Last week, the campaign brain trust for Alberta’s beleaguered premier managed to find 19 old Tory MLAs willing to sign their names to an open letter begging United Conservative Party members not to vote to change horses in mid-stream.*
The first question a lot of Albertans asked when the letter warning UCP members about the terrible things that might happen if they persist with the urge to dump Jason Kenney as party leader first surfaced on social media was, how could they manage to find only 19 old Tories who were prepared to sign the thing?
This is a good question, I suppose. But if you consider the subterranean approval ratings Kenney has been getting lately, a better one might have been, “How did they manage to find so many?”
Kenney’s campaign team must have been so excited when the ex-MLAs agreed to sign up that it could hardly concentrate. Leastways, as more than one political observer pointed out, the first line of the letter was almost incoherent—or at least required the reader to imagine what its missing word or words might be.
It began: “In only a few days, United Conservatives will begin voting or not they will stand behind Premier Jason Kenney heading into the 2023 provincial election.”
Say what?
The signatories—or whoever wrote the epistle for them—went on to beg readers “to think long and hard” before turning thumbs down on Kenney.
In the nightmare world such a vote would precipitate, they warned, the ridiculous policies Kenney’s government is racing to enact would grind to a halt, the doomed fight against the federal carbon tax would falter, the almost universally reviled changes to Alberta’s once envied school curriculum would wither, and, worst of all, there would be a “real threat of an NDP government!”
I know that some of you may be thinking, what’s not to like about that? But in the minds of the letter’s authors, this is a Prairie dystopia almost too frightening to contemplate.
One thing the letter most certainly got right was its assertion that under former premier Rachel Notley, Alberta’s NDP Opposition is “disciplined, organized, and well-funded.”
A few of the names on the letter might carry a little weight—if you’ve got a long memory.
But in addition to the likes of former cabinet ministers like Shirley McClellan, Iris Evans, and Patricia Nelson—all pretty influential in days of yore—there are non-entities George VanderBurg, Gary Bikman, and Bruce Rowe.
The latter pair, in case you were wondering, are former Wildrose MLAs who joined their leader, Danielle Smith, in that party’s notorious walk of shame to the Progressive Conservative benches of the Legislature on Dec. 17, 2014, a day that continues to live in infamy in certain Alberta circles.
Like Smith, the Wildrose leader who replaced her, Brian Jean, is campaigning for the leadership of the UCP in the event the members who vote, be they real or imagined, decide to skid Kenney in the extended mail-in balloting that began Friday and is set to end on May 11. Jean was sworn in as an MLA last week.
The results, the UCP says, will be announced on May 18.
The remaining names in this epistolary blast from the past were: Wayne Drysdale, Steve Young, Genia Leskiw, Jeff Johnson, Greg Weadick, David Dorward, Mary Anne Jablonski, Alana DeLong, Chrsitine Cusanelli, Shiraz Shariff, Everett McDonald, Dave Quest, and Luke Ouellette.
Readers will notice no living former Conservative premier joined the list of former Progressive Conservative MLAs who signed on to Mr. Kenney’s bandwagon. Although with the new rules for party elections, there’s no guarantee there won’t be a couple of dead ones. Peter Lougheed? Ralph Klein? C’mon down!
Given the parlous situation in which Premier Kenney now finds himself—widely disliked by Alberta voters of all stripes, if recent polls are to be believed, and obviously in trouble with his own party—one has to wonder if such a letter will have its intended effect, or quite a different one.
Who can forget the Campaign of Fear launched in Melcor Developments’ Jasper Avenue headquarters in downtown Edmonton on May 1, 2015, as it started to look as if the NDP might actually be on track win the general election four days later?
Do you remember the dire warnings from the five prominent and well-heeled businessmen at the press conference about what might happen if voters rashly decided to suddenly change course after only 44 years?
The five businessmen in the boardroom that day—John Cameron, Paul Verhesen, Doug Goss, Ashif Mawji, and Tim Melton, in the order they sat at the Melcor boardroom table—speculated that Alberta voters weren’t “thinking straight,” called NDP leader Notley’s policy proposals “amateur,” and complained that New Democrats “do not understand how economics work.”
The effect, as a student of human psychology might have predicted, seems to have been the opposite of that intended. Leastways, voters either ignored the businessmen’s entreaties and voted NDP anyway, or voted that way to spite them.
It seems quite possible that many members of the UCP now contemplating what to do about their unpopular leader will turn out to be just as likely to listen to the entreaties of 19 mostly forgotten Progressive Conservative MLAs.
*Changing horses in mid-stream is a mainstream political metaphor of declining utility in an era when “ford” is rarely used as a verb and “mid-stream” is a phrase a fellow’s more likely to hear on being handed a small jar at a recently re-privatized diagnostic laboratory, but readers should understand just the same what the author had in mind.
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Nick Seebruch, editor
