NDP accused of ‘trying to rig’ yet-to-begin PC race
There’s no doubt about it — the NDP is messing with Jason Kenney’s Progressive Conservative leadership bid.
First, the government took the unusual step of asking the province’s chief electoral officer to investigate his pre-campaign fundraising.
This is just noisemaking. The office has no power over Kenney’s bucket-passing before an official leadership campaign starts, unless he uses the cash for that campaign.
The NDP knows this well. Raising the non-issue now only serves to cast a seedy aspersion, which appears to be the entire point.
But then the NDP dropped a genuine hammer on Kenney’s pickup truck, showing once again that this party practises eternal political warfare.
On Monday, the legislature ethics committee voted to limit leadership campaign spending to 15 per cent of a new ceiling on party spending for a general election.
That would work out to about $330,000 for Kenney, and all other PC candidates, for campaigns stretching from Oct. 1 to voting day on March 18, 2017.
Kenney figures the change is aimed straight at him and his considerable fundraising power.
“I’m flattered that the NDP seems to be spending so much time focused on an unofficial candidate for the third party’s leadership,” he says.
“On the other hand, I find it disturbing that the premier’s office spends more time worrying about me and the unity effort than the direction of Alberta’s economy.”
Kenney’s campaign will involve plenty of travel. He’ll need paid operatives to co-ordinate a long and complex race that was decreed by the party’s decision to choose the leader by a vote of delegates from 87 ridings, rather than a general vote of party members.
“It’s not inexpensive to get around to every community of the province and to hundreds of thousands of Albertans over six months,” he says.
The limit could also encourage other PC candidates to run against him.
MLAs Sandra Jansen and Richard Starke are known to be thinking about it. The race would look less daunting without the bug-stomping power they saw Jim Prentice deploy in the PC race of 2014, when he spent the outlandish sum of $2.6 million.
And the NDP, you can be sure, would like nothing more than to hand victory to a PC who is determined not to merge the party with Wildrose.
Kenney says it’s government meddling in the affairs of parties.
“Political parties come from civil society — they’re not creatures of the state,” he says. “I’m not aware of a single jurisdiction in Canada that imposed a legislated limit on leadership campaigns ... they’re trying to rig the rules of the PC party’s leadership election.”
But first, the resolution passed Monday by the NDP majority in the ethics committee would have to become law. That means amendments would be passed in the legislature.
The house is scheduled to sit Oct. 31. The PC campaign officially starts Oct. 1.
Would the NDP dare to make the law retroactive for the entire PC leadership campaign?
Officially, they are coy. But you can bet they would.
Asked about retroactivity by Alberta Party Leader Greg Clark, government whip Estefania Cortes-Vargas told the committee: “It is not our intention to make this retroactive at this point, no.”
Well, they can’t do it at this point, since there’s no official race.
But the NDP has already made a similar law retroactive. The very first bill they passed, which made corporate and union donations illegal, was declared to be in effect on June 15, 2015.
This mousetrapped the other parties, especially the PCs, who had not yet collected on many corporate pledges made during the campaign that ended May 5.
Justice Minister Kathleen Ganley interpreted the new law to mean that money could not be collected, even though such contributions were completely legal during the campaign.
Retroactivity wasn’t a stopper for the NDP then, and it probably won’t be now.
“It would be outrageous to apply legislated rules retroactively,” Kenney says.
But he might have to live with it.