PC leadership brawl could well turn the divided party into a smoking heap

The battle for leadership of the PC party has quickly moved from testy to downright explosive.

The only women in the provincial party leadership race — Sandra Jansen and Donna KennedyGlans — suddenly dropped out Tuesday afternoon.

Both fled a competition they see as hostile to moderate ideas. In vivid language, Jansen claims she was harassed at the party’s policy conference in Red Deer on the weekend.

“Insults were scrawled on my nomination forms,” she said in a statement Tuesday afternoon.

“Volunteers from another campaign chased me up and down the hall, attacking me for protecting women’s reproductive rights, and my team was jeered for supporting children’s rights to a safe school environment.”

This has been going on for months, says the Calgary MLA. “My social media has been filled with filth, my domain name purchased to direct people to smear (me).”

Jansen doesn’t utter Jason Kenney’s name, but her views on his campaign were clear to people who talked to her on the weekend.

She was especially upset, she said, to see four busloads of new youth members brought in by the Kenney forces.

They backed candidates who beat out longtime PC volunteers, in order to capture four seats on the executive of the PC Youth Association.

“Watching our dedicated youth volunteers — some of whom logged thousands of kilometres this year volunteering for this — discarded like that was heartbreaking,” Jansen says.

Boo-hoo, reply the Kenney loyalists. That’s politics. Busing is a time-honoured tactic in a leadership contest, especially when the choice is made by delegates from each riding, not by party members at large.

But this is about much more than old-time elbowing in the corners. Longtime PCs fear the party is about to be swamped by intolerance.

Kennedy-Glans, a former Calgary MLA, is more restrained than Jansen, but makes much the same point.

“Right now, politics in Alberta is polarizing and there is limited opportunity for centrist voices to be heard,” her statement says.

She thanked the party and wished all the candidates well, then concluded: “Many Albertans are centrists, and sooner or later a centrist movement will take shape around them.”

The exit of these candidates signals yet another pitched battle in the Thirty Years’ War of Alberta conservatism.

Preston Manning’s Reform party, formed in 1987, eventually swallowed the federal PCs and became the federal conservatives.

Many progressives — certainly including Jansen — still bear the wounds.

They now see exactly the same thing happening in provincial politics. For them, the formation of Wildrose was a problem, but the prospect of Jason Kenney as the last PC leader amounts to a tragedy.

He now finds himself in a tougher fight.

It was obvious on the weekend that splitting the moderate vote among five candidates was campaign folly.

Now, three progressives remain — Stephen Kahn, Byron Nelson and Richard Starke. Two could yet drop off, leaving Kenney against a single traditional PC opponent.

The departure of the only women may hurt Kenney, but it’s not good for the PC party, either. Women have run for the leadership in every race since 1992. Alison Redford won it in 2011.

Jansen has long seemed likely to quit the divided PC caucus, and now she might do it.

This leadership race was always fated to be a destructive brawl that risks turning the PC party into a smoking ruin — an outcome that might not be displeasing to Jason Kenney.