A photo of UCP leadership candidate Travis Toews, between the blue flags, with 14 of his supporters from the Government Caucus in the Alberta Legislature.
UCP leadership candidate Travis Toews, between the blue flags, with 14 of his supporters from the Government Caucus in the Alberta Legislature.

Talk about your awkward family portrait! Former finance minister Travis Toews, the United Conservative Party (UCP) establishment’s choice to replace Jason Kenney as Alberta’s premier, lined up with 14 of the party’s MLAs at his campaign launch in Calgary Friday for a family portrait intended to demonstrate that he’s the man most likely to be able to hold the disunited party together through another election. 

Kenney was rejected by party members in April’s leadership review vote, but he’s still hanging on to the province’s top political job long enough to influence its choice of his successor, and his political strategists are doing their best to spin Toews as the inevitable frontrunner.

That ain’t necessarily so. Team Kenney wasn’t good enough to get their boss sufficient votes in the review to hang onto his job, despite doing their best to keep a finger on the scales. Nor was it able to keep former Wildrose leader Brian Jean, who had vowed to topple Mr. Kenney and replace him, from winning the by-election for the UCP on the Ides of March in Fort McMurray-Lac La Biche. 

So there’s a strong case to be made that Mr. Jean was and remains the front-runner in this contest. 

Still, Toews has certain advantages. He looks and sounds like a grownup, even if he advocates the same old austerity claptrap as Kenney. This makes him a rare bird in Kenney’s cabinet and caucus. 

And unlike his departing boss, as others have observed, he knows how to keep his trap shut when it’s not to his advantage to continue yodelling. Indeed, he’s kept it so tightly shut that what he actually believes is something of a mystery.

So the family portrait at Rotary House in Cowtown’s Stampede Park was clearly intended to convey the message that he’s the man to beat, and he’ll be too hard to beat to bother trying very hard. That won’t deter Jean, or that other former Wildrose leader, Danielle Smith, but it might put off a couple of credible candidates. 

Which is where the awkward part comes in. I mean, every family has its embarrassing cousins, but when the family in question is a political party, you don’t necessarily want Shane Getson, the MLA for Lac Ste. Anne-Parkland who just suggested in a reposted Facebook meme that the prime minister ought to be lynched, showing up at the family reunion.

There he was, prominently on view on the left-hand side of Toews’s family portrait. Well, at least Getson is farther away from Toews than the man on the far right, Peace River MLA Dan Williams, best known for his fervent anti-abortion views, objections to public health measures during the pandemic, and his attacks on Alberta Health Services.

Between those fabulous bookends, from left to right, were Agriculture Minister Nate Horner, Drumheller-Stettler; Advanced Education Minster Demetrios Nicolaides, Calgary-Bow; Tracy Allard, Grande Prairie; Matt Jones, Calgary South East; Grant Hunter, Taber-Warner; Jackie Armstrong-Homeniuk, Fort Saskatchewan-Vegreville; Community and Social Services Minister Jason Luan, Calgary-Foothills; Associate Status of Women Minister Whitney Issik, Calgary-Glenmore; Energy Minister Sonya Savage, Calgary-North West; Seniors and Housing Minister Josephine Pon, Calgary Beddington; Justice Minister Tyler Shandro, Calgary-Acadia; and Tanya Fir, Calgary-Peigan. 

Enough big names and Calgary MLAs to give Mr. Toews a dose of intramural credibility. In all, he said Friday he has the endorsement of 23 MLAs.

Nevertheless, this photo doesn’t show a collection of folks who are going to set anyone’s heart a-pumpin’ – it includes three ministers even Kenney dumped from cabinet, Allard, of Hawaiigate fame, the lacklustre Hunter, and Fir, another pandemic holiday traveller. If the disastrous Luan and the frequently shuffled Shandro have been standouts in cabinet, it’s not because they delivered bravura performances! 

If this lineup suggests anything, it’s that as leader Toews would deliver pretty much the same old same old, including keeping some of the UCP’s most embarrassing performers close. 

Just the same, if Rachel Notley’s New Democrats hope to form the next government of Alberta, they’re going to have to come up with something better to campaign on than a pledge to open the Sky Palace to the public!

What the NDP needs to do, if I may be so bold, is make the next election about health care and education, both files that have been disastrously mishandled by the UCP – with the smiling Tyler Shandro playing a key role during his catastrophic tenure as health minister. 

The UCP will try to make it about financial management and public debt, where despite evidence to the contrary many voters still give conservatives credit for being better managers. 

The Sky Palace? That was Alison Redford’s problem, whether or not Kenney had a boozy dinner party up there on the patio one night. Inside baseball! Plenty of Alberta voters in 2023 won’t know or care that Redford was once a Conservative premier of this province. 

The Opposition and Notley have benefited so much from Kenney’s shambolic performance for three years that they haven’t had to hone a clear message about why the UCP must go and why only they can replace them. 

Whether the new UCP leader is Toews, Jean or someone else, the NDP is going to need to up its game and apply some of that laser focus Kenney used to talk about to the issues that show the UCP under any leader in the worst light.

On the hammer of D-Day and the anvil of Russia

June 6 is the 78th anniversary of the D-Day invasion, when our magnificent Canadian soldiers went ashore at Juno Beach in Normandy to play their part the grim and deadly task of sweeping Hitler and his odious empire from Europe.

Now more than ever, though, Canadians need to remember that the landings on June 6, 1944, by 156,000 Canadian, British, American and other Allied soldiers along the beaches of Normandy were the hammer that battered Germany. 

The anvil was in the East, and it was against Russia that Adolf Hitler’s armies were eventually crushed.

You can read more of my thoughts on D-Day here. 

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...