UCP cabinet minister and former leadership candidate Rajan Sawhney says she won’t be running in this spring’s election.
UCP cabinet minister and former leadership candidate Rajan Sawhney says she won’t be running in this spring’s election. Credit: Alberta Newsroom / Flickr Credit: Alberta Newsroom / Flickr

Trade, Immigration and Multiculturalism Minister Rajan Sawhney, one of the seven contenders to lead the United Conservative Party (UCP) last year, won’t be running for re-election this spring.
 
“Today, I met with Premier Smith to inform her that I will not be seeking the nomination and re-election for Calgary-North East,” Sawhney said in a brief social media post late Friday.
 
Despite stating that “I continue to be a strong supporter of Premier Smith and her leadership,” Sawhney’s announcement doesn’t exactly come as a shocker.
 
She was one of the leadership candidates who strongly criticized then-candidate Danielle Smith’s Sovereignty Act promise, calling it “an unconstitutional distraction.”
 
“She calls it ‘sovereignty,’” Sawhney warned in a Calgary Herald op-ed last August. “It is a gentle word for separation.”
 
All the Sovereignty Act would do, she sneered accurately enough in the piece, is “enrich a lot of lawyers. It provides no value to Albertans, beyond thumping our chests and pretending we’re doing something to show those dastardly feds.”
 
Well, she nailed it, but by doing so she didn’t really enhance her chances of playing a significant role in any future UCP government.
 
Moreover, in the leadership all-candidates’ forum, in which she proved to be a nimble debater, Sawhney bluntly concluded that if Smith won the UCP leadership it would guarantee the victory of Opposition NDP Leader Rachel Notley in the 2023 election.
 
That’s not the sort of thing Smith is likely ever to forget.
 
Yes, Smith did return her to cabinet, but that was an effort to keep the fractious UCP together through the next election, scheduled for May 29. The premier also put all the other leadership candidates with the sole exception of Chestermere-Strathmore MLA Leela Aheer in cabinet too.
 
Aheer came last in the leadership race and announced last fall that she wouldn’t be running again for the UCP.
 
Sawhney’s campaign was generously supported – she spent the most after Smith and Travis Toews – but her progressive-conservative pitch did not resonate with the far-right Take Back Alberta cadres who used the leadership election as a vehicle to dominate the party.
 
But for the similarly progressive-leaning Aheer’s dismal performance Sawhney would have come last.
 
Sawhney had been in hot water before when she, along with Aheer, assailed former premier Jason Kenney after he and other senior cabinet members were busted by a still-unknown photographer with a long lens while they dined and drank cheap whiskey on the rooftop patio of his Sky Palace office during the pandemic in June 2021.
 
Kenney would kick Ms. Aheer out of cabinet for her demand on social media that he apologize for ignoring COVID-19 mitigation protocols, but he let Sawhney remain, possibly because she had either the wisdom or good luck to have made her comment in Punjabi on a Calgary South Asian radio station.
 
Soon after, Kenney shuffled Sawhney from the community and social services portfolio to transportation.
 
The next big question is whether Toews, who has served both Kenney and Smith as finance minister, will stay or go.
 
“The rancher-accountant and UCP leadership race runner-up has been silent on his plans for the next election and the party has not released any news about nominating a candidate in his Grande Prairie-Wapiti riding,” Daveberta.ca author Dave Cournoyer reported on Friday.

David J. Climenhaga

David J. Climenhaga

David Climenhaga is a journalist and trade union communicator who has worked in senior writing and editing positions with the Globe and Mail and the Calgary Herald. He left journalism after the strike...