No one should be shocked by the fact Alberta Premier Danielle Smith not only survived her leadership review vote but posted an absurd sounding 91.5 per cent approval rating.
The explanation is simple and obvious on its face, and not necessarily good news for the United Conservative Party (UCP).
To wit: There’s almost no one left in the UCP except the extremists.
The “lunatics,” as former premier Jason Kenney called them not long before they skidded him, now utterly dominate the party.
And of course they’re happy with Smith’s performance – for the most part, she’s delivering precisely the policies they demand. And when she doesn’t, a tip of her tinfoil cap to the chemtrails above or a boot aimed at a lonely transgender athlete below is sufficient to distract them.
So when Smith told her jubilant supporters – essentially everyone in the hall in Red Deer last night – that “our party is more united than it has ever been,” she spoke the unvarnished truth.
But agreeing with the first part of her statement – “our conservative movement is stronger than it’s ever been” – requires a little more nuance.
You could make a case it’s true if you go by the obvious unity of what’s left of Alberta’s big-tent Conservative movement of yore. But a large percentage of the old-style Progressive Conservatives and not-so-progressive but still sane Conservatives have abandoned the ship.
How they will vote in the next general election remains an open question, but the MAGAfication project that really got under way when Kenney was booted to make way for Smith is now for all intents and purposes complete. And it does not guarantee the UCP a victory in an election as the UPC would like you to believe.
Albertans were not well served by local media in the lead-up to this relatively meaningless vote, thanks to the addiction of lazy journalists to portraying any event in which a ballot is cast as a horserace. Where was the other horse in this race?
A leadership review is like a North Korean election. The leader is essentially running without opposition – although with the theoretical ability of eligible electors to vote no.
Thankfully, there’s still a little more freedom in the Democratic People’s Republic of Alberta than the DPRK, so Smith had to be satisfied with a mere 91.5 per cent. She still has a little way to go to catch up to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, who the last time he faced a similar ballot seems to have captured 100 per cent of the vote.
Well, it’s a benchmark Smith can strive for next time.
Meanwhile, for Smith’s fan club at Postmedia to suggest that a 91.5 per cent victory in a race against no one is somehow the equivalent of NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi’s 86 per cent victory against several credible candidates, each with a base of support in the Opposition party, is preposterous and a little sad.
Likewise, when former Progressive Conservative deputy premier Thomas Lukaszuk noted last night that at the peak of their popularity, neither Peter Lougheed nor Ralph Klein received 95% approval, we need to remember that the PC Party in the heydays of those two premiers was a true brokerage with a moderate ideology and broad appeal. Of course the leaders of such a party couldn’t marshal that kind of support.
“All leaders with totalitarian tendencies get +90% support scores. Yet on the outside crowds of millions gather to oppose them. It’s funny how that works,” tweeted Lukaszuk, who grew up in Poland when it was part of the Soviet bloc. “It reminds me of my childhood.”
The UCP is not the next iteration of the Progressive Conservative Party. It is a lineal descendent of the Wildrose Party, and a successor to the Social Credit League – which under William Aberhart arguably formed an even crazier government, at least so far.
I imagine in 1935 or ’36, though, that Bible Bill could have summoned up a 90-per-cent-plus leadership review vote too.
By 1937, though, not so much. That year the voters in Premier Aberhart’s Okotoks-High River riding tried to recall him. His government repealed the Recall Act poste haste. Expect history to repeat itself if anyone looks as if they could have a chance of using Jason Kenney’s legislation of the same name to unseat a UCP leader. But I digress.
The Red Deer AGM passed all 35 of the policy resolutions put on the agenda for debate, including recognizing “the importance of CO2 to life and Alberta’s prosperity” by abandoning all net-zero targets and stating “CO2 is a foundational nutrient for all life on Earth.”
You can’t make this stuff up. The UCP has gone deep into climate change denialism and it’s likely to go deeper.
Readers may have seen suggestions in media that now Smith’s leadership review is successfully concluded, she will start to act more seriously.
Don’t believe it. The extremists are going to continue to call the tune and, insomuch as she might disagree with them, Smith can be expected to continue to dance to it.
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Nick Seebruch, editor
