Unity plan complex for a simple goal
Iwanted to write the “I read the Alberta PC-Wildrose pact so you don’t have to” column, but I find myself sitting here at the keyboard thinking it all looks an awful lot like a book of instructions for solving a Rubik’s Cube. Almost no one on earth can have learned how to solve a Rubik’s Cube from one of those damned books. The plan for solving the cube was inevitably more complicated to describe than the puzzle was to solve. ( Which is not to say that I ever managed ...)
So it will go, no doubt, with the process of unifying Alberta’s rightwing parties. The unity program, as signed by Wildrose Leader Brian Jean and Progressive Conservative Leader Jason Kenney on Thursday, is an amusing, baffling tangle of ad hoc bodies and tight deadlines. It contemplates the creation of an interim joint board, a policy committee, a leadership election committee, and a nominations committee, which in its turn will make rules for 87 Alberta electoral constituencies.
Each of these constituencies is, within the next six weeks, supposed to form an interim unity party board of directors, with representation from existing PC and Wildrose associations: those temporary boards are then supposed to elect a permanent board to locally operate a party that might not end up existing after the parties hold provincewide deal- ratification referendums in July. In the meantime, the caucuses of the two parties are supposed to get together more or less immediately and pick a mutually acceptable, neutral interim leader for the unified party that isn’t a thing yet.
I am leaving out some complications, believe it or not, and I am not sure the text of the unity deal answers all the possible questions. But the important thing, after all, is to get the actual organizational cores of the Progressive Conservative and Wildrose parties of Alberta — the few hundreds of people who are the essential motive forces within each institution — to accept unity as a practical fact.
It is a question of perceived legitimacy. The language of the unity deal might just as well be the text of the Necronomicon or The Faerie Queene, as long as it con- vinces everyone that, yes, unity is really happening.
The PC-Wildrose deal makes explicit what was always suspected by students of Alberta election law, and what some people thought was an insurmountable obstacle to unity. Money in the existing bank accounts of the two parties cannot be combined, exchanged between the parties, or transferred to the new united entity. The two parties thus seem destined, after they become electorally defunct, to have ghostly afterlives as balance sheets.
Something of the kind happened with Saskatchewan’s Progressive Conservative Party after most of its members defected to the Saskatchewan Party in 1997. They left behind a fat trust fund ( far larger than anything at stake in Alberta) that was tied up in litigation for most of the next 20 years. Top Wildrosers and PCs seem to have concluded that the cash in their war chests is modest enough to walk away from, possibly forever, with no bitterness.
We shall see if Wildrose diehards agree. The two parties will have referendums on the unity deal at around the same time in July. With the PCs, the bargain needs only majority support. But the deal collapses unless it gets at least 75 per cent on the Wildrose side. Leading Wildrosers like MLA Drew Barnes are making confident noises. But what if there exists enough of a socially conservative Wildrose true-believer bloc to sabotage this dream?
In theory, these members should find Jason Kenney attractive as the head of a unified conservative party. In practice, some evangelical Protestants may see him as a Dantean arch- traitor: a devious papist who was part of a Conservative federal government that enforced a grand truce on abortion, connected the last dots on same- sex marriage, and irksomely increased immigration.
In the Wildrose Party’s 2009 leadership race, the libertarian Danielle Smith — now a talk radio host — ran against a more socially conservative rival, a chiropractor named Mark Dyrholm, who has accused Smith of being a liberal flake. She just barely cleared three-quarters of the Wildrose vote at that time, getting 76.8 per cent. Her coup involved a pragmatic, eloquent public endorsement by an influential so- con intellectual, the old Alberta Report editor Link Byfield. He is no longer around to help the twin causes of conservative unity and Jason Kenney, as he undoubtedly might if he were alive.
The stringent, non- negotiating evangelicals who founded the Wildrose party gave Smith no end of trouble after Dyrholm lost. Their ability to generate static and to argue hot, churchy resolutions at party general meetings was a major factor in Smith losing her nerve and attempting to defect to the PCs in late 2014. If they still like the idea of a tough, traditionalist Wildrose Party and a soggy, centrist PC Party existing separately, they have a real chance to save that structure — and to deliver a crippling blow to both Brian Jean and Jason Kenney.
AN AMUSING, BAFFLING TANGLE OF AD HOC BODIES.