hopeful Jason Kenney is confident
CALGARY Progressive Conservative leadership candidate Jason Kenney says he’s confident of winning, but willing to move to Plan B if the party won’t follow his plan to merge with the Wildrose. “My commitment is to serving Albertans through the free enterprise cause,” Kenney said Friday outside a downtown Calgary convention centre.
“My preference is for us to unite into one big broad party, so basically reconstitute the coalition that Peter Lougheed and Ralph Klein had before it split in half. “But if the grassroots members decide not to go in that direction, I would respect their mandate, as well as the mandate I have as PC leader.
“I would then try to make the PC party the platform for unity and to find other ways to reach out and co-operate with our Wildrose friends.”
PC party members will vote Saturday in a delegated convention to pick a leader to replace former party leader and premier Jim Prentice.
Prentice announced he was quitting politics in May 2015 after the PCs lost the election to Premier Rachel Notley’s NDP.
Current PC legislature member Richard Starke and party member Byron Nelson are also running for the top job.
Kenney, a Conservative cabinet minister under former prime minister Stephen Harper, believes he has the majority of delegates needed to win.
“We’re very confident,” he said.
“We believe that the majority or all of the delegates in the 80 of the 87 constituencies were elected to support this unity campaign.
“But we’re not going to take any one of those votes for granted. We’re going to continue to work hard over the next 24 hours to win the confidence of the some 1,300 or 1,400 delegates here.”
Kenney has said only a merger can prevent vote splitting in the 2019 election and another election win by Notley.
Starke said he’s disappointed the exchange of ideas in the race was eclipsed by debates over Kenney’s plan.
“There has been very little talk about policy, and that’s frustrating to me,” Starke said in an interview.
“It’s politicians that think about the next election and that’s where their focus ends. People who are nation builders think not just about the next election, they think about the next generation.”