No way to defeat Kenney without damage to PCs

The government of Ukraine named Jason Kenney to its Order of Merit on the weekend. The Alberta PC Party did not.

Rules adopted by the party look like a way to kick Kenney out of the leadership contest if he shows any sign of damaging the party brand. Or hitting him with a $20,000 penalty for acting in an unseemly way. Or refusing to allow his candidacy in the first place.

Not only that, but he’ll have to disclose all details of his precampaign fundraising that goes to the budding Unite Alberta.

PC Party officials insist these are not anti-Kenney rules. The stricture against “causing harm or disrepute” to the party brand, they correctly point out, has been around for ages.

But Kenney is the candidate who wants to merge with Wildrose. For traditional PCs, there can be nothing more harmful than a candidate who wants to collapse their party.

So, the re-statement of this rule inevitably looks like it’s aimed at him. Especially since he is, so far, the only candidate of any kind.

Kenney’s backers expected this. When ex-PC minister Rick Orman organized a unite-the-right meeting in April, he told assembled conservatives they could expect a three-front war: “against the PC establishment, against the Wildrose establishment, and against the NDP.”

Orman, who backs Kenney, said Monday he’s “very unhappy with the way the party are handling this. It’s an attempt to gerrymander the process against one candidate and in favour of others. That’s just not fair.”

Other Kenney operatives were outraged by the party’s ruling that five of the 15 leadership delegates from each riding must be members of the riding board.

The Kenney loyalists say those delegates will be “establishment,” and thus anti-Kenney. He’d start the race with hundreds of delegates already against him.

Kenney’s people paint this as a potentially ruinous handicap.

Which is odd, since quite a few of the ridings lean to Kenney, and that likely means their delegates will too.

Party President Katherine O’Neill, the target of much of this background invective, points out that Kenney has as strong a chance as anyone of capturing those board delegates. He may have more, in fact, since he’s likely to be the best organized and funded.

Every way the party turns in this house of mirrors, Kenney’s looking back. He has all the angles covered.

He put the party in the impossible position of dealing with him, while fulfilling the clear mandate from party members to rebuild under the PC brand.

Some PCs would simply refuse to accept Kenney as a candidate. MLA Sandra Jansen, for one, argues the rules seem to disqualify him already.

Veteran operative Stephen Carter (who may run Jansen’s own leadership campaign) thinks that would be a disaster.

“I think that would be fatal to the party.

“I honestly think the best thing that could happen to the PC Party is that Jason Kenney runs, he runs a great campaign, and he loses.

“Then the party can say his idea was floated democratically, and defeated democratically.”

If Kenney is kicked out he would be an instant martyr. The whole conservative wing would be an instant flight risk.

If he wins the leadership, he’d head for talks with Wildrose, cutting loose the thousands of progressives he’s never cared about anyway.

Even if he loses, he could still claim the rules were stacked, further discrediting the PCs.

Jason Kenney is many things. He’s even a new member of the Ukrainian Order of Merit, so designated by President Petro Poroshenko.

But one thing he is not. A victim.