Yesterday was Deadline Day in the United Conservative Party race to replace Premier Jason Kenney, one of those frustrating moments in journalism when everyone knows there’s news to report and nobody knows exactly what it is.
That is to say, everyone knows that some of the candidates have neither the bucks nor the credibility to continue with the charade, but no one is likely to be able to find out which ones have dropped out or been pushed out for a few more hours or even a few days.
Except, that is, for candidate Jon Horsman (Jon Who?), who sensibly gave up and quit shortly before the 5 p.m. deadline passed.
Mr. Horsman, inevitably described as a former banker, published a statement saying that, “while we are on track to meet the requirements of today’s deadline, it is a very crowded leadership race and having one more does not serve the purpose of why I decided to run – which was to contribute to the success of the conservative movement in Alberta by growing the moderate and inclusive base for the party.”
Well, good luck with that, Mr. Horsman. In case you missed it, dear readers, there isn’t much of a moderate and inclusive base left in the UCP anymore.
Former Progressive Conservative MLA and Alberta Liberal Leader Raj Sherman, the other candidate thought most likely to come to face to face with harsh reality yesterday, seemed to be still trying to hang in at the end of the day.
There is no rational expectation for why Dr. Sherman is bothering – unless it’s just a pathetic effort to get a few more hours in the limelight, as in days past when he was leader of the opposition – as he has zero chance of winning and the UCP doesn’t want him in the race.
When he inevitably departs, like Mr. Horsman, he will claim to have influenced the race for the better.
Then there was the already forgotten Bill Rock, mayor of the Village of Amisk, who admitted on July 9 that he couldn’t raise enough money to get on the ballot.
There will likely be others who fall by the wayside before long from exhaustion, acknowledgement of reality, or a lack of funds.
In the meantime, professional reporters have editors breathing down their necks to come up with something about the race, so they dress up the facts that everybody already knows and send them out with a new lead, or report on such drolleries as UCP Finance Minister and House Leader Jason Nixon, not long ago heard dropping F-bombs in the Legislature, acting as if he were the party’s voice of reason and maturity.
What’s known is that eight candidates have managed to navigate the party’s red tape, collect the required 1,000 member signatures, and pony up the considerable amount of cash necessary to remain in the running – $50,000 of their $150,000 entry fee and a $25,000 good behaviour deposit.
Three of them have already had their applications formally accepted: Former Finance Minister Travis Toews, first choice of the UCP Caucus and the party establishment; former Wildrose Leader Brian Jean, who for the past several months has played Marcus Brutus to Mr. Kenney’s Julius Caesar; and the other former Wildrose leader, broadcaster and sometime Fraser Institute apparatchik Danielle Smith, who appears to be auditioning for the role of Alberta’s answer to Donald Trump.
All three are contenders, although Ms. Smith has been showing surprising strength in the campaign with her calls for unconstitutional, illegal and almost certainly completely unworkable legislation to ignore federal laws and jurisdiction. But all the fire and smoke it would generate might provide good cover for other radical policies Ms. Smith would like to implement before an election could take place.
This is what prompted Mr. Nixon to put on his metaphorical big boy pants yesterday to say, “I would caution anybody who wants to lead our party about overpromising things that we know that cannot be delivered.”
Ms. Smith, naturally, quickly and predictably responded to insist Mr. Nixon has it all wrong.
The big brain behind Ms. Smith’s Alberta Sovereignty Act campaign, which is generating headlines faster than Mr. Toews’s and Mr. Jean’s campaigns seem to be able to come up with things to tweet about, is thought to be former Wildrose Party House Leader Rob Anderson.
Mr. Anderson has a reputation for being able to bring out the worst in Ms. Smith, which certainly seems to be what he’s achieving right now.
The success of the dynamically destructive duo may be what prompted the rumour yesterday that one candidate plans to bring back former Kenney issues manager Matt Wolf, a master of Twitter trollery.
The remaining candidates all said they’d submitted their paperwork, nominators’ signatures, and cheques. They are Leela Aheer, Todd Loewen, Rajan Sawhney, and Rebecca Schulz, all UCP MLAs but for Mr. Loewen, who was exiled to the Independent benches in May 2021 for criticizing Mr. Kenney’s response to COVID-19.
None of that group, it is said here, have much of a chance but for Ms. Schulz.
Right now she is probably the second choice for the UCP Caucus and party establishment.
But she is backed by such high-profile Conservatives as former interim federal leader Rona Ambrose and former Saskatchewan premier Brad Wall, and everything could change if Mr. Toews’s campaign continues to falter in the face of Ms. Smith’s Trumpian ability to make up news.
