Keep an eye on the Alberta Party.

In Alberta you have to keep one eye on small political parties. It is still technically the case that no governing party, once it has lost power here, has ever gotten it back: when Alberta decides on a change of government, it will look for a vehicle that did not exist before, like the United Conservatives or Social Credit, or it will suddenly elevate a very minor party, as it did with the New Democrats in 2015.

So perhaps it is worth monitoring the activity of the Alberta Party, which received nine per cent of the vote in the provincial election a month ago and seemingly established itself as the strongest alternative to the UCP and the NDP, despite obtaining no legislature seats. What are the plucky underdogs up to?

Stop me if this shocks you, but the answer is “asking for a handout.” The Alberta Party’s leader, Stephen Mandel, told the Edmonton Journal earlier this week that he intends to petition new premier Jason Kenney for ... some sort of something or other. Mandel, the irascible former mayor of Edmonton and provincial health minister, suggests that the AP deserves money because 17 2,000 people voted for it and “We deserve to have some form of government funding in order to allow us to represent those people.”

This is an interesting statement. The accepted premise of our system of government is that an elected member of the legislature represents everybody in his constituency whether they voted for him or not. Guaranteeing this is one of the purposes of the secret ballot, and literally every victorious candidate pledges to represent everybody as soon as it is clear that he has won. Presumably the Alberta Party’s MLAS, if any had existed, would have made this promise on election night. It might even be thought dangerous or distasteful for a political party to suggest that it is not so — that individuals are actually entitled to government à la carte, and that they can only be “represented” by delegates whose partisan affiliation they consented to support.

No one ever seems to follow this logic to its natural end — namely, that all government of one man by others who may disagree is immoral, and that the ideal political system is anarchy. (Why be “represented” at all?) Yet the premise is in fact a commonly stated pretext for “proportional representation.” PR advocates say all the time that votes for some party are “wasted” if they don’t lead to the election of some particular person of sym

pathetic stripe, and an advantage often claimed for large multi-member ridings under PR is that the people who cast a ballot for the Meatball Party are more likely to be comfortable conferring with and petitioning a friendly Meatball Party legislator.

It sounds as though the Alberta Party should be supporting proportional representation, in specifically mixed-member form, but perhaps Mandel is too conventional for that, or maybe advocating PR now carries an even greater stench of loserdom than outright begging. The AP has failed spectacularly to define itself over the years, but the one thing that seems to be universally agreed is that it is “centrist.” Mandel, as a centrist, is apparently content just to ask for the money he would have been eligible for if his party had actually elected anybody.

However, it is not clear he is advocating for a per-vote subsidy of the sort that the federal government used to operate. It honestly sounds more like pleading for a one-time, one-off taxpayer present — a sort of metaphorical bronze medal, or perhaps a special achievement prize for finally driving the Alberta Liberals beyond even the outer fringes of Alberta politics.

Critics were quick to point out that 172,000 supporters must have almost 172,000 wallets, and that the Alberta Party need only convince those wallet-holders to open them, assuming those people truly agree with Mandel that only the AP can properly represent them in political life. The awkward fact is that the AP was more popular in the voting booth than it has ever been amidst Alberta pocketbooks. In May’s election, AP candidates got more than one-sixth of the votes of the winning UCP and well over one-quarter as many as the New Democrats. Yet over the course of 2018, the AP had raised only $274,000 in campaign contributions while the UCP was harvesting $5.3 million and the NDP $3.3 million.

This may lead the reader to the suspicion that marking an AP ballot was really just a way for habitual voters to express lazy displeasure with the two genuinely popular choices on the menu. On the other hand, if you have a vivid imagination, it might suggest that the AP is incredibly efficient at making use of the funds it is able to raise.

THE AP HAS FAILED SPECTACULARLY TO DEFINE ITSELF OVER THE YEARS. — COSH

Stephen Mandel