National Post (National Edition)
‘NASTY’ AFTERMATH EXPECTED AS ALBERTA BRACES FOR UNITY VOTE
CONTEST FOR LEADER OF UNITED CONSERVATIVES TO BE NEXT BATTLEGROUND
On Saturday, conservatives in Alberta will decide if it’s finally time to stop bickering. Members of the province’s Progressive Conservative Party have been voting since Thursday on whether to join forces with the Wildrose Party under the new banner of the United Conservative Party. Voting will be open to Wildrose members all day on Saturday and Albertans should know the fate of the unite-the-right movement by early evening.
This new party will have a single mission: the electoral destruction of the governing New Democrat Party.
Albertans are at the midway point of what once looked like a quixotic scheme by former federal cabinet minister Jason Kenney to wrestle control of the Alberta PCs, force a merger with the Wildrose Party, win the leadership of the new party and then become premier of the province. It doesn’t look so quixotic anymore.
Insiders on both sides are brimming with cautious confidence — no one gets too cocky about polls these days — about the unity vote. The PCs only need a simple majority and Wildrosers expect they’ll be able to clear the relatively high bar of 75 per cent that their party’s constitution demands.
Party officials are already looking ahead to the nitty gritty details of the new party: who will be interim leader, where staff from both parties will end up, and how to keep the embryonic party stable during what is expected to be a nasty leadership race.
And although the parties are ostensibly voting to be friends, “nasty” is what everyone expects the battle for leader to be.
It’s taken as an article of faith among right-leaning Albertans that the NDP is ripe for supplanting in the province’s next election in 2019. Kenney calls them an “accidental government,” that stumbled to power amid unprecedented disarray on the right. The Progressive Conservative dynasty that governed for 44 years finally got on voters’ last nerve and the Wildrose Party self-destructed when 11 members crossed the floor to the PCs, including then-leader Danielle Smith.
Since the latter years of Ralph Klein’s reign, conservatives in Alberta have had the luxury of fighting among themselves without losing power, whether it was particularly vicious leadership races, caucus mutinies or the raucous and personal attacks flying back and forth between the Wildrose and PC caucuses. Before long the bickering, once the sideshow to governance, became the main act.
In the 2015 election, the PCs were obliterated and Wildrose Leader Brian Jean failed to bring his party all the way back from the dead — no easy task, considering he had less than two months to do it after winning the post-floor cross leadership race. The NDP capitalized, increasing its seat count from four to a resounding majority of 54. It was a sizable mandate and the party governed with enthusiasm and growing confidence, like a new employee keen to impress.
Ask a conservative in Alberta to rattle off the government’s sins and it will sound a lot like the NDP boasting, just with a different inflection.
They raised the minimum wage, brought in a carbon tax, made it easier for unions to certify, created a pilot program for universal daycare, beefed up farm safety laws, put a cap on oilsands emissions and slashed school fees. All the while, they racked up record deficits as oil prices plunged.
If the NDP gets punished by voters in Alberta in 2019, it won’t be for cynically breaking promises, it will be for earnestly doing what they said they would do, despite a back-breaking recession.
The disconnect comes down to two disparate views of a changing province. NDP supporters believe Rachel Notley’s election as premier is a reflection of a more youthful, progressive Alberta, driven by migration from across the country and booming urban populations. After all, the two largest cities have both elected young, left-leaning mayors and Alberta returned four Liberal MPs to Ottawa in 2015.
Kenney, and conservatives across the province, will tell you the NDP election was a fluke and the true provincial map more naturally reflects the federal one, where even those four Liberal MPs are swamped by a sea of blue Conservatives. Alberta may be changing, but conservatives argue its beating heart is still business and balanced budgets.
The race to be the man who doles out the NDP’s electoral punishment — so far no women have declared for the race — is between Kenney, Jean, Calgary lawyer Doug Schweitzer and Wildrose MLA Derek Fildebrandt, all of whom have either officially declared or hinted strongly that they are running.
Barring the entry of a star candidate, the race will be between Jean and Kenney, the two current leaders of the merging parties. Jean, who now seems enthusiastic about the merger after initial reservations, believes his personal popularity and the fact that his Wildrose Party are buoyant in recent polls should propel him to the leadership.
Kenney’s sense of inevitability and organizational prowess will be hard to overcome, though. After his resounding victory in the PC leadership race this year, many centrist members who opposed him have chosen to pack up and go home, rather than fight hopelessly against another Kenney victory. Now, in the funny world of Alberta politics, it’s actually possible to find disaffected PCers who will leave the new party if Kenney wins but stick around and see what happens if Jean is leader.
The future of the conservative parties in Alberta has broader implications, too, and the federal Conservatives will be watching closely. As a sign of the times, and perhaps a testament to the amount of resources being sucked up fighting the NDP on home turf, the only Albertan challenger in the Conservative leadership race was Deepak Obhrai, who was eliminated after the first round of voting with 0.4 per cent of the vote.
They’ll be watching not just because Alberta is the conservative homeland, but for strategic reasons, too.
When the federal carbon tax was announced, Trudeau and Notley clung to each other, hoping to spread out the political liability of an unpopular policy. Conservative leader Andrew Scheer may look to United Conservative messaging on the carbon tax and see if he can find a template for attacking Trudeau.
Due to the vagaries of Alberta’s election laws, the Wildrose’s bountiful war chest can’t be spent to promote any particular candidate or party after the merger, but it can be spent to help set up constituency associations and, more interestingly, on ads to attack government policy. Alberta’s carbon tax could be in for a rough ride in the next two years.
All that is in the future, though. If the vote goes as planned on Saturday and the leadership race kicks off, it’ll be back to the bickering for a little while, at least.
THE RACE WILL BE BETWEEN BRIAN JEAN AND JASON KENNEY.