It’s said here that if it comes down to a last-ditch Anybody-but-Danielle campaign by the UCP Caucus, which fears Ms. Smith could succeed with the motivated party base and then scare moderate voters enough to give the NDP a majority in a general election, Ms. Schulz could well emerge the winner.
And if what it takes is a woman to make the party safe for the Conservative Old Boys Club, by Zeus, Ms. Schulz may just be the candidate for the job!
NOTE: An earlier version of this story said Matt Wolf, the departing premier’s former “issues manager,” hadn’t tweeted anything under his own name since 2020. Turns out he has, the little sneak, but only quote tweets and replies, so nothing shows up under tweets. Nothing is ever straightforward with our UCP. DJC
Basically, these UCP leadership candidates are the worst that money can buy. What do they really have to offer Alberta, other than bad neoliberal policies, which pretend conservatives and Reformers are good for, which would be to the detriment of Alberta? We never saw this foolishness under Peter Lougheed.
By contrast to the long-running amateur-hour show put on by the UCP to select a new leader, it’s worthwhile noting that the British Tories got on rapidly with the job of replacing Boris Johnson. They’ve had a series of MP voting runoffs among five candidates and are down to two for the final month of campaigning, after which the totality of members of the party will choose between two candidates, Truss and Sunak. And these people didn’t have to put up hundreds of thousands to put their names forward as prospective leader. Both are already MPs, one a total geographic moron and the other the rentier/financial/big-boy/austerity for the masses fave. No dope of a rural hick got into the race only to “discover” they didn’t have the baksheesh to pony up to really be “considered”.
One has to really be concerned about Alberta’s future with the incredibly low quality of the candidates proffering themselves, and Smith appears from afar to be a complete lunatic to boot. The fact she’s gained traction speaks only to the complete dimwittedness of a large portion of the older Alberta electorate who seem to live in another galaxy where reason runs opposite to reality.
One also wonders if Smith, who says as premier she would not enforce federal laws she doesn’t agree with, knows about this:
https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/c-46/page-20.html#docCont
Disobeying a statute
126 (1) Every person who, without lawful excuse, contravenes an Act of Parliament by intentionally doing anything that it forbids or by intentionally omitting to do anything that it requires to be done is, unless a punishment is expressly provided by law, guilty of
(a) an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term of not more than two years; or
It seems it is not optional for some rube of an elected official to omit doing something an Act of Parliament requires them to do. I can hear the anguished cries from the Cons of Trudeau overreach if the federal attorney general tells Smith as premier: “No, you cannot disobey the law just because you feel like it.” You can bet your bottom dollar no Con in power would hesitate to have a go at political opponents who disobeyed the law. But hypocrisy is baked into Con thinking as a basic premise, in my view.
While it is correct that the British Conservative Party had caucus winnow down its list of leadership candidates to two finalists through a series of ballots, the decision between the final two — Liz Truss, Foreign Secretary, and Rishi Sunak, former Chancellor of the Exchequer (Finance minister) — will be made by the party members themselves.
But the biggest difference between that race, and the two concurrent Conservative leadership races going on in Canada, is that there will be no “instant members” voting for Britain’s next PM. Members have to have become such no later than June 3rd — weeks before BoJo resigned – in order to be eligible to vote: https://www.conservatives.com/leadership-faqs.html. I feel all parties would be better off, and make better choices, if their membership/voter lists were similarly frozen before leadership races began.
Some have lamented “What happened to the party of Lougheed?” during this leadership campaign. Well, the party of Lougheed made a deal with intemperate and immoderate groups so it could defeat Rachel Notley, and those groups have quite naturally wrested away the soul of the party because they are more activist and contribute more money. I welcome Danielle Smith’s leadership because finally it will be crystal clear to the voting public who and what the UCP stands for. The establishment candidates, if successful, would just put the veneer of civility on the party and allow Albertans to sleepwalk into the next general election, hoping a vote cast for the UCP is a vote for the old PC’s of yore.
The “party of Lougheed” died in the early 90’s after most of its big spending economic and social engineering plays failed. In many ways, the NDP is the spiritual successor albeit with a no talent caucus composed moslty of former union reps, teachers, Arts students and school trustees.
Doug: your classist, elitist bias is showing with this comment. Why are teachers, arts students, school trustees & union reps a “no talent caucus”? Are only corporate lawyers and business executives fit to serve as MLAs or Cabinet Ministers in your world view? Personally, I’d prefer people who know something about working day in and day out just to survive over those who have never known a hungry day in their lives.
