Advantage, Danielle Smith
With ball in her court, what will Wildrose leader do next?
The Wildrose Party held its fundraising leader’s dinner Thursday in Calgary. Tickets for the roast beef banquet at the Telus Conference Centre were $400 each.
Tech n ica l ly, Da n iel le Smith’s speech was sold out. But some of the companies that pre-purchased tables had called or emailed ahead, to say they wouldn’t actually be attending in person, or that they’d be sending their junior staff.
To make sure there were no embarrassing empty spaces, the party arranged for volunteers to act as seat fillers.
But Wednesday evening, Premier Alison Redford announced her resignation. And suddenly, Smith’s dinner was the hottest ticket in Cowtown.
More than a thousand people showed up, including power players who had planned to send junior staffers. Event organizers ran out of roast beef and had to rustle up extra chicken dinners to feed everyone.
It sounds counterintuitive. If Redford was really the Tories’ one big problem, wouldn’t her abrupt departure have made the Wildrose dinner a less enticing affair for Calgary’s political elite?
Not exactly. Instead, with the Tories in disarray yet again, Danielle Smith emerged as this week’s biggest political winner.
Smith and her party, from what I could tell, were actually looking forward to facing Redford again in the next election. Now, they run the risk that the PCs will find some hero to ride to their rescue. But although that risk is real enough, the chaos that’s engulfed the Tories gives the Wildrose a huge competitive advantage, at least in the short term.
By the terms of the PC party’s constitution, the leadership selection process “can take no less than four months, and no more than six months from when the leader resigns.” That means a divisive leadership race, which unofficially began Wednesday night, will rage until at least the end of August, perhaps right through October.
Yes, that will keep the Tories in the news, but for all the wrong reasons.
If senior members of the current cabinet want to run, they’ll have to give up their cabinet appointments, causing no end of shuffle and disarray for new premier Dave Hancock to manage, not to mention the inevitable delays of government policy. Meantime, with essentially a caretaker at the helm, the party will be stuck defending Redford’s budget, her policy agenda, and her legacy projects.
But for the Progressive Conservative party itself, the bigger problem is what this means for its internal finances. The once-mighty PC war chest is rumoured to be empty. And while the leadership race is running hot, party fundraising will all but grind to a halt because donors will be more inclined to support a favoured candidate rather than to finance the party as a whole.
In 2006, when Ed Stelmach beat out Hancock, Ted Morton and Jim Dinning to become premier, the party charged a $15,000 fee to enter its leadership race. In 2011, Redford and her rivals had to put up a much steeper fee: $40,000. The party hasn’t said what its charging this time. It’s expected to make that decision at a meeting Monday. But it might not be surprising if the party were to raise its entry fee yet again, not just as a fundraising gambit, but as a way of limiting the number of candidate and creating a less messy, internecine and time-consuming race. That wouldn’t be very democratic. But for the party brass, it might look like expedient strategy.
That’s not to say anyone should count out the Tories. After 43 years in power, they’ve learned plenty of survival tricks. But Danielle Smith has spent the past 18 months evolving, trying to convince voters the Wildrose has become a party of social moderates and competent managers, who believe in global warming and support gay rights, labour rights and LRT. You can dismiss it as a fake cosmetic change or a craven ideological betrayal of the party’s roots. Either way, the polls suggest the makeover is working.
But can Smith maintain that moderate, urban image? Can the Tories evolve to counter it? Or might both parties revert to their default setting and start courting the rural right?
For now, Smith has the advantage. Her Tory rivals are distracted, more interested in defeating each other than beating her. Her real test, in these next six months, is to convince doubtful Albertans the Tories didn’t “fix” themselves by dumping Redford — and that she might actually be a leader they could trust.