Hurdle on path to unity

The Jason Kenney coup within Alberta’s Progressive Conservative party hit a speed bump over the weekend. The party is going old-school with its 2017 leadership convention, picking delegations from the various Alberta constituencies instead of having the now-usual one man, one vote free-for-all. The first local delegate selection meeting was the one for Edmonton-Ellerslie, a riding on the south side of the provincial capital, held at the Millwoods Golf Course on Wednesday, Nov. 16.

Being pretty familiar with the traditional techniques of political organization, Kenney rented part of the golf course’s clubhouse for what’s called a “hospitality suite” — half command centre, half Welcome Wagon for potential loose fish, and supplied with snacks and drinks for both. The voting by PC members was elsewhere in the clubhouse, a few steps away, and Kenney appeared in that part of the building before the ballot, pressing the flesh with those in attendance.

This is all a standard part of Canadian party leadership campaigns — standard, that is, almost to the point of cliché. Political beat reporters write openly about hospitality suites, and in some settings — particularly where one candidate has more money than the others — they are considered to have pretty large strategic significance.

Which is probably why the PC leadership campaign rules were written to make them impossible. The rules take the view, for the purposes of picking a leader (and a fate), that a delegate selection meeting, something no one has seen in years, ought be managed like a polling place in a general election.

It is not the bloody, Octagon-like scene of an open contest of organizing skill; it is, rather, a neutral ground on which voters can make a serious choice without being plied with ginger ale and vexed in person by the candidates.

Either way of running a delegated leadership campaign is probably reasonable. For breaking the rules, the party’s neutral arbiters never conferred with the candidates and said, “Hey, guys, just a side note: we are, almost uniquely in Canadian political history, outlawing hospitality suites this time out.”

But as the party’s electoral officer Rob Dunseith pointed out, it seems more likely that the Kenneyites did not anticipate the rules being seriously enforced. Rival campaigns warned his organizer Alan Hallman, an old PC hand who used to handle constituency matters for Ralph Klein, that by letting Kenney take a turn through the voting area, he would be risking a fine.

He is said to have responded that Team Kenney can afford it. Lucky for them! But the harm to Kenney’s Unite Alberta campaign does not stop at the from the PCs to the New Democrats shows, the crossroads at which Alberta’s historic Progressive Conservative party stands is pretty gnarled — more like one of those crazy over-engineered cloverleafs you see on American highway maps. There are continuity PCs like Jansen who have given up to despair and cynicism, and who are perfectly prepared to watch the party burn to the ground (while retreating with a suspiciously empty gasoline can) if Kenney is destined to win. There are also longtime PCs who are willing to go along with a victorious Kenney, assuming he can prove his competence at organizing and persuading in a fair fight.

It is, after all, not as though there are not strong arguments for the unite-theright course of action that Kenney is pursuing. The columnists here in Alberta, me included, have emphasized that a united right will not mean an automatic ouster of the New Democrats. We have also had to emphasize that the details of how a Wildrose-PC merger might work — politically, financially, and legally — are so damned fuzzy they could have starred in The Muppet Movie.

If Kenney wins the PC race, unity might very well still not happen.

It is also true, however, that the Alberta PC is still full of Ralph Klein’s allies, and that when they are told the party can only return to power by being a polite “centrist” voice, some of them look at how the Alberta Liberals have done for the last hundred years, and their skin crawls.