PC leadership race in serious danger of becoming a joke

The other day I likened Alberta’s Progressive Conservative leadership race to a runaway train. I was wrong. It’s a runaway clown car. It has become such a joke that during the next election the party’s campaign buttons should be plastic flowers that squirt water.

Not that the PC party is likely to be a party by the next election.

The latest funny business, but not in a funny ha-ha way, came Wednesday when the PC board of directors announced it will hold an emergency meeting on a Friday night, Feb. 24, in Red Deer.

The topic of discussion: yet another attempt to kick Jason Kenney out of the race.

This follows directly from an attempt last week by PC member and Calgary lawyer Jeff Rath, who filed a detailed complaint with the PC party. Rath argued Kenney should be ejected because if elected leader he’d want to dismantle the PC party and merge it with the Wildrose into a new conservative party.

On Sunday, Rath’s complaint was reviewed by the party’s 12-member leadership election committee that unanimously declared, “the platform of Jason Kenney does not cause harm to the PC brand.”

Kenney was allowed to stay in the race.

However, some members of the PC party’s governing board of directors didn’t like that decision because, and I’m guessing here, they think Kenney ’s plan to dissolve the PC party is pretty much the very definition of causing “harm to the PC brand.”

They asked party president Katherine O’Neill for an emergency meeting of the whole 50-member board to review Rath’s complaint. O’Neill reportedly refused on the grounds the election committee had dealt with the matter on Sunday.

But anti-Kenney forces on the board persisted and enough members pressed the matter that, on Wednesday, one of the party’ vice-presidents, Darcy Schumann from Calgary, called an emergency meeting for next week.

“My apologies for calling this meeting for a Friday but time is critical!” exclaimed Schumann in an email to fellow board members.

Kenney was not thrilled with the news, to put it mildly.

“I do not expect all PC members to agree with our effort to reunite Alberta conservatives,” he said in a news release. “But I do expect all members to respect the basic principle of democracy: that the voters get to decide. Disqualifying my candidacy would violate this principle by disenfranchising the thousands of PC members who have voted to support our campaign.”

At the risk of being a nitpicker, I should point out that political parties are less like democracies and more like private clubs. And private clubs get to include or exclude pretty much anybody they’d like.

Nevertheless, Kenney’s angst is understandable.

His plan to merge with the Wildrose was well known when the race began last October and yet he was allowed to run. The problem for PC loyalists is that he now appears to be winning the leadership race by signing up the most supporters for the March 18 leadership convention.

Predictably, his plan has created division in the party between those who support him and those who don’t. But now there’s a subdivision among those who don’t support him — between those who want to use whatever means necessary to kick him out of the race and those who want to defeat him fair and square on the floor of the leadership convention.

Defeating him at the convention is the infinitely better choice for the party.

Kicking him out would make the party look weak, afraid and desperate — and ironically would do as much harm to the PC brand as letting Kenney win.

Interestingly enough, there is another path emerging for PC loyalists resigned to a Kenney leadership.

They are hoping the yet-tobe-designed process to actually dissolve the party will prove to be so complicated and time consuming that Kenney can be convinced to change his plans. In that scenario he’d stay on as leader of a still-functioning PC party for the next election.

Sounds like a long shot but, again, it’s a better plan than panic-kicking Kenney out.

Booting Kenney with just a month left in the race would make the PC party a joke — and in politics that’s never a laughing matter.