Alberta Election Day 2: Will UCP scandals keep traction once parties start rolling out their policies?

Premier Rachel Notley’s NDP clearly hopes to make Opposition Leader Jason Kenney’s character the ballot box issue for voters in the April 16 provincial election, but will the United Conservative Party’s scandals have as much traction now that the election writ has been dropped?

The risk for the NDP strategy, even if daily reminders of the UCP leader’s flawed character and his party’s problem with extremists continue, is that they will get lost amid the daily policy announcements both parties and their smaller rivals are bound to make during an election campaign.

For a government generally perceived to be campaigning from behind its principal challenger in popular support, the campaign didn’t get off to a bad start from the NDP’s perspective, with near simultaneous revelations that more fines had been levied in the UCP’s “Kamikaze Campaign” scandal and that a high-profile UCP candidate had been forced to quit the race after her apparent white supremacist views became known.

On Tuesday, the day Premier Notley called the election, the Office of the Election Commissioner announced that it had levied two additional fines related to Jeff Callaway’s UCP leadership campaign in 2017, which has come to be known as the “Kamikaze Mission,” so called in a leaked recording of UCP strategists talking because its intent was allegedly not to win, but to knock off Mr. Kenney’s main rival, former Wildrose Party leader Brian…