Kenney is keeping his distance from UCP policy
UCP leader won’t give NDP a target by wading into contentious social issues
RED DEER United Conservative Party MLA Jason Nixon, Alberta’s largest politician, has this to say about Alberta’s largest annual party meeting.
“It is amazing,” Nixon said, surveying the party crowd from his towering height. “PC, Wildrose conventions? There’s never been anything like this, and I never thought I’d see anything like it.”
By Friday, the number of paid attendees had swelled to 2,600.
The attendance shows leader Jason Kenney has a point when he claims the party has powerful momentum. It’s also a bonanza for UCP coffers. The standard ticket for party members is $249.
They’re putting tents in the convention hotel parking lot to feed the hordes. The bar will be commandeered for overflow voting. Many a departed conservative would have happily voted there, all day long.
Everything is somewhat outsized, including the rhetoric. For instance, there’s Kenney’s remark about the thick book of 250 policy resolutions up for debate on Sunday. “I haven’t even read that,” he said.
It’s a very odd thing for a party leader to say. Kenney was making the point that he let the grassroots members express their view with no involvement from him.
That’s true, according to two people who worked on the policy. There were only a couple of conversations with Kenney during a remarkably rigorous process that lasted more than a year.
Kenney’s hands-off approach may have another motive. It also means he isn’t personally branded with several socially conservative resolutions, including some aimed at limiting abortion rights and gay-straight alliances.
A resolution ranked 30th in level of interest by party members calls for parents to have the right to consent to their kids’ involvement in “any subject of a sexual nature, including enrolment in extracurricular activities/clubs.”
Kenney will let that one rise or fall on the convention floor. He says he won’t speak for or against any resolution during the policy debates. That’s the membership’s business, he says again.
He’s also quick to add that the party platform won’t necessarily come from resolutions that pass.
He’ll form a separate, non-party committee in June to work on a platform for the 2019 election.
The strong likelihood is that many of these party calls for parents’ rights in schools, conscience rights for medical practitioners, and private healthcare options, will either fail in Sunday’s voting or be quietly set aside if they don’t.
Party members know Kenney doesn’t want to deal with social issues. That’s the NDP’s main point of attack, and he just won’t bite.
But it’s not easy to simply set Kenney apart from all this. In fact, it’s kind of bizarre for a leader not to engage in any say with policy development.
The UCP reads the polls avidly, however. One after another shows that the big concerns are the economy, jobs, the Kinder Morgan pipeline and other economic issues.
It isn’t that people don’t care about the social issues. Opinion about them is always hot on both sides. But in the grand scheme of public concerns, they rank far below deep worry about the future of Alberta’s economy.
This convention surely makes that quite obvious.
It may not be the biggest political gathering in Alberta history — 4,000 people attended the 1985 convention that picked Don Getty as Progressive Conservative leader and premier. Those old-time leadership events tended to be big because delegates came from every riding to vote.
But for a party annual meeting, with voting on policy and a party constitution, this UCP affair is truly mammoth.
The UCP is riding high — confident, enthusiastic, energetic.
But Alberta’s political dynamics can change on a dime. A pipeline and $90 oil would do wonders for the NDP.
As the election nears, Kenney will inevitably face much more pressure to explain himself on subjects he prefers to ignore.