The United Conservative Party (UCP) has failed to get a leadership candidate it really could have used and instead got stuck with a non-candidate in Raj Sherman it sincerely wants nothing to do with.
Michelle Rempel Garner, touted for weeks by media pontificators as a likely contender to lead the UCP who had been granted special dispensation by the party to run despite not quite meeting its membership requirements, took a clear eyed look at her chances and said nuts to that plan.
Meanwhile, Sherman, a former Alberta Liberal leader and one-man political wrecking crew whom it would be charitable to describe as sometimes “erratic,” said he was going to stick around and run anyway despite being told to get lost by the UCP.
I didn’t think it was possible to feel empathy with the UCP, but after it suffered this double whammy in one day, it’s hard not to … sort of.
Rempel Garner, the Conservative Party of Canada MP for Calgary Nose Hill, may have been the best chance the party had to field a credible leader for the early 21st Century, an economic conservative who nevertheless favoured reproductive and LBGTQ rights.
She would have been an excellent foil to NDP Leader and former premier Rachel Notley.
Alas for the UCP, Rempel Garner took a look at the Iron Age social attitudes nurtured by departing Premier Jason Kenney in the party’s ranks and the simmering civil war in its caucus and cabinet and decided it couldn’t be fixed. Who can blame her?
Details of her remarkably frank Dear John letter to the UCP were shared on this website last week.
Sherman? Since his days as a junior member of Ed Stelmach’s Progressive Conservative cabinet, the Edmonton Emergency Room physician has left a trail of political devastation in his wake.
In 2010, he gave Stelmach little choice but to fire him after he penned a rambling, sometimes incoherent email attacking his own party’s failure to reduce Emergency Room wait times and mailed it to, well, almost everyone.
This wouldn’t have been so bad if Sherman hadn’t been the Parliamentary assistant to what was known in those days as the minister of health and wellness.
Given the boot by Stelmach, Sherman followed up with a media interview attacking Alberta Health Services Board chair Ken Hughes and then health minister Ron Liepert, now one of Rempel Garner’s Conservative Caucus colleagues in Ottawa.
In 2011, Sherman took a notion to run for the leadership of the Alberta Liberal Party, whose leader David Swann really wanted to retire.
The Liberals had two good candidates for the job, capable MLAs Laurie Blakeman and Hugh Macdonald. However, the party had foolishly decided to allow anybody to vote for their new leader, including non-members.
On Sept. 10, 2011, thanks to that brainstorm, Sherman won the Liberal leadership on the first ballot.
He thought he had all the answers – especially when it came to health care – and for a spell he managed to persuade quite a few Albertans that was so. It didn’t last.
At one point Sherman tried to modify the party’s name to the Liberalberta party. That didn’t work out either.
In the 2012 provincial election, Alison Redford’s PCs formed the government with 61 seats. The Liberals – once a credible opposition party – managed to win only five seats with Sherman at the helm. That surprise kept the party’s heart pumping, though, for another three years.
The Wildrose Party led by Danielle Smith, now another candidate to lead the UCP, managed to win 17 seats, enough to become the Official Opposition. The NDP won four.
Sherman soon earned a reputation as a party leader who made startling revelations and strident claims about the conduct of the government and the health care system, and then couldn’t back them up.
He didn’t seem that interested in leading the party, either, which was described by a cynical commentator as a group of independents who shared office space.
Sherman’s performance in the 2013 preferential health care inquiry was underwhelming. His accusations, which contributed to the inquiry being called, amounted to very little, with retired Judge John Z. Vertes concluding there were only a few minor incidents of patients receiving preferential access to care.
Before the next election in 2015, Redford’s premiership imploded; Jim Prentice was imported from Ottawa to save the four-decade PC dynasty; Smith and eight of her Wildrose MLAs committed political hara-kiri by crossing the floor of the legislature to the PCs; and the Liberals under Sherman began to disintegrate with two MLAs quitting to run federally. The NDP surpassed the Liberals both in fundraising and popularity.
On Jan. 26, 2015, Sherman chose to pull the plug on the Liberals, quitting as leader and promising not to run again as an MLA.
On May 5, 2015, the NDP astonished everyone, including themselves, by winning a majority government in a general election. The Liberals elected only one MLA, an outcome for which Sherman certainly deserves some of the credit. Swann, the only Liberal still standing, was pressed back into service as interim leader.
In the 2019 election, the Liberals failed to elect a single MLA.
When Sherman began talking about running for the leadership of the UCP after Premier Kenney’s announcement in April he would be stepping down, the notion was greeted everywhere with incredulity.
Having been sensibly turned down by the UCP, Sherman insisted he’s going to run anyway, sort of.
This will be a challenge since his name won’t be on the ballot.
Last Thursday, Calgary Herald political columnist Don Braid gave Sherman’s notion a gently respectful hearing.
Braid reported that Sherman – who suffered “what seemed to be a heart episode” last week at 55 – planned to leave emergency medicine at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Edmonton after 30 years, having always worked some ER shifts through his political career.
This is a pity. By all accounts, Sherman is a fine emergency doc.
The same cannot be said of his political acumen.
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