PHOTOS: Wildrose Party Leader Brian Jean at the Calgary Stampede. Too country to be electable in the new Alberta? (Photo from Mr. Jean’s Flickr account.) Below: Former Harper strategist Ken Boessenkool and former Harper speechwriter Paul Bunner, both involved in Alberta’s “reunite the right” movement. (Photos grabbed from their Facebook accounts.)

Well, no one can say the Great Alberta Wildrose Experiment worked out exactly as anticipated!

It must’ve seemed like a great idea back in 2008 when politically motivated Albertans too far to the right for the big-tent instincts of the dynastic Progressive Conservative Party got together and cooked up a scheme to engineer a reverse hostile takeover of the PCs designed to move the party and the provincial government radically to the right.

Some of the Wildrose Party’s original movers and shakers were particularly incensed at then PC premier Ed Stelmach’s unluckily timed and unsuccessful attempt to get a fairer prices for Albertans for their nonrenewable resources.

BoessenkoolThe Wildrose Party was the Trojan Horse that was supposed make this reverse-takeover maneuver possible – formed out of the hulks of a couple of unsuccessful far-right fringe parties, named for Alberta’s beautiful provincial flower and fertilized with generous dollops oil industry cash.

Four premiers and seven exciting years later, during which it often appeared Alberta was only an election away from a Wildrose government, we have a comfortable New Democratic Party majority in Edmonton determined to once again review the province’s royalty policies, a population apparently reasonably supportive of that policy, and two right-wing parties haggling over what’s left of the conservative vote.

It’s enough to make conservative heads spin! The great minds in the most secretive corners of the conservative movement who came up with the Wildrose scheme, then tried to arrange the party’s shotgun marriage to the PC Government last fall when the leadership coup by their man Jim Prentice had rendered a second market-fundamentalist party redundant, must be thinking, “What the hell happened?”

So, for sure they are once again contemplating a reunion on the right. For public consumption, the idea of a reunited right-wing party that can restore God to His (obviously male-dominated) Heaven and resume the Tory dynasty in Alberta is being presented as both wise and inevitable.

But when Alberta conservatives now assemble, their tone is more anxious, as illustrated by a quiet cabal of conservatives in an Edmonton suburb, digitally recorded by person or persons unknown and recently published by the left-leaning Broadbent Institute’s Press Progress online publication.

In one tidbit made available by Press Progress, Ken Boessenkool – a veteran campaign strategist tied at various times to campaigns for Prime Minister Stephen Harper, B.C. Premier Christy Clark and Alberta PC interim leader Ric McIver – bluntly sums up the situation in Edmonton. “In the Western provinces, we are now in a situation where the left is gonna be united, the Liberals are dead, the Alberta Party is a joke and you have a very powerful, very strong – or soon will be very powerful and very strong – NDP government. And a divided right against an NDP government is just a second term for Rachel Notley.”

Bunner-LPaul Bunner, a former Harper speechwriter now employed by Preston Manning’s so-called “centre for building democracy,” told the gathering: “In a perfect world the leadership of the two parties would announce today that they’re holding exploratory talks on a merger. They would each hold delegated conventions this summer where the members agree to fold up the existing parties. There would then be a founding convention to create a new party, elect a new leader by the fall, then a single conservative candidate would contest and win the Calgary-Foothills by-election. Unfortunately, none of this is likely to happen.” (Was that a chuckle, or a cough, that was audible in the background?)

Now just a minute there, cautioned Mr. Boessenkool, a signatory to the notorious Firewall Manifesto calling for Alberta sovereignty-association. He explained that this is going to have to happen in secret, presumably so that the two parties’ supporters – who may not be focused on what the movement’s brainiacs think are the right priorities – don’t get wind of what’s up.

What’s needed, Mr. Boessenkool said patiently in the final clip of the Press Progress scoop, is “a discussion among the senior people in both parties, unfortunately in private, about the willingness to proceed down a road where the other party doesn’t say no immediately.”

He seems to be saying “the first public communication” must come only after the process has moved too far along for messy grassroots democracy to try to stop it.

Count on it, this time Mr. Manning will make no public appearances, with or without his metaphorical matrimonial shotguns, like his disastrous (to conservatives) intervention in the effort to fold the Wildrose Opposition into the Prentice PCs last December.

In the mean time, Mr. Boessenkool can be heard on the tape’s closing segment explaining what happened during the 2003 hostile reverse takeover of the federal PCs by the Reform Party: While the deal was being sealed behind closed doors, “we continued to bash each other over the head” in public. It was not clear to me whether Mr. Boessenkool meant this as a strategic suggestion or a tactical lament.

Regardless, Mr. Boessenkool is likely right in his view any merger of the Wildrose and PC parties will have to be conducted in secret from their members, because the divisions are just too deep, and the disgust at last year’s cynical merger too profound, for members to stand for any such agreement if they’re permitted to know what’s going on.

