of leadership.
At the time, there had been a significant amount of early buzz around the group.
The party had chosen its first full-time leader — Hinton Mayor Glenn Taylor — held an enthusiastic convention, and was attracting a handful of credible candidates.
Then the momentum waned. Fundraising faltered. Attention disappeared.
The party ran candidates in less than half the ridings in the 2012 election and was shut out, attracting just 1.3 per cent of the overall vote.
Fast-forward seven years and the Alberta Party is again something of a movement reborn, with a new leader, new candidates and renewed promises of a fresh approach.
It’s also a movement still trying to climb its way out of political obscurity, hovering at between seven per cent and nine per cent support in the polls.
“I think the issue isn’t as much about people don’t like us or don’t want us,” leader Stephen Mandel told me this week during a taping of the Press Gallery podcast.
“They don’t know us.”
For Mandel, seven per cent is something of a lucky starting point.
Back in 2004, that was his level of support when he joined the Edmonton mayoral race against a pair of more established candidates — a race he ended up winning comfortably.
Mandel, now 73, would obviously love for that history to repeat itself, but an awful lot of things are going to have to go right for his party in the coming months.
To get the momentum going, party members are set to gather in Edmonton this weekend to approve policies they hope will strike a chord with middleground Albertans.
Resolutions on the economy and financial management are featured among the highest priority items on the agenda.
Included are policies to put more resource revenue into savings, remove red tape for businesses and create a “balanced and sustainable” tax model, though no details are offered on what that model might look like.
Other resolutions call for reducing funding to some private schools, implementing a poverty and homelessness elimination strategy, and creating an income top-up for the working poor.
The focus on the province’s finances is telling, though the Alberta Party will also need to improve its own financial picture. Elections Alberta disclosures show the party raised $236,000 through the first nine months of the year, enough to buy a decent condo in downtown Edmonton but not sufficient to run a provincewide campaign.
Party executives say donations are actually higher than reported but haven’t been publicized yet due to a “processing delay” with a new data system.
Another priority for a party short on exposure is to quickly finalize a slate of 87 candidates, giving them as much time as possible to build a presence in their respective ridings.
On this score, the party seems to have made progress.
About 40 candidates are now in place and the list includes at least 14 women and a significant number of people from minority communities — meeting the party’s stated goal of having nominees that better reflect the demographic makeup of Alberta.
Still, while not the list of usual suspects, the majority of those candidates are political rookies who likely can’t count on the same kind of campaign machine the two leading parties will deploy.
They will face an uphill battle for attention.
Then there is Mandel, who is both an asset and a risk.
I think the issue isn’t as much about people don’t like us or don’t want us. They don’t know us.
He has the ability to attract donors and candidates, can draw on a strong track record from his time as mayor, and enjoys good name recognition — at least in the Edmonton area.
But Mandel has always seemed an ill fit for partisan politics, where the loudest leaders often get the most attention.
Simple optics also suggest he may not be the right face for a party keen to sell itself as fresh.
Ultimately, his biggest liability may be fighting off perceptions that the Alberta Party is a reboot of the old Progressive Conservative brand. Mandel bristles at that suggestion, insisting the party is far more diverse.
“We are a home for a variety of people who want to see good government, but government that also understands the importance of fiscal responsibility (while) being socially progressive,” he said.
More than anything else, his party’s chances may depend on his ability to prove that to Albertans.
Six months from now, political scribes may again be asking, what happened to the Alberta Party?
Supporters can only hope the context is much different this time, coming on the heels of a move from political obscurity to election breakthrough.