Liberals look to regain relevance with new leader Khan
With little cash, organization, experience or name recognition, Khan will be in tough
Alberta Liberals — who elected Calgary lawyer David Khan as their new leader on the weekend — deserve to celebrate.
Um, not because they have a new leader.
They should celebrate because it was 100 years ago this week that the Alberta Liberals won a majority government — on June 7, 1917, to be precise.
It was their fourth electoral victory in a row. It was also their last. They should celebrate now. The way things are going for Alberta Liberals, it will be 100 years before they win another provincial election.
I should emphasize this is not a dig against newly elected leader Khan. He seems like a very nice and capable person. He has some political experience, having spent time as the party’s vice-president, as well as running, unsuccessfully, as a Liberal candidate in Calgary-Buffalo in the 2015 provincial election and in the Calgary-West byelection in 2014.
Last Sunday, he won the party leadership with 55 per cent of 1,670 votes cast, defeating the only other person in the race, Kerry Cundall.
“We need to stay true to ourselves and who we are and what we stand for,” Khan told supporters. “There’s new people, there’s new energy, and we need a new vision and need to move this province forward for the benefit of all.”
Yes, but it’s difficult to see new people or new energy in a party that had a total of only 1,670 votes cast in Sunday’s leadership vote. Liberals are a shadow of their former selves.
They haven’t come close to winning an election since 1993 when under Laurence Decore they captured almost 400,000 votes, or 40 per cent of all ballots cast, compared to the 440,000 (or 44 per cent) for the Progressive Conservatives under Ralph Klein.
The Liberals have been pretty much on a downward trajectory ever since, despite desperate attempts by party loyalists to stop the fall.
Leaders came and went with the seasons.
During the party’s leadership race in 2011, the executive opened up the party to an experiment where Albertans could join the Liberals as “supporters” without having to pay a $5 membership fee. The result was the election of former PC MLA Raj Sherman as leader.
The spiral became a nosedive. The party has also tried changing its colours, literally as well as ideologically, in recent years.
In 2012, it replaced the longtime Liberal red with green, and the party’s name became the much-ridiculed “Liberalberta.”
Party officials also experimented with a dramatic policy platform during the 2012 election campaign where they promised to raise taxes on the wealthy, eliminate post-secondary tuitions, reduce the number of MLAs to 66 (from 87) and overhaul our electoral system by introducing a preferential balloting system.
No wonder people don’t know what the party stands for.
Alberta Liberals conducted so many experiments, the party logo should be a Bunsen burner.
In 2012, they managed to hang on to their five incumbent MLAs, but were whittled down to only 127,000 votes. In 2015, they tumbled to 62,000 votes and just one seat, that of Calgary MLA David Swann.
Swann is a more-than-capable MLA and one of the nicest politician in Alberta. But in politics, nice guys capture just four per cent support in province-wide opinion polls.
Khan, of course, is hoping to do better.
However, he is a complete unknown with little experience running a spent party with little organization and even less money.
Liberals are trying to position themselves as the moderate alternative to the too-far-left NDP government and the toofar-right Wildrose-PC alliance.
But the Alberta Party is staking out the same ground. And, more ominously for the Liberals, Premier Rachel Notley is trying to position her party in the middle of the political spectrum, too.
You have to think that Alberta Liberals, once a dominant force in provincial politics, are an endangered species, if not yet politically extinct.