Unity closer for right, but power still far away
The voting starts Thursday for, or against, the proposed union of two conservative parties that have despised each other for a decade.
It will be the oddest kind of balloting. A person who holds a membership card in both parties can vote twice.
Some joker is sure to vote yes as a Wildrose member and no as a Progressive Conservative member, or vice versa, just for the originality of it.
“Vote early, vote often,” is a standard punch line about dubious voting. Now it’s official.
PCs will vote electronically over three days, concluding Saturday. Wildrosers cast ballots Saturday, both online and in person in Red Deer.
Ah, Red Deer. Every vote held there seems to end up at 77 per cent positive — former Premier Ed Stelmach’s approval rating, then Alison Redford’s. There’s something in the water.
Even Jim Prentice got 77 per cent, although in Edmonton.
Wildrose Leader Brian Jean would be thrilled with that level of support, because the party’s threshold for acceptance of unity is 75 per cent. That is a high bar and nobody is quite sure if Wildrose will clear it, even in Red Deer.
The PCs need only 50 per cent plus one. Everybody assumes this means a slam dunk.
It would be truly hysterical if the PCs voted strongly for unity, only to be refused by Wildrose.
PC members decided by a wide margin on May 9, 2016, (in Red Deer) to stay in business and fight the next election as the proud old party with a new leader.
The convention was ardently against unity. The prospect of joining forces with Wildrose never made it to the convention floor.
The PCs also set rules for a leadership vote on March 18 this year.
Still quite high in the polls, they had a fighting chance of reforming, learning a bit of humility and competing strongly in the next election.
But those PCs didn’t count on Jason Kenney, who became a leadership candidate in July 2016, with the sole goal of merging the party with Wildrose.
Through skilful organizing, singular focus and spectacular fundraising capacity, Kenney won the leadership and pushed the unity project further than anybody thought it could go after only two years of the NDP government.
What Kenney has accomplished is almost miraculous, but it has cost him. Kenney has alienated the moderate wing of the party, and non-partisan moderates have doubts about him.
Jean comes across as a steady leader one day, an odd duck the next. Last week, he told Postmedia’s Rick Bell that he won’t be a right-wing premier or an ardent cost-cutter if he wins an election as head of the United Conservative Party.
“Gone are the days when hardright governments are going to be successful in Alberta,” Jean said.
The forehead-slapping from Wildrose strategists was almost audible.
A conservative leader was bound to eventually make that pitch in order to woo the centre. But Jean outraged his party’s deeply conservative base, and
Gone are the days when hard-right governments are going to be successful in Alberta. BRIAN JEAN
he did it only a week before the unity vote.
The people who originally envisaged union — longtime strategists such as Rick Orman and Thompson MacDonald — never saw it as traditional party business.
They wanted regular Albertans with no patience for internal bickering to swamp the parties with a simple demand — unite and beat the NDP.
They counted on massive membership sales to newcomers. But the total party memberships as voting starts — about 50,000 for the PCs; 40,000 for Wildrose — shows only modest success.
This is a province of four million people. In conservative eyes, nearly everybody in it is rabidly focused on ejecting the NDP.
And yet, it’s possible that only half of the eligible voters will actually participate. The turnout would pale beside the numbers of some PC contests of old.
In the 2006 leadership convention that chose Stelmach, for instance, nearly 100,000 people voted on the first ballot.
A vote for unity this weekend would be a significant victory for conservatives. But there’s no tsunami pushing them inevitably to government.