I read the CBC story David alluded to, in which Jason Nixon cautions that Danielle Smith’s ‘Alberta Sovereignty Act’ will be unconstitutional, illegal etc. I thought it was pretty rich, considering some of the things his own government has come up with (public inquiry into unAlbertan activities, war room etc.)
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/jason-nixon-ucp-danielle-smith-sovereignty-act-1.6527066
Haha my first thought was, “Mr. Nixon must be so grateful to Mrs. Smith, she has given him the opportunity to look like an adult.” Then I thought, “When is the last time I watched an elected member of any party badmouthing the policies of a leadership candidate for their own party during a leadership campaign?”
…Maybe not such a grownup moment after all. Not a great look when you gotta send out your seven foot shyster to point out that a candidate for leadership in your party is running on insane, illegal, unworkable policies that could only seem reasonable to someone divorced both from reality and cause and effect.
“And if what it takes is a woman to save the Conservative Old Boys Club, by Zeus, Ms. Schulz may just be the candidate for the job!”
That was the Redford play. And it turns out the Old Boys Club is, for their own self-preservation, happy to put a woman in charge… right until they have to actually act like she’s in charge.
Given the political shenanigans over the past three years, does Alberta still claim to be rat free?
Alberta is still rat free. That’s why this frankenparty in Alberta is floundering. They’ve lost their moral compass.
Bojack Horsman! Gosh, how did I miss that slice of levity in an otherwise depressing chuckwagon race. How we grasp at straws in these times of despair.
When Jason Nixon puts on his big boy pants (both literally and metaphorically) you know the comedy is just getting started. Since in a recent expose in a free Calgary weekly, the RCMP know Nixon very well as the “dumb, f*kin gorilla”, it may be too much of Nixon to advise the leadership candidates to not “over-promise” on their respective platforms.
Looking at the field, it’s beginning to appear that the race for the right-wing ditch is hard on, between Ginger Kenney, Danielle Straitjacket, and Mr. Toes. Now that it’s beginning to look like the center lane is going to be very empty, it’s very like Schultz, trying very hard to be the adult in the room, it going to try to appeal to the urban voters that Notley and the NDP are in a very strong position to steal. While the fight for the moderate voters in Alberta is usually short and small, it looks like this block of voters could emerge as a deciding factor in who becomes the next premier.
Schultz may grab attention from Smith by selling less of the crazy, but there is one thing that ruins it for her, as it was ruined for Notley and Redford; she has a uterus and ovaries. Yes, it’s the Female Factor in Alberta politics that is the kiss of death for many a woman aspiring to leadership, or trying to keep herself there.
With this in mind, even if Smith keeps that delicious crazy going right to the finish line and an impressive showing, the one thing that will still hold her back is … yes, her uterus and ovaries. The Female Factor will do in Danielle Smith and score a win for Brian Jean because he isn’t a female.
There’s a way to fix that! South of the 49th, people are busy knitting those politicos a uterus of their own. There are also crocheted vaginas and sewn cervixes. That way, the playing field is equal. Everyone has their own “fuzzy lady parts”. Forget the pink pussy hats of yore. This is next level.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/activists-sending-knitted-vaginas-congressmen/story?id=16014922
If I could vote in the UCP leadership, it would be a toss up between Towes and Schulz. The most important priority is to manage government spending growth to less than inflation plus population growth, which will be very challenging under rising interest rates. This will likely be the final non-renewable resource revenue windfall and it can’t be wasted on “investments in people” or whatever nonsensical reaons can be conjured to justify spending borrowed or non-recurring revenue on operational expenses. Towes is a boring fiscal conservative, ideally fit for the times. Schulz is still somewhat of an unknown. Schulz might stand a better chance of defeating the NDP and keeping the O&G windfall out of greedy union hands.
Just think of all the potential rewards that could come Jon Horsman’s way now. He could be installed as the head of the hapless and perennially witless AIMCo, ready to steal our Canada Pension Plan funds in a single bound. Maybe he could lead the charge to privatize ATB Financial, or at least gut the profitable parts of it. With his inside knowledge, who is in a better position, should the UCP win the next election? We might not know much about him now, but by this time next year, he could be Public Enemy No. 1. Maybe his horse was in this race to get his name out there and reap the rewards.
It doesn’t matter who gets elected I still can’t find anyone dumb enough to elect anyone of them I think Albertans are finally waking us and are starting to see through the stupidity these reformers are trying to force up us. Yet there are still a lot of really stupid seniors believing every lie , which is why Danielle Smith is leading the pack. They don’t care about all her previous political disasters. These seniors are just too dumb to realize what she would do to them, but then we know what Ralph Klein did to us while these fools called us names for trying to stop him. They are doing it once again.
