Stoking the fires in Tory heartland
ALBERTA’S UCP LEADERSHIP RACE WILL CHART A COURSE FOR CONSERVATIVES ACROSS CANADA
Whatever the outcome of the new United Conservative Party’s leadership vote this weekend, one thing has become abundantly clear: Alberta is angry.
Why? Ask Brian Jean, former leader of the Wildrose Party, which launched 15 years ago as the conservative alternative to the province’s dynastic Progressive Conservatives and eventually hoovered up enough of their supporters to split the province’s conservative vote, begetting the province’s current NDP government and the merger that created, finally, the UCP.
According to Jean, now a candidate for the new party’s leadership, other Canadian provinces have declared “war” on Alberta. How else to explain the gleeful boasting of Montreal mayor Denis Coderre over the announcement earlier this month that TransCanada was dropping its plans for Energy East, a pipeline that would have taken Alberta crude from Hardisty to the Atlantic?
In his statement responding to the news, Jean hinted darkly that the pipeline proposal’s failure portends a threat to national unity. Jean’s chief leadership rival, former federal Cabinet minister and (briefly) Alberta PC leader Jason Kenney, is no more measured: “What I found outrageous is that many of the same politicians (who) benefit massively from equalization payments generated by Alberta’s energy sector, they seem willing to take our money but not buy our oil.”
By all accounts, the UCP membership — more than 87,000 Albertans, whose choice to lead the fight against Rachel Notley’s NDP will be announced Saturday — is lapping up this kind of rhetoric.
Alberta is Canadian conservatism’s hearth and home. But a stunning protest vote in 2015 stripped the province’s conservatives of the generational power they had long taken for granted, that and the sudden economic reversal resulting from a decline in commodity prices have bruised their egos. Meanwhile, another Trudeau is in Ottawa, and natural resource projects that require the cooperation of other provinces or the feds are faltering. So this leadership race — and the fight that will come after it — is personal and heated: Success here must spread.
Because it is from Alberta that conservatives across Canada so often take their cues, the issues being debated in this leadership race — resources, taxes, equalization and the very nature of Confederation itself — will influence those that right-wing politicians across the country choose to champion. And the three men now running to lead the United Conservative Party — Jean, Kenney and Doug Schweitzer — represent three very different shades of Conservative blue. But whichever candidate wins on Saturday, the recent relative politeness of the Canadian polity is facing its end. The emergence of the UCP will mark the beginning of a much more combative tack in conservative politics.
Kenney, 49, got involved in politics more than 25 years ago when as a member of the Alberta Taxpayers Federation he started hectoring the late Alberta premier Ralph Klein. He entered federal politics with the Reform Party and went on to become one of the stars of Stephen Harper’s Cabinet, particularly expanding the party’s base among culturally right-leaning immigrant communities.
He was also a notably prolife Conservative activist who took a hard line against gay marriage when the issue was au courant in 2005, although he now tends to stick to the economy and interprovincial relations.
Kenney, then, represents a continuation of the Harper school of politics; nodding subtly toward divisive social issues — so as not to alienate a still-powerful faction within Conservative circles — but being aggressive on breadand-butter matters like government spending, job creation, regulation and recall legislation, for example.
Jean, 54, contrasts with Kenney the career Ottawa politician; though he, too, worked in the capital under Harper, Jean plays the plainspoken rural populist who highlights his experience as a local businessman and lawyer.
He took over as leader of the Wildrose Party after a disastrous attempt to merge with the ruling Progressive Conservatives by mass floorcrossing ended in bitterness, recrimination and several ruined political careers.
At the time, facing a snap election and absent a leader, many predicted Wildrose was a doomed outfit. Jean, himself recovering from the death of his 24-year-old son, took over the party and managed to increase its seat count in the face of the wave that swept the NDP to power.
“I’ve been underestimated my entire life. But look at my resume, I’m used to being underestimated but that’s not a bad position to be in. I don’t mind that,” Jean told the National Post in a phone interview during the campaign.
“The more people know me and watch me and see that they can trust me because I care and I will use every skill set and hour, awake time and sleep time, to think about how I can make the province better for Albertans.”
Lastly, there is Doug Schweitzer. A 38-year-old Calgary-based corporate lawyer, Schweitzer has been at home in political backrooms since his university days; although his economic positions remain in line with conservative norms, Schweitzer wants the new United Conservative Party to make a clear break from the socially conservative dogmas that limited Wildrose’s success in previous elections.
“For me, those issues are done. They’re dealt with,” Schweitzer told the Post earlier this month at a Starbucks in one of Calgary’s gentrified neighbourhoods. “The biggest challenge and risk the UCP has is brand. If you go and talk to young Albertans — whether it’s fair or not — they’re worried about being involved because there is a perception that Conservatives are homophobic.”