At the caucus level, too, the rift is wide – after the contempt with which the two parties treated each other right up until last winter’s maneuvers.

The parties have structural problems as well. The PCs were battered more severely by the May 5 election, emerging with only 10 seats, reduced to nine by Mr. Prentice’s petulant election-night resignation. (That’s the reason for the by-election referenced by Mr. Bunner, a date for which has not yet been set.)

But the Wildrosers are firmly identified in the minds of urban Albertans as a rural rump, unrepresentative of the style or attitudes they look for in a government, and therefore all but unelectable unless the Notley Government manages to mess up spectacularly.

So a takeover that favours the larger and more successful party will hurt the movement more than a takeover by the reviled and less successful branch. That too will be hard for the unite-the-righters to work around.

Finally, it hardly seems likely that having just saved the party, and possibly the conservative movement in Alberta, Wildrose Leader Brian Jean will be in a mood to step aside for the good of the cause. Yet, given his wooden performance in the election campaign, his lack of political appeal outside hard-right and rural circles, and his insipid effort during a decade as an MP, he will probably have to go for a merger to succeed.

So the idea or fixing everything through a rightwing family reunion is not as inevitable or as easy as its proponents would like Albertans to believe.

That said, behind the scenes, the people with the money and the big sticks will be pushing hard to reunite right as quickly as possible, at least as soon as they’ve confronted the danger presented to their plans by the prospect of Thomas Mulcair as prime minister of Canada.

And, count on it, their next meeting will be by invitation only, behind locked doors, with cellphones confiscated by Security!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

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4 Comments

  1. The mounting dissatisfaction of Albertans for the PC party’s four-decade reign was the main motive that spawned the Wildrose party. An attractive showing in the polls attracted attention from everywhere. When the PCs asserted their plan to raise oil and gas royalties, those interests affected saw an opportunity to throw their support behind this fledgling upstart party, giving it a massive boost. Also at that time, many of the original founding members found themselves quickly tossed aside as the party reorganized.

    I think however, Albertans were suspicious of this new political force which seemed to appear fully-formed, to toss out the multi-generational PC dynasty. They voted to keep the old guard merely because they didn’t really trust the potential “new guard.”

    So the frustration continued to grow, building steam after each and every outrage, until the pressure was so great that all it took was a leader with a reasonable pedigree and a winning smile to blow up the PCs train, regardless of which party they represented.

  2. You are the only political commentator/columnist who can make me laugh out loud. The “cellphones confiscated” did it. I used to work for the Department of National Defence. In order to enter certain facilities (like the headquarters in Edmonton), you had to surrender your phone. And it is amazing that Boessenkool is already anticipating a second term for Rachel Notley. Is that the right wing loonies rolling over and playing dead? Or are they finally admitting defeat and moving to Montana? Keep up the good work.

  3. Reunite is a double negative like progressive conservative . People are tired of the tiring entitled people. Can we give them all the rest they earned by their corruption and entitlement for them and their friends. Yhat goes for harperwho doesn’t even practice democrcy . He is very remanicent of what you read of Hitler. Won’t talk to media. Trys to control eveything and everyone around him. HE NEEDS TO BE VOTED OUT . CANADA NEEDS TO VOTE IN PEOPLE WHO RESPECT DEMOCRACY!

  4. Conservatism is facing a number of internal tensions that may mitigate against any such merger, at least in the short term. There is traditional, pre-Reform Toryism, whose roots lay in pre-Confederation Conservatives both in Canada and in the UK. While devoted to a classist society which sought to keep the “great unwashed” in its place, it had one redeeming quality: a sense of noblesse oblige, which led to a kinder gentler form of Toryism in the 2nd half of the last century.

    Then there is the free-market fundamentalism of libertarian new-liberalism, which has gained currency since the late ’70s/early ’80s, which loosened the reins on corporations, reducing the size of government and reducing regulation. This has led to serious global restructuring and led, through liberalization of trade, to the export of high-quality manufacturing jobs to low-wage countries in the developing world.

    Then there is social conservatism, which seeks to put the State back into the nation’s bedrooms from which Trudeau pere evicted them in the late ’60s. This reactionary movement tends to have more strength in rural areas than in big cities, at least in Canada, but is in direct opposition to the small-government libertarians.

    Finally, there is the racist, paranoid, security-obsessed thread, which seeks to take us back to the 1950s, Joe McCarthy and HUAC. It seems the Harper Conservatives have decided that this is the thread of conservatism that will carry them to another majority victory in October. Good luck with that. I don’t think there are enough Canadians paranoid enough to do it for them.

    So, there are too many flavours of conservatism to be effectively contained within one political party in this country.

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