A spectre is haunting the UCP – the spectre of Rachel Notley. That seemed to be the key message to be had from Tuesday night’s final United Conservative Party (UCP) leadership candidates’ “debate.”
As the frontrunning candidate, former Wildrose Party leader Danielle Smith, put it to the candidate who is likely her strongest challenger, former UCP cabinet minister Travis Toews, Premier Jason Kenney and his cabinet “allowed themselves to be bullied and pushed around by the NDP!”
This was pure gaslighting.
After all, the UCP was the party whose leader handed out earplugs for his MLAs in the Legislature to stuff in their heads when the NDP spoke.
As leader of the NDP, Notley leads a caucus of 23 MLAs that faces a government caucus of 61 in the House. (There are also three independents in the 87-member Legislature, one in exile from the NDP and two from the UCP – one of those, Todd Loewen, was on stage last night running for the leadership.)
So this is simply not a government that can be bullied by the NDP, even if, for a brief moment in political history, both parties accepted the need to take some measures to control the greatest public health threat in a century, which Smith apparently dismisses as a fraud and an excuse for an assault on freedom.
But the prospect of an NDP victory in the general election expected next spring, personified by former premier and Opposition leader Notley, loomed over the seven candidates on the stage at downtown Edmonton’s Citadel Theatre.
Not even the current surge of money into provincial coffers could chase it away – when Toews tried to take credit for the surfeit of cash by claiming, “we inherited a fiscal trainwreck, my friends,” Loewen accurately responded, “what you inherited was high oil prices!”
And it was the threat presented by Notley and the NDP – not the usual lightning rod for the UCP’s cartoonish fury at Confederation, Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau – that surely motivated the three leading candidates last night to pull their punches in the so-called debate.
Of course, it’s too much to expect any intramural debate among candidates to lead the same party to generate many sparks, let alone draw blood.
All must consider the greater horror than losing the leadership race – that somehow they’ll have to wear the blame for losing the coming election.
So it was too much to hope there would many genuinely sharp moments among Smith, Toews, and the other former Wildrose leader, Brian Jean, all of whom have some chance of replacing departing Premier Jason Kenney.
You’re just not going to hear a you-had-an-option-sir moment in a party leadership debate – not if the party has any prospect of maintaining a façade of unity after the dust has settled.
So it’s no surprise the question that generated the loudest debate of the night was about arts and culture in Alberta, not exactly a Conservative strong suit. The reason was fairly obvious: the stakes are low, and the chance of a pointed jab puncturing the potential leader is therefore negligible.
The possibility of damage was further limited by a format that started discussion on each topic with a softball question lobbed by the moderator that clearly delineated the limits of debate, and kept the responses too short for real damage.
The closest thing to a punch that actually landed came when Smith asked Toews to indicate if he would stick around as leader if he lost, and the former finance minister demurred to provide a clear answer.
But who can blame the man for not wanting to step aboard a ship piloted by the political equivalent of Philip Francis Queeg, the UCP commander most likely to start a hunt for Justin Trudeau’s strawberries?
A little earlier, Toews tried a similar gambit, reminding the audience of how Smith crossed the floor of the House to the Progressive Conservative benches in 2014, famously dooming the re-election chances of then Conservative premier Jim Prentice and all those who followed her.
But that story’s long in the tooth, and it glanced off Smith judging from the cheers of the crowd every time she fired off a call for her Alberta Sovereignty Act – colourfully summed up by former Kenney principal secretary Howard Anglin recently as the Alberta Suicide Act.
The three former Kenney Cabinet ministers who now seem to have little chance to win – Rebecca Schulz, Leela Aheer and Rajan Sawhney – added their voices to the night’s mild criticism of the proposed sovereignist legislation.
Schulz – whom my colleague Dave Counroyer tweeted “would be a frontrunner if this were the old PC Party” – warned of the danger Smith’s anti-constitutional obsession could split the already disunited party asunder.
Aheer called Smith’s signature policy “an excuse to leave Canada when we should be looking for ways to lead Canada.”
And Sawhney advised the frontrunner to wait for the general election before trying to enact obviously unconstitutional and inevitably controversial legislation. “These are the kinds of things that require a mandate from Albertans,” she pleaded.
Smith shrugged it all off with the claim the party has a mandate to fight with Ottawa thanks to Premier Kenney’s 2021 equalization referendum, a bit of political theatre no one took seriously at the time.
For the most part, though, Smith’s opponents used their debate challenges to deny her opportunities to grandstand – either to cost her a few votes or acknowledging her lead is now unassailable.
As for Jean, he put some effort into sounding more grownup and lawyerly than Smith – not a difficult challenge – without much effect on the audience’s obvious enthusiasm for the frontrunner.
He promised to include all of the other six candidates in his cabinet – assuming they all win seats, I suppose – and argued he was the man for the job because he’d never had to kick anyone out of caucus.
He forgot, apparently, that in May 2016 he tried to fire his finance critic, Derek Fildebrandt, and didn’t quite succeed.
The UCP will mail out ballots to its members starting Friday. The results of the vote to choose which of the seven candidates will get to replace Kenney as premier – a decision of no more than 3.5 per cent of eligible Alberta voters – will be announced on Oct. 6.
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