REMEDY FOR THE RIGHT?
The fate of Alberta’s PC party is at stake this weekend as members vote for a new leader
To get a better idea of what’s happening at the Progressive Conservative leadership race on Saturday think of it like this: Alberta’s PC party is infected.
It has come down with a bad case of Kenney-itis. The infection began last summer when supporters of leadership candidate Jason Kenney invaded the sickly body politic of the PC party.
Now, the question is can the party generate enough “progressive” antibodies at the convention to fend o the conservative attack? Or will the infection prove fatal?
The prognosis for the 50-yearold PC party doesn’t look good.
The invading Kenney forces have proven themselves tenacious, virulent and exceptionally well-organized.
Kenney — a former federal Conservative cabinet minister from Calgary — figures he has snapped up the support of 80 per cent of delegates chosen at constituency meetings across the province the past six months. He also believes he has the support of as many as three-quarters of the super-delegates such as former party MLAs who have automatic voting status at the convention.
“Nothing is decided until the votes are cast,” he said recently, trying to sound cautious but not really succeeding. “We’re going to stay humble and work hard. Our supporters have to show up but we’re feeling confident.”
Overconfidence might be one way Kenney could lose. His supporters might think he’s such a shoo-in that they’ll stay home rather than spend the time and money to attend the leadership convention in Calgary.
Or perhaps some delegates who were pro-Kenney will balk at the last-minute and not support a candidate whose goal is to dissolve the party and merge it with the Wildrose into a new conservative entity.
That’s not how Kenney articulates his vision. He doesn’t like the term “dissolution” even though the o cial timeline for his plan uses the term “winding up” to describe the fate of the Wildrose and PC parties this year to open the way for the new united party.
He prefers to call his plan “reconstituting ” the two halves of Alberta’s conservative culture — PC and Wildrose — back into one. Sort of like the thing you do with frozen orange juice.
Kenney makes it sound that easy. “We must come together to form a single free-enterprise party and we must do so before the next election. Because, to coin a phrase, Albertans can’t wait,” said Kenney last July, coining a phrase from the most impatient of the unite-the right groups, Alberta Can’t Wait.
Kenney — a latecomer to the PC party himself — likes to invoke the names of two previous PC premiers, Peter Lougheed and Ralph Klein, as the beacons of Alberta’s conservative past to which he aspires.
But the thing is all of Alberta’s PC premiers were regularly more progressive than conservative.
Lougheed’s passion for social justice and intervention in the economy saw him raise royalties on energy companies and invest in private ventures including Pacific Western Airlines and Syncrude. In 1985, one Calgary oilman complained that Lougheed “would better fit in a socialist party.”
Even though Klein began his mandate in a recession by slashing spending and cutting the civil service, he reversed course when the energy money began pouring back in.
He spent billions buying Albertans’ votes with their own money via a series of rebates for natural gas bills, electricity costs and even filling up our cars in advance of the 2001 provincial election, for example.
And he raised taxes when it suited him.
In 2002, while Alberta was going through a post-Sept. 11 rough patch, Klein hiked taxes on tobacco and alcohol, including a 40-cent hike for a dozen beer. Klein tried to argue these were “user fees,” not taxes because people could choose not to drink or smoke. Remember that when you get irritated by the current NDP government calling its carbon tax a “levy.”
All this to say that Alberta’s Progressive Conservative governments of old could at times be confused with Alberta’s NDP government of today.
The PC party used to be a huge political tent that straddled the centre of the political spectrum and spilled off in either direction, left and right.
It offered a home not only to conservatives but to politicians who would be Liberals or NDPers anywhere else.
Lougheed moulded the party to reflect Alberta itself: an urbanized, sophisticated province where the majority of people are politically moderate.
That’s what’s at stake this weekend.
If Kenney gets his way, the PC party will cease to exist as a viable entity. He will open up negotiations to merge with the Wildrose. But in politics, as in business, there are never mergers, just takeovers.
And you’d have to think that one way or the other the eventual winner would be the bigger of the two dogs, the Wildrose which has more money, more MLAs and more popular appeal, according to opinion polls.
That’s why so many “progressives” in the PC party dread this weekend. They see this as a reverse takeover of the party by the Wildrose.
They look with dismay at Kenney’s history — from years ago when he was an anti-abortion advocate to more recently when he fought against women wearing a niqab in citizenship ceremonies.
A few weeks ago, former PC MLA Ron Ghitter said he had metaphorically ripped up his party card at the thought of Kenney becoming leader.
“Philosophically, he doesn’t live where a lot of we Progressive Conservatives live. He’s an ideologue, more on the right, and that’s not where you win elections in the long-term in Alberta,” said Ghitter. “I’m a Lougheed conservative. I’m a conservative that believes you’re in the middle, you care for all people, you don’t go right or left, you deal with the issues that are right for Alberta.”
But I have to ask, where were all the teeth-gnashing “progressives” the past six months when the Kenney conservatives invaded the party?
You’d have to think the old-time PCs were complacent or lazy or naive. They appear to have been outmanoeuvred, out fought and outwitted by the opposition.
Leadership candidate Donna Kenney- Glans left the field saying it was sloping too far to the right. The only other woman in the race, Sandra Jansen, complained of bullying by Kenney supporters and fled to the NDP.
Former MLA Stephen Khan abandoned the race, too, leaving two keep-the-party-afloat candidates: MLA Richard Starke and Calgary lawyer Byron Nelson.
A big question today is what happens to moderate party members such as Starke and Nelson if Kenney wins the leadership?
Do they quit? Do they go to another party?
If that happens, we could see the beginning of a major shift in Alberta politics. For decades, the longest governing party in Alberta managed to straddle the middle of the political spectrum.
Now, we might be seeing the polarization of Alberta politics, with the NDP on the left and a new conservative party on the right. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Even if Kenney wins the PC leadership, he still has to work with members of the party’s executive who might resist a merger with the Wildrose.
And then he has to negotiate with Wildrose leader Brian Jean, who is open to a united party but with the Wildrose dictating the terms. Jean is already on the road drumming up support for his own version of a united party, one that would see him defeat Kenney in a yet-to-bedeclared leadership race.
The PC party might have come down with a lethal case of Kenneyitis but it’s still too early to say whether it will prove fatal to the Wildrose. Kenney may have gone to a lot of trouble to wipe out the PC party only to clear the way for the rise of a reinvigorated Wildrose led by Jean.