Schweitzer notes that Alberta is a young, forward thinking province; he hopes to recruit a diverse slate of candidates who are strong on fiscal issues and restoring the province’s economic advantage.
“I think we can keep the coalition together if we focus on the economy and provide a real contrast to the NDP. But I think that’s the mix we need to win.”
Indeed, among the things for which the NDP has lambasted Kenney is his position on Gay-Straight Alliances in Alberta’s schools (he believes parents should be notified if their children join).
While most positions Kenney and Jean have occupied on the campaign trail have mirrored one another — Jean notes that his rival’s more popular stances on the federal equalization program, for example, are identical to proposals he put forward years ago — Kenney began his bid for the UCP leadership with a kind of anti-policy platform. The party is set to elect a leader; the thinking was the grassroots could decide on policy platform through coming conventions.
“I am not seeking to impose my views as a mandate on the party,” Kenney told the Post earlier this month during a sit-down at a restaurant near his Calgary campaign office. “This is not a dodge for me on policy issues. Anyone who knows my record knows I am outspoken and clear on contentious positions ... I have been clear on every conceivable issue.”
Now that the province’s conservative parties are united, he adds, the NDP knows it has a slim chance of re-election and is so is trying to use Kenney’s previous clarity on those contentious issues to derail the new party. They have cast him as “not just extreme, but super extreme,” he said. “This is descending into junior highschool levels of rhetoric. The higher they turn their volume on the attack rhetoric, the less persuasive it becomes.”
The potential UCP leaders each promise to restore a competitive, low-tax regime while railing against the province’s high per-capita spending. All three rail against the very notion of a carbon tax; all propose some form of spending constraint and tax relief. All would continue to defend the provinces’ right to control natural resources. And all, eliding over the role bountiful resource royalties have played in the past in filling the gap between the province’s high spending and low taxes, suggest that good old-fashioned spending cuts are due. (The specific cuts proposed, however, all seem incremental and bolstered by attrition. No one is promising to blow up a hospital or, more brazenly, consider a consumption tax.)
Another thing the UCP candidates have in common is their comfort threatening — and, it’s easy to imagine, actually using — process against their provincial and federal opponents. They float the idea, for example, of filing a lawsuit against any broad-based federal carbon tax. They raise the possibility of cancelling permits for pipelines, which would stop the flow of oil west or east from Alberta, as Peter Lougheed did in response to the elder Trudeau’s National Energy Program. Schweitzer has openly called for a trade war with B.C., proposing to kick the province out of the New West Partnership Trade Agreement with Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Both Kenney and Jean have promised to use the Supreme Court Quebec reference to launch a referendum in Alberta on equalization. At the very least, they want to amend the equalization formula to discount resource royalties as a factor in the calculation (although doing so won’t help Alberta’s own fiscal situation.) The time Jean and especially Kenney served in Ottawa have given them an in-depth knowledge of how Confederation works, and how they might best gum up its works in service of their province and their principles.
It is equalization, through which the federal government absorbs and redistributes the income taxes skimmed from Alberta’s high wages and redistributes them to “have-not” provinces, that again seems to be the subject of the most spittle-flecked kitchen table conversations in the province’s conservative households. And it’s the moon shot antiequalization ideas that got the crowds braying loudest at the leadership debates. But the province’s anger is broad and its subjects are many, and each of the three is happy to channel it.
These threats might not do Alberta any material good, but cutting permits and watching Justin Trudeau dragged into a meeting room to discuss equalization in good faith would make for some grimly satisfying political theatre at home.
With the polls suggesting Notley’s New Democrats will be hard pressed to hold onto government in the next election, which will take place by the end of May 2019 — months before the likely next federal election — this weekend’s vote will anoint her heir apparent. Even before the province goes to the polls again, their presence at the head of the UCP will challenge her to push harder against the provincial and federal counterparts with whom she’s tried so far to collaborate. And if they’re successful, Conservatives around the country will take note.
Whatever the outcome, whichever of the three wins, Saturday’s result will mark a change for an Alberta — and a conservative movement — that has tried to play nice.
WHAT I FOUND OUTRAGEOUS IS THAT MANY OF THE SAME POLITICIANS (WHO) BENEFIT MASSIVELY FROM EQUALIZATION PAYMENTS GENERATED BY ALBERTA’S ENERGY SECTOR, THEY SEEM WILLING TO TAKE OUR MONEY BUT NOT BUY OUR OIL. — JASON KENNEY
DESCENDING INTO JUNIOR-HIGH LEVELS OF RHETORIC.