There’s been some online chatter since the passage of Bill 81 about the possibility the United Conservative Party might use the Election Statutes Amendment Act, 2021, to seed the NDP with lunatic candidates who could destroy the Opposition party or secret neoliberals who would switch their allegiance once elected.
Since the act legalizes the for-all-practical-purposes corrupt practice of purchasing memberships for people who may not even know their names are being used or misused for that purpose, some have wondered if this kind of skullduggery will be used by the UCP directly against the NDP.
Have no fear, Dear Readers, there are many bad things that might happen to the NDP to diminish its chances of victory in 2023, but this is not one of them.
There a number of reasons this is not going to happen and certainly a key one is that in 2023, or whenever the next election takes place, the UCP is going to be far too busy trying to ensure its own survival in an inhospitable electoral environment to try to engineer a secret takeover of its principal opponent.
The UCP brain trust will have neither the time nor the resources even to try to give the Alberta Party a gentle boost to split the progressive vote. Anyway, surely by now almost all progressively inclined voters in Alberta have figured out that there’s nothing progressive about the Alberta Party.
No, the Alberta Party’s best chance, if it materializes, will occur in the wake of the collapse of the UCP from its own contradictions and divisions, after which it could attempt to portray itself as a moderate and progressive conservative party, you know, like the Progressive Conservative Party we had for nearly 44 years and got tired of in 2015.
Nor is the UCP going to do anything that might result in less money flowing into its coffers in the runup to the next election — which would certainly happen if a bunch of secret Cons wanted so badly to infiltrate the NDP for whatever purposes that they were willing to pay membership fees for the privilege.
We’ve all read the stories about how badly UCP fund-raising has been going this year. Indeed, that’s part of the reason for Bill 81 — to allow membership fees paid by third parties to go straight into the party’s coffers, bypassing the usual contribution limits.
Even the nominal membership fees collected by the NDP would be too much for the UCP to forego.
Anyway, by the time the next election rolls around in a year and a half, the UCP may not have enough activists to fill its own decimated ranks! That’s probably an exaggeration, of course, but there’s certainly been talk the party has suffered a catastrophic membership loss.
Back in the day, the UCP used to claim it had about 160,000 members. That was always a lie, or at least a vast exaggeration, almost certainly based on memberships purchased illegally for fair-weather supporters of the party and even a few victims of outright identity theft. In 2019, Press Progress estimated that about 32,000 UCP members didn’t know they were members.
According to Airdrie-Cochrane UCP MLA Peter Guthrie, however, by last month the UCP’s membership had fallen to approximately 10,000. If true, that’s not a drop in numbers, it’s a collapse!
The NDP also has a rule that members may not join another party, but this is unenforceable, and therefore meaningless, and often honoured in the breach.
Nevertheless, the principal reason this is not going to happen is because party leaders can still disallow candidates they don’t like or don’t approve of.
If the leader won’t sign your nomination papers, you’re not going to be a candidate, and given the community of activists in any riding, it’s extremely unlikely that no one would smell a rat if some sneaky neoliberal was trying to pull a Wilberforce Project on the NDP and sneak in a secret UCP candidate.
No, if the NDP suffers a major bozo eruption or nominates a lunatic candidate, it will almost certainly be one of their own. This is a perennial problem for all parties in ridings where no good candidate wants to run because the chances of winning are small.
The only stealth neoliberal candidate I have ever heard of who snuck into the NDP and did it untold harm was in Saskatchewan, a woman named Janice MacKinnon.
MacKinnon, Jason Kenney’s favourite New Democrat, didn’t need Bill 81 to leave a trail of devastation through Saskatchewan and Alberta, of course. She was the Saskatchewan NDP’s own MLA, made finance minister by NDP premier Roy Romanow.
In that role, she closed 52 rural hospitals in the 1990s. In half-hearted defence of her austerity measures, Grant Devine’s previous Conservative government had basically left the cupboard bare when Romanow took over in 1991.
Pre-pandemic, Alberta Premier Jason Kenney put MacKinnon on his “blue-ribbon panel” to trot out the already-decided justification for his planned austerity binge, which has been partly derailed by the pandemic.
Subsequently, he appointed her to the University of Alberta’s board of governors to help oversee the diminishment of that great institute of learning into a regional trade college, work that is continuing apace.
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