Alberta PCs’ delegate selection rules put Kenney at disadvantage
Procedure muddies an outsider’s path to victory in leadership race
The three-day Alberta Progressive Conservative Party policy meeting ended last Sunday in Red Deer, a couple of weeks before delegate selection begins for the leadership convention in March.
Delegate selection is key. The old one-member, one-vote system almost elected my friend and colleague Ted Morton in 2006 and did elect Jim Prentice in 2014. The long-term members of the provincial party, and especially those members who had been active in various executive positions, were unhappy with the results of this procedure.
They suspected Morton — he was, after all, a university professor with ties to the federal Conservatives — and saw Prentice as an Ottawa carpet-bagger. They claimed, not without reason, that the old system allowed persons whose connections were chiefly to the much larger federal party to join the Alberta PCs on short notice. Such new recruits might then select someone unconnected to the glorious machine that brought us the last Klein government and his disastrous successors, premiers Ed Stelmach and Alison Redford.
Everyone knows that one such outsider is Jason Kenney. And every PC knows that Kenney seeks to amalgamate their party with Wildrose. This is one reason the procedural guide for delegate selection specifies that the rules are to be interpreted “in the best interests of the Progressive Conservative Association of Alberta.”
Those loyal to the memory of the old PCs see amalgamation as the extinguishing of the source of feel-good nostalgia. Watch for a Kenney opponent to try to disqualify him on those grounds alone.
The second way to obstruct a Kenney victory is slightly more subtle. The old guard Alberta PCs, the now largely out-of-work mechanics who used to tend the PC machine the NDP smashed last year, erected a procedural firewall directed against Kenney.
Here’s how the selection procedure makes Kenney’s path to victory difficult. Each of 87 constituencies selects 15 delegates who must either be residents of the riding or non-resident members of the constituency board of directors. A third of the delegates from each constituency must be board members.
Most constituency annual general meetings took place before Kenney announced he was running, so many boards have already been selected. This means many of the automatic delegates have fond memories of the glory days of the discredited party machine. They will be joined by ex officio delegates unelected by anyone. These persons are heavily represented by existing provincial and regional boards, present and former constituency association presidents and MLAs, and other senior party officials. They, too, distrust federally tainted Conservatives.
Their strategy is simple. Even if the Kenney people do well in electing delegates, they may not win the 50 per cent plus one needed to capture the leadership. This opens the way for an ABK — anyone but Kenney — alternative. As one of the ABK people, Donna Kennedy-Glans said, “there’s already a lot of co-operation.”
Despite musings of self-styled progressives whose ideological home is someplace in NDP land, the struggle, as always, is less about ideas and values than power. As another ABK candidate, Richard Starke, the Vermilion veterinarian put it, uniting the parties “is solely a mechanism to try to seek to gain political power.” Yes, it is.
With the NDP back at their historic levels of support, around 15 per cent, why the old-style PCs would seek to lose on their own by perpetuating past failures suggests an organizational suicide wish. Kenney is trying genuinely to restore the party, rebuild the alliance that the PCs lost to Wildrose, and ensure that conservatives are a part of government. Victory of the ABK faction ensures nothing — nothing except the possibility of more NDP rule.