PC gaffes gave Wildrose weapons to pose serious threat

‘People are always looking for something better’: Hinman

Back in 2008, demoralized Wildrose Alliance Leader Paul Hinman prepared to step down from the party’s top job and drop out of politics entirely when he failed to hold his rural Cardston Taber Warner riding in the general election.

The former feedlot operator lost the riding to Tory candidate Broyce Jacobs, and the lone Wildrose representative was plucked from the Legislative Assembly.

Hinman, 52, first elected in 2004, lost by just 39 votes.

He stepped down as party leader, paving the way for a leadership race that was eventually won by Danielle Smith. She became a mainstream and articulate leader who worked diligently across the province, fundraising and wooing support to propel the fringe party, now called the Wildrose, to contender status.

Hinman contemplated going to work in the diamond mines in the Arctic, but it turned out there was still support for the one-term MLA and his fledgling party to be mined in the field of Alberta politics.

The party and Smith convinced him to run again in a byelection in the urban riding of Calgary-glenmore, where he just happened to be residing, to seek the spot vacated by PC deputy premier Ron Stevens, who had been appointed to the bench.

“She said: ‘We can’t win, but we need to show well. Would you be willing to run in the byelection,’” Hinman recalled Monday.

He began the campaign as the underdog, polling about nine per cent when the race began.

But the bloom was coming off the Progressive Conservative government of new premier Ed Stelmach, who set off a fire of discontent in the oilpatch when he attempted to hike oil and gas royalties.

On the doorsteps, Hinman found a receptive audience.

“People are always looking for something better,” he said.

It was clear they were not happy with the Tories.

“There was this utter, visceral dissatisfaction with premier Stelmach that I’ve never really experienced in politics before,” recalled Diane Colley-urquhart, a well-known city alderman and the PCS’ star Tory candidate in Calgary-glenmore.

The Ward 13 alderman said there were a lot of factors playing against her in the fall 2009 vote: the economy was grim, the new royalty regime was starting to unfold, and controversial Bill 50 — allowing cabinet to bypass a public hearing to approve a massive electricity transmission upgrade — raised the spectre of higher prices and property rights conflicts.

“You had all these things kind of compounding on themselves, and then the overlay on top of that was the Wildrose party was seeking to find a new leader, so they were campaigning out there.”

Colley-urquhart finished an embar-rassing third, and Hinman won.

Political pundits warned at the time the astonishing Wildrose byelection victory and humiliating Tory thirdplace finish could well be a harbinger of things to come.

One Tory organizer said the byelection could have major implications for the next general election.

“They have to be very nervous,” said political analyst David Taras at the time. “If Colley-urquhart can lose, they can all lose.” But that didn’t happen. Despite leading in the polls through most of the campaign, the Wildrose faltered in the last week in the wake on stinging criticism over racist and homophobic views of some of the party’s candidates.

Former Tory cabinet minister Lyle Oberg, who came over to the Wildrose as an adviser, said the polls couldn’t have been wrong. Voters just had a change of heart.

“The polls were showing a narrowing on Friday and Saturday, which I thought was a bad sign. But I think people just lost their nerve.”

Government appeared ripe for the picking.

Unrest in the Tory caucus and unhappiness with a string of five consecutive deficits led to two Tories, Rob Anderson and Heather Forsyth, crossing the floor to join Hinman’s Wildrose in 2010. Maverick Tory Guy Boutilier, who was punted from caucus over his criticism of Stelmach, also joined to give the Wildrose four MLAS. Together they turned this spring session of the legislature into a feeding frenzy, ripping Tory gaffes in daily question period.

When the Canadian Taxpayers Federation pointed out 21 MLAS, mostly Tories, were being paid $1,000 a month to serve on a committee that hadn’t met since 2008, the die was cast.

Wildrose took the moral high ground when Forsyth, Boutilier and Hinman paid back the money they were paid on the committee, shaming the government MLAS who didn’t.

Working behind the scenes with the help of key former Reform party advisers such as Tom Flanagan and Vitor Marciano, the Wildrose stirred up unrest in the rural Tory heartland over a series of land bills they claimed eroded landowner’s prop- erty rights.

Hinman said he always believed the party would prosper, but it has come more suddenly than expected.

The Wildrose has blossomed, going from no seats in the 2008 election and garnering seven per cent of the vote, to forming the Official Opposition.