I’d like to say the rats are leaving the sinking ship, but I don’t think Travis Toews or Sonya Savage are rats, and I’m not certain the United Conservative Party (UCP) is sinking. With that caveat, it is a fact that Finance Minister Toews and Environment Minister Savage will not be seeking re-election as members of the version of the UCP led by Premier Danielle Smith.
Say what you will of the policies they advanced, both were capable cabinet ministers and members of what we might call the rapidly diminishing sane wing of the UCP. It is entirely understandable that neither of them would want to risk the damage to their reputations that would have been done by being part of a Smith Government with an electoral mandate.
Toews, MLA for Grande Prairie-Wapiti and finance minister in both Jason Kenney’s and Smith’s governments, ran for the leadership of the party against Smith and was narrowly defeated on the sixth ballot. Ms. Smith had 53.8 per cent of the final vote; Toews had 46.2 per cent.
An accountant and a rancher, the first-term MLA was a powerful and influential minister under Kenney, much less so under Smith.
It’s said here that as a genuinely austerity minded Conservative, there is no way he could have been very happy with Smith’s high-spending approach to contesting the expected 2023 election. It must have nearly killed him to publicly tout his February 28 budget.
In a letter he posted on social media, Toews said that after “deliberate and prayerful consideration, I have decided not to seek re-election.”
Savage, a lawyer and energy industry lobbyist before running for the first time in the 2019 provincial election, was well-known and respected in the Alberta oilpatch when she was given the energy portfolio by Kenney. As energy minister she opposed the end of the polluter-pay principle advocated by lobbyist Danielle Smith and later by Premier Danielle Smith.
In Smith’s first cabinet Savage was demoted to environment minister. She also faced a strong challenge in her Calgary-North West riding from the NDP’s Michael Lisboa-Smith.
Her decision was reported early this afternoon by Radio Canada’s Jean–Emmanuel Fortier on social media.
Responding to Toews’s announcement, Opposition Finance Critic and former NDP environment minister Shannon Philips, wished him well in a tweet. “I do not admire his record … but he conducts himself with decency and is mostly grounded in reality, unlike the new crop of Smith candidates.”
However, the Lethdridge-West NDP MLA criticized Toews’s record in a tweet thread for, among other things, being “one of the largest drivers of costs on Albertans.”
“He cost Albertans over $600 million in higher income taxes, he gave Alberta the highest auto insurance rates in Canada, he grabbed control of teachers’ pensions, without consultation, provoking an unnecessary conflict with educators, and during the pandemic, he appeared to be the only person in Alberta who figured a pay cut for nurses and other health professionals was ‘reasonable,’” she said. (I have edited her statements, made in a series of tweets, to summarize them in a single quote.)
As for Savage, well, she will have to live with ignominy of being the minister in charge of Kenney’s notorious “War Room,” officially and misleadingly known as the Canadian Energy Centre.
Still, both were among the more capable and sensible UCP ministers. As such, they will probably be missed, and not just by the UCP.
It remains to be seen which other members of Smith’s cabinet, if any, conclude that discretion is the better part of valour.
Naturally, as a result of Toews’s timing, there have also been rumours that Smith may call an early election before the scheduled May 29 date while she still enjoys some lingering political benefit for not being Jason Kenney.
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