Then the Alberta Liberal leader, Raj Sherman gets a little media attention on the steps of the Alberta Legislature in 2011 (Photo: David J. Climenhaga).

Yesterday, the United Conservative Party failed to get a leadership candidate it really could have used and instead got stuck with a non-candidate it sincerely wants nothing to do with.

From the author’s collection: a never-worn T-shirt from Dr. Sherman’s 2011 campaign to lead the Alberta Liberals (Photo: David J. Climenhaga).

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, Raj 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.

Ms. 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. 

Former Alberta Liberal Leader Dr. David Swann (Photo: David J. Climenhaga).

Alas for the UCP, Ms. 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 yesterday are found here.

Dr. 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 premier 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 Dr. Sherman hadn’t been the Parliamentary assistant to what was known in those days as the minister of health and wellness.

Conservative premier Ed Stelmach in 2010 (Photo: David J. Climenhaga).

Given the boot by Mr. Stelmach, Dr. Sherman followed up with a media interview attacking Alberta Health Services Board chair Ken Hughes and then health minister Ron Liepert, now one of Ms. Rempel Garner’s Conservative Caucus colleagues in Ottawa. 

In 2011, Dr. 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, Dr. 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.

2011 Alberta Liberal leadership candidate Laurie Blakeman (Photo: David J. Climenhaga).

At one point Dr. 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 Dr. 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. 

Dr. 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. 

2011 Alberta Liberal leadership candidate Hugh Macdonald (Photo: David J. Climenhaga).

Dr. 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, Ms. Redford’s premiership imploded; Jim Prentice was imported from Ottawa to save the four-decade PC dynasty; Ms. 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 Dr. Sherman began to disintegrate with two MLAs quitting to run federally. The NDP surpassed the Liberals both fund-raising and popularity. 

On Jan. 26, 2015, Dr. Sherman chose to pull the plug on the Liberals, quitting as leader and promising not to run again as an MLA. 

Alberta health and wellness minister Ron Liepert in 2012 (Photo: David J. Climenhaga).

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 Dr. Sherman certainly deserves some of the credit. Dr. 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 Dr. 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, Dr. Sherman insisted he’s going to run anyway, sort of. 

This will be a challenge since his name won’t be on the ballot. 

Yesterday, Calgary Herald political columnist Don Braid gave Dr. Sherman’s notion a gently respectful hearing

Mr. Braid reported that Dr. 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, Dr. Sherman is a fine emergency doc. 

The same cannot be said of his political acumen.

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6 Comments

  1. What is that old saying, the advice often given to mediocre actors, singers and comedians? Don’t give up your day job! Maybe it should apply to doctors who want to go into politics too.

    On the one hand there are some good qualities Sherman has. He is passionate and not excessively partisan. If he runs for the UCP leadership, this would be either the third or fourth party he supported. The guy may have serious commitment issues, politically I mean.

    Like you, I actually have some sympathy for the UCP’s position here. Getting a moderate candidate to run would be helpful for them now, but given his past record they surely have a number of other valid concerns about Sherman. He does seem to leave disaster in his wake. The UCP already has one leadership candidate of whom this can be said. It would probably not be wise to have two.

    So, I suspect Sherman may remain a one man performer in search of a party to lead. Maybe he should have stuck with his apparent third choice, the Alberta Party. Of course, they already have a leader, so they are really not looking for one right now.

    However, perhaps the UCP will relent and let Sherman run. While I think that is unlikely at this point, many strange things have happened in Alberta politics in the last decade or so.

  2. The appalling thing is that the UCP are intent on getting private for profit healthcare in Alberta, like their hero Ralph Klein wanted to do. Ralph Klein’s bad healthcare policies have cost Albertans their lives, and no doubt the UCP are causing the same problems, with their negligence on the Covid-19 pandemic front. Peter Lougheed supported public healthcare. These pretend conservatives and Reformers don’t, they just care about their rich corporate friends, at the expense of everything else. It’s still baffling how Albertans fall for their lies.

    1. Ralph knew very little about very little, but I have it on good authority that he got a great deal at death because he was already embalmed.

  3. After moving to St. Albert in 1998 from Devon , Lois Hole talked me into joining the local Liberal Party after being a strong conservative for many years and already voting for the liberals to try to stop Klein I agree. Yet I found them to be basically useless. The attitude seemed to be that Klein will piss off enough Albertans off and the people will elect us, they have no choice. They wanted me to run as their MLA in St. Albert but I had no intention of getting involved that way. I knew my wife and I planned to do a lot of travelling when she retired. Instead I promised that I would continue to keep writing my letters to the editors pointing out what I was being told by a former MLA friend that I was having lunch with once or twice a month in Devon who kept me informed of what Klein was doing to us and I did. I also made it crystal clear that I wanted them to write letters to the editors backing my remarks and adding things that I might have missed, yet never once did any of them do it. Instead I met Bob Mason , NDP s Brian Mason’s father who had been an electrical engineer and fully agreed with my commits about what deregulation of electricity would do to us. Ironically I had learned it from my late father a power plant engineer and Bob agreed with everything I said.I found that Bob was a lot better at showing support for my letters than any of the liberals were and I started voting NDP. Like Bob I knew we were wasting our votes. From 1975 to 1978 I was Royal bank manager in Peace River and got to meet NDP Grant Notley and he really impressed me. I told him about how our family was involved with volunteering for the Lougheed government and how energy minister Bill Dickie was a brother in-law of one my uncles so I would be voting conservative and he fully understood. Ironically I was also involved with lawyers Don and Halyna Freeland and remember their young daughter Chrystia Freeland well, and I think she should be our next prime minister. Don’s father was also a lawyer and his mother was their office manager in their law office. She always impressed me. To me Chrystia appears to be a lot smarter than Trudeau and friends agree. None of us conservatives have any intention of supporting another damn Reformer as our leader, we saw what a farce Harper was, and Pierre Poilievre is carrying on right where he left off making a fool of himself.

  4. Well, well. So MRG would like to lead the UCP, but the party’s too chaotic for her taste? It’s good to know there’s at least one Alberta Conservative with a working brain.

    Rempel Garner’s inside look at abuse, cliques and (let’s call it) empire-building should be an embarrassment to the UCP party. I was surprised at her comments that political parties (all of them) apparently are not required to have HR policies to protect against abuse by petty tyrants. Maybe I’m naïve, but I thought there were provincial laws that protect workers from abusive bosses. It seems political parties aren’t bound by privacy laws; are they exempt from labour laws, too?

    It’ll be interesting to see how the UCP leadership react to Rempel Garner’s exposé. The NDP were embarrassed by news stories of verbal abuse of volunteers. Within days, Notley announced the party would hire an independent company to investigate and (presumably) recommend changes. How long will it take the UCP to follow suit?

    As for Raj Sherman re-entering politics, well…everyone should have a hobby.

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