Hard on the heels of new a new poll indicating a majority of United Conservative Party voters want Jason Kenney gone, the premier was busy defending his decision to disqualify a couple of candidates tipped to beat pro-Kenney MLAs in a party nomination votes.
Meanwhile, voters in Fort McMurray-Lac La Biche head to the polls today, with the premier’s self-declared leadership rival, former Wildrose Party leader and Fort Mac area MP Brian Jean, expected to win. Jean had endorsed the two freshly dumped nomination candidates.
The unpopular premier’s own date with destiny, his party leadership review, is scheduled to take place in Red Deer on Apr. 9.
And to think, for more than four decades under the Progressive Conservative Party’s steady hand, this province’s politics were the most boring in Confederation!
For a political columnist, it just doesn’t get any better than this.
The new Think HQ poll reported last Wednesday indicates that 59 per cent of the Albertans who voted for the UCP in 2019 now want the premier gone. Which means, if the survey of 1,136 Albertans got it right, that UCP voters feel just about the same way as everyone else, since the pollster concluded 61 per cent of all eligible voters would like to say goodbye to Kenney.
That’s true without much variation throughout the province, according to the poll, except within shouting distance of the U.S. border in Alberta’s consistently conservative deep south—where 67 per cent want the premier out!
This can’t be good news for a guy facing a leadership review in just under four weeks. It does go to show, I guess, that you really can annoy almost all of the people all of the time.
Meanwhile, as predicted in this space on Feb. 18, Mr. Kenney has disqualified former Clearwater County municipal councillor Tim Hoven from challenging UCP House Leader and Environment Minister Jason Nixon in the Rimbey—Rocky Mountain House—Sundre riding.
There’s no question Hoven was farther to the right than Nixon, who is no New Democrat, but if the thwarted nomination candidate’s claim is true that he was dumped for being registered on an inactive social media account, platform unnamed, that seems a bit of a stretch for a party that loves to scream about cancel culture.
I suppose we’ll have to wait to pass judgment, though, until we know what the social media platform was.
The real reason, it’s much more likely, is that Hoven was widely thought to have an insurmountable lead over Nixon among UCP members in the riding.
Also dumped last week was Jodie Gateman, supported by the anti-Kenney Take Back Alberta group in her challenge of MLA and UCP deputy whip Joseph Schow for the UCP nomination in Cardston—Siksika in southernmost Alberta. She too was disqualified for a social media post, the details of which have also not yet been revealed.
So it’s hard to say if the premier’s claim is justified that if either had been nominated the UCP could have faced another Lake of Fire—a reference to the 2012 discovery of a recorded sermon by a Wildrose Party candidate who doubled as a fundamentalist pastor asserting that gays and lesbians were bound for eternal damnation.
One has to be skeptical that no matter what she said, any candidate could be defeated in the region around Cardston for being too conservative. But that doesn’t mean that such a revelation couldn’t have had an impact elsewhere in the province.
The Lake of Fire incident may well have ruined Wildrose leader Danielle Smith’s dream of knocking off the Progressive Conservative Dynasty, a task left to the NDP’s Rachel Notley to complete in 2015.
Notley is now the leader of the opposition NDP, which is leading in several polls of voter intentions for the next provincial election. Contested NDP nomination races are also taking place in many ridings, but mostly without the theatrics associated with the UCP.
Meanwhile, Jean, who recently returned to politics vowing to replace his former rival for the leadership of the UCP back in 2017, will be in a position to cause considerable mischief for Kenney in the lead-up to the leadership review if he wins as expected on March 15.
But as Calgary Herald political columnist Don Braid pointed out, as horrible as the premier’s latest polling numbers may seem, they don’t mean Kenney can’t survive his leadership review on Apr. 9.
“Kenney retains some strength among loyal UCP voters,” the long-time observer of Alberta politics wrote, reminding his readers that “only party members will make the decision on the floor of a convention in Red Deer.”
As Think HQ boss Marc Henry pointed out in Braid’s column, it really all depends on who shows up for the UCP annual general meeting in Red Deer—where by Wednesday there were almost 5,000 people prepared to put down $100 bucks to be there.
You can probably count on it that people like Hoven and Gatemen, not to mention many of their supporters, will be doing their best to pack the Cambridge Hotel in Red Deer, site of many storied Alberta political showdowns.
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Nick Seebruch, editor
