Leaderless Alberta Party proclaims renewal
Annual convention draws 400 delegates with noticeable sprinkling of former Tories
The Alberta Party is under new management.
We just don’t know yet who the new manager is. Or where the party is headed.
We don’t know who the party’s new leader will be and we don’t really know who the new members are.
Oh, there are a lot of new members.
Almost 400 people packed the party’s annual general meeting in Red Deer on the weekend. That’s compared to 59 who turned up last year.
There were new, young faces but many sure looked like old, familiar Progressive Conservative faces.
There were former PC MLAs aplenty, including Doug Griffiths, Stephen Khan and Dave Quest. And all kinds of former PC operatives such as Susan Elliott, Rob Dunseith and Stephen Carter.
These are the “progressive” PCs who have been politically lost since Jason Kenney blew up their home on his way to forming the United Conservative Party.
“They love to step up for Alberta and they want to be involved,” said Katherine O’Neill, a former president of the PCs who is now in the Alberta Party.
“So, they’ve been looking for a political party to call home after the PC party folded down,” she added.
It’s worth noting that O’Neill helped organize a political action committee of former PC members and others, called Alberta Together, that raised money and support as they looked for that “home.”
They found it in the Alberta Party.
Be it ever so humble.
The party might have the coolest name in provincial politics but it has struggled for years to raise money and recruit members.
This weekend could change that, depending on what the new members bring to the table. The former PCs are certainly experienced and smart but their affiliation with a tired old political party that lost the 2015 election has its downside, too.
That’s why they were quick to point to former Liberals and Wildrosers who are now Alberta Party members.
Those include Kerry Cundall, who ran for the Liberal leadership this year. Yes, but she was a long-standing PC member before that.
Others examples are Kerry Towle and Blake Pederson, who were indeed Wildrose MLAs until they crossed the floor in 2014 to join the, um, PCs.
It would be overly simplistic to say the PCs have taken over the Alberta Party and kicked out Greg Clark in a search for a more dynamic leader.
But, boy, that’s sure what it looks like.
Clark resigned suddenly just days before the party’s annual meeting, insisting a leadership race was just what the party needs now to attract attention, money and new members.
He kept to that narrative during his goodbye speech Saturday morning.
“As you can imagine, today is a pretty emotional day for me,” he told the largest gathering of Alberta Party members ever. “A leadership race will bring in new people to the party, it will train them in campaign skills that we need in 2019. We will sell memberships.”
Clark’s abrupt resignation as leader is very odd, especially when Clark said he might enter the race himself.
He insisted he has only “stepped back” from leadership “for now.”
It’s almost as if he wants to enter the race and win it to prove to former-PC naysayers in the party that he is in fact the best person for the job.
Right now there are no leadership candidates but plenty of revolving-door speculation about people who might be in or out.
Those include radio host Ryan Jespersen, who wasn’t at the Red Deer meeting, and Chima Nkemdirim, chief of staff to Mayor Naheed Nenshi of Calgary, who was.
By coincidence, across town several hundred conservatives met as part of a Manning Centre symposium where UCP leader Jason Kenney took a jab at the Alberta Party.
“This is basically a second Alberta Liberal Party and it’s a party with apparently fewer than 500 members that is polling about six per cent, the same place it was 18 months ago, that raised $79,000 in the first nine months of this year. That’s the political equivalent of a phone booth.”
It’s a phone booth that might yet get bigger.
Former cabinet minister Khan insists the Alberta Party will not be a retread of what’s gone before. “This is a real genuine opportunity for a fresh start.”
We shall see. Much depends on the party’s new management, in particular the new leader.