The UCP and the future
BATTLE BEGINS FOR ALBERTA PARTY — IF WE CAN CALL IT THAT
There was a silencing, clarifying quality to Saturday’s conclusion of Alberta’s twin votes on merging its two main opposition parties. The Alberta Progressive Conservatives voted “Yes” to unification by a margin of 25,692-1,344; the Wildrose Party totals were 23,466 Yes, 1,132 No. These numbers look suspiciously similar, and maybe there is near- total overlap between the Yes voters on both sides.
But, after all, the thousand or so No voters on both sides may also be the same people.
And even if it’ s 2,000 grouchy Wild rose and PC diehards ... well, that wouldn’t make much difference, would it? It is still a rounding error.
The need for explicit, formal ratification of the unity plan offered a last chance for the Wildrose’s social-conservative original gangsters and the Progressive Conservatives’ disappointed continuity advocates to stop the whole scheme. They could at least have shown numerical strength before wandering off to join other parties or start new ones.
So where were they? Too busy on social media to turn up for a vote? Some of them will make a show of grouchily cutting up membership cards for political parties that are about to not exist anymore. The steamroller hath already passed over them.
The dual 95 per cent Yes victories seem to have surprised literally everyone. They obviously surprised journalists who had nervously been leaving room in their blitherings — I should say, our blitherings — for a different outcome. They sur- prised unity campaigners who had been working to secure votes as if the game were destined to go to overtime all along. And perhaps they surprised even the leaders of the two disappearing parties.
PC boss Jason Kenney, who will now face the Wildrose’s Brian Jean and others in a runoff for the United Conservative leadership, left a comment in his post- referendum speech about wishing to welcome, embrace, and listen to the No voters in his party. This seemed awfully generous to a dissenting five per cent. Any professional pollster who surveyed the Alberta PC party would expect to find at least this much support for belief in a flat Earth, or that brown cows give chocolate milk, or that Hitler is underappreciated as a painter.
The twin landslides are, I think, a phenomenon in themselves — a sign of the tremendous moral force that the desire to overthrow New Democratic government has gathered in parts of Alberta. The NDP’s supporters have been heckling the unity drive, arguing that their party’s 2015 election victory did not happen because of vote- splitting on the right. But it did happen partly because federal conservative voters in Alberta stayed home, as simple arithmetic makes apparent, and the presumptive 2019 election is bound to have a decidedly different shape from 2015’s.
The New Democrats may be right to think that Rachel Notley can campaign successfully, head- t o- head, against either Jason Kenney or Brian Jean. But if the New Democrats could choose, they would certainly rather have both leaders in the field against Notley, clobbering each other over the head occasionally. No one is likely to be fooled by their dismissals of a United Conservative Party.
Both Kenney and Jean can argue that they served as Members of Parliament in a fairly successful national government — Kenney, of course, having been one of its key ministers and animating spirits. The question now is what their campaigns against one another are going to look like. Is it simply going to be a test of personalities and résumés? Having built a big- tent party with convincing public support, they will hardly want to start trading below- the- belt personal blows.
But if there is a single meaningful, explicit policy difference between the two men, or for that matter between them and other possible candidates for the UCP leadership, I cannot name it. So far the prospective Kenney- Jean choice is 100 per cent a matter of identity politics. Do you want a taxfighting Latin Mass Catholic who has been a vanguard politician since he was in his teens? Or do you want the friendly guy whose family owns a large, lightly toasted chunk of Fort McMurray? Will they be putting forward different visions for Alberta’s future, or is this an instinctive, subjective choice, like choosing ice cream at Baskin-Robbins?
I trust we will know soon. Jean and Kenney alike have mostly engaged in emotional posturing against the NDP government so far. Both mentioned the NDP carbon tax in their victory speeches, and the Notley government has carelessly ensured that it will be relatively easy to abolish, since it keeps almost none of the revenue. No politician in sight, even among the bad- tempered continuity PCs, is offering the public a “keep the carbon tax and give a Marine Corps haircut to all the others” deal.
So at this point Alberta’s political future seems to involve a contest between two major parties. We have the New Democrats, who have handled enormous deficits and a declining provincial borrowing position by sticking their fingers in their ears and singing There Is Power In A Union very loudly. And we will have the United Conservatives, who have all said that they intend to start addressing enormous deficits by, er, getting rid of odious NDP taxes.
So far this is not even normally followed by an “and” followed by the usual braying about “cutting waste” or “gravy trains.” It has been enough for prospective UCP leaders to signal cultural bona fides by denouncing NDP government, and the carbon tax in particular, as a series of exercises in Alberta self- hatred. This is all very well, but perhaps now is the time for these gentlemen to start talking about what their Bill 2 might be.
THE DUAL 95% YES VICTORIES SEEM TO HAVE SURPRISED LITERALLY EVERYONE.