Kenney’s dream of Tory unity faces three major challenges

It won’t be easy to merge Alberta’s right, write Peter Loewen and Jonah Goldberg.

This week, Jason Kenney announced his bid to lead the Progressive Conservative Party of Alberta. The party had once been dominant, ruling the province for 43 consecutive years. That run came to an end last year, when Rachel Notley led the Alberta NDP to its first majority government.

Kenney’s pitch is not that he will restore a once-great party. Instead, he proposes to merge the Progressive Conservatives with the official Opposition Wildrose Party. In essence, he is asking for a mandate to end the once-great party and create something new, which can then defeat the NDP in the next election.

Kenney is proposing a three-part high-wire act: winning the leadership of the party, completing a successful merger and winning the next election under a unified party — all in less than three years.

To be sure, Kenney is a kind of politician we rarely see in Canada. He understands — esteems even — the transactional nature of the politics. He is notoriously hard working. His political positions are strongly held and derived from first principles. But not all of this will make the task ahead of him easier.

First, Kenney has to win leadership of a party to which he is seemingly hostile. He is arguing in essence that the party should cease to exist in its present form. Such a strategy has not worked well in the past.

In 2012, Nathan Cullen argued for an alliance between the federal Liberals and NDP in his bid for the leadership of the latter. He lost. In 2002, both Grant Hill and Diane Ablonczy ran for the leadership of the Canadian Alliance on platforms of co-operation with the Progressive Conservatives. They both lost badly.

There is a lesson in this: if you want to win the leadership of a party, tell its partisans that you will lead it to victory. Do not tell them you plan to fold it up.

Kenney does have a strategy to work around party members who oppose his candidacy: he can simply bring in new members. This is exactly the strategy that made Patrick Brown the leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party in 2015. A Progressive Conservative party led by Kenney will have a much different membership base than the current one.

Second, Kenney will need to lead a merger and eventually win the leadership of the new party. The first part of that equation is easier than the second. The leader of the Wildrose Party, Brian Jean, has signalled that he would be willing to negotiate a merger.

As caucus colleagues in Ottawa for several years, there is likely a reservoir of good will on which both can draw. The difficulty will come in convincing the partisans of both parties that they are getting the better end of a bargain and convincing Jean to stand aside. And then Kenney needs to convince members that he is the one to lead the new party.

The third challenge is the greatest one: winning an election. The four-decade rule of the Progressive Conservatives was not a period of unalloyed conservatism. Instead, the party won on two broad strategies. First, provide competent and relatively centrist government, an easy task when oil prices are up. Second, convince Albertans that there is no other choice, either in standing up to Ottawa or in maintaining a vibrant economy.

Such arguments no longer carry. On both the left and the right, voters can find parties that provide credible alternatives to a party of the centre or centre right. Kenney’s challenge will thus be in creating a party that is sufficiently acceptable to a large number of centrist voters, while not hewing so far to the middle that he invites the creation of another alternative on the right.

Kenney is a deeply talented, committed and seasoned politician, but he has never before faced a task like this.

There is a lesson in this: if you want to win the leadership of a party, tell its partisans that you will lead it to victory.