It would be interesting to know what Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has to say about the call by the founder of her party’s influential Take Back Alberta (TBA) faction to his supporters to use the NDP’s upcoming leadership race to infiltrate the Opposition party and try to elect its leader.
On November 17 last year, David Parker promised in a rambling tweet that when Rachel Notley announced her plan to resign as leader of the NDP, “We will sell more memberships in their party than the unions and the green activists combined, and they will refuse to accept the results of their own leadership race.”
On January 16, the day Notley announced her plan to step down, David Parker tweeted: “Take Back Alberta will be travelling the province in the coming months encouraging people to buy memberships in the NDP and make their voices heard. … When the NDP cancel their leadership race, we will know they no longer believe in democracy.”
Now, Parker has a lot to say on a social media on any given day, a lot of which sounds pretty unhinged, and on its face this scheme appears to be bonkers. Still, it’s said here he has presented both the United Conservative Party (UCP) government and the NDP with a problem.
The UCP’s problem is that, for most Albertans, there appears to be no light at all between Take Back Alberta and the governing party officially led by Smith.
There have been too many headlines like the one over Calgary Herald political commentator Don Braid’s column last November 5 – “social conservatives completely control Danielle Smith’s party” – for it to be otherwise. So plenty of Albertans are bound to be skeptical about Smith’s claim that no matter what TBA tells her she will “govern for all Albertans.”
At this point, with TBA controlling the UCP’s governance board, it appears that they are essentially the same political entity.
So this makes the call by TBA’s founder and putative leader for his supporters to join the NDP and either engineer a hostile takeover of the Opposition party or create an embarrassing battle to control it something virtually unprecedented in Canadian political history.
In the absence of a statement to the contrary from Premier Smith, it amounts to a declaration by Alberta’s governing party that it approves of an organized effort by its operatives and members to sabotage the operations of the Opposition party through the creation of a Trojan horse.
This is not a good look for a party that supposedly advocates democracy!
For the NDP – and particularly for Amanda Freistadt, the Opposition party’s newly named chief returning officer – this means that even if Parker is just blowing hot air, they need to be serious about setting rules for the leadership contest that will prevent TBA/UCP members from being able to try to hijack the party.
TBA and Parker, of course, will cry foul no matter what the NDP decides to do, so that need not be a particular concern. Moreover, it seems likely most Albertans would understand and quietly sympathize with any effort by the NDP to ensure the integrity of its leadership vote in the face of threats by an influential UCP figure to sabotage and neutralize its leadership race.
That this is not the way Parliamentary democracy is supposed to work goes without saying, although schemes like this are not completely without precedent in Alberta.
Readers will recall that in 2016, when the NDP was in power, the organizer of an anti-NDP petition campaign named George Clark advocated a similar stunt and got nowhere. At the time, then NDP provincial secretary Chris O’Halloran said about 250 would-be infiltrators were identified and had their applications rejected.
There was no question then, though, that the leaders of either of the two conservative opposition parties in the Legislature – the Progressive Conservatives or the Wildrose Party – would have endorsed such a covert scheme.
There has also been a tradition in Alberta of efforts by activist groups of various stripes to take over moribund fringe parties. The Alberta Party got its start as an alliance of far-right separatist groups in the 1980s, and when many members left to join the fledgling Wildrose Alliance in 2009, a group of more progressive members succeeded in changing the party’s focus.
And in 2016, the much-diminished Social Credit Party was taken over by a group of anti-abortion activists who renamed it the Pro-Life Alberta Political Association. It appears now to operate not as a true political party but as a social conservative political action committee that is able to issue tax receipts. This, it is fair to argue, is an attempt to abuse Canadian tax laws intended to support our democratic Canada’s system of government.
But the key difference about the TBA scheme is that there is nothing moribund about the NDP, which has formed the largest Opposition in Alberta history and, notwithstanding the hopeful claims of some UCP supporters that it will surely collapse without Notley at the helm, stands a credible chance of returning to government in Alberta with a new leader.
Assuming it’s not just an annoying ruse, that makes Parker’s scheme to encourage TBA members to support some kind of Kamikaze candidate – to borrow a phrase – an effort to engage in political sabotage.
Premier Smith, whenever she returns from her vacation, needs to renounce it and denounce it, although we all know how likely that is.
Freistadt needs to ensure the NDP sets clear rules and enforces them to prevent the infiltration of the party leadership race by enemies of democracy.
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Nick Seebruch, editor