Sometimes it seems like there are a ton of very loud white people with grey hair who have decided they don’t care at all what is left of humanity after they pass. Other times, it seems worse.
Sometimes it seems there are a lot of negative and untrue stereotypes too…judging by your comment.
Alan K. Spiller: You are correct. These seniors have done a great job of brainwashing the younger generations to support these pretend conservatives and Reformers. It’s beyond comprehension to understand how people can support Danielle Smith, let alone any of these UCP leadership candidates.
Alan K. Spiller: How much more insulting can you possibly be? I ‘ve been supporting the NDP since I moved to Alberta long ago. I am educated, urban, and have lived (thankfully!) in more progressive provinces. However, your nonsensical accusation that “These seniors” will blindly and stupidly vote for the idiotic right wing is simplyl just plain wrong.
Nixon: “I would caution anybody who wants to lead our party about overpromising things that we know that cannot be delivered.”
A considerable volte face, considering that this has been a UCP governing principle from the git-go.
Yes, Schulz could be a dark horse to watch. She has some heavy weight backers and supporters. Also the staid Finance Minister doesn’t seem to be setting the world on fire, even though he probably was the initial favourite of the UCP establishment. They must also be a bit concerned that some of his odd bible school baggage that pops up from time to time might turn off a lot of voters. If Alberta wanted a Harry Strom, it would have voted for him in 1971.
I have always thought Smith was meant to be sort of a kamikaze candidate, although probably no one advised her of that and I don’t think she realizes it either. I suspect she was encouraged to run to split support with Jean to allow Toews to get enough support from the remaining pro Kenney UCP members to win.
It was a clever idea, but of course, they may have not anticipated that her not knowing she was to be a kamikaze candidate, she would actually run a strong campaign. Also its been long enough that people have somewhat forgotten or gotten over her past debacles. Of course, while Smith has been setting hair on fire, Toews has not been exciting enough. So, I suppose back to the drawing board with a Plan B, for those that want to keep the Kenney wing of the party in power – Schulz could be their candidate.
If there is supposed to be a kamikaze candidate in this race, I think things this time may be far less coordinated than the last time one was deployed.
Calling Schultz a kamikaze candidate would make sense if she was going for Brian Jean. However, now that Jean is mimicking Danielle Smith’s lunacy, seems to be the fly in the ointment. If Jean would have presented himself as a moderate, then Schutz’s presence would be problematic. But now that Jean appears to be running against Smith and not Mr. Toes, who is now beginning to lurch hard to the right, this will leave Schultz’s effort trapped in the center/moderate lane…alone. So, what went wrong?
Wouldn’t it be great if Brian Jean thought, “Fool me once, shame on me …”? What better way to beat a kamikaze candidate than to make them the unique candidate, while everyone rushes away from them? Schultz is now the sole candidate at the moderate center, a place where no UCP voter wants the party or its new leader to be.
Just: Personally, I don’t think Ms. Schulz is a Kamikaze candidate. I think she is a serious candidate with a serious chance of winning. I don’t have much sense of how she would do as leader, though, because she was very low key as an MLA and cabinet minister. The closest thing to a Kamikaze candidate in this race, I think, is Danielle Smith – except, as is now becoming apparent, she has a real chance of winning. It’s hard to imagine what many of the candidates hope to achieve. Ms. Aheer, probably just to raise her profile enough to win her riding nomination. Todd Loewen, maybe to find a way back into the UCP Caucus. DJC
This popped into my head yesterday. With Jason Kenney gone, I wonder if we will see a return of Derek Fildebrandt. For that matter, Mr. Kenney dumped a few other candidates for their unacceptable views/postings; will we see them return as well?
Saw this today: Mainstreet poll , as quoted on twitter by Phillippe Fournier:
Alberta poll from Mainstreet Research:
With Danielle Smith as UCP leader
NDP 38%
UCP 33%
WIP 4%
⚪️Undecided 18%
With Travis Toews as UCP leader
37%
29%
6%
⚪️19%
With Brian Jean as UCP leader
38%
26%
4%
⚪️21%
[Mainstreet, July 16-17, 2022, n=1,151]
Now sure, Mainstreet have got things badly wrong on occasion in the past (Calgary Civic election, 2017 for one), and the undecided vote is high. But interesting all the same, and a bit surprising to me. I would not have thought Danielle Smith would do the best of the three; I had expected her wide-eyed craziness would scare away former PC voters, and that some former WildRosers would not have forgiven her.
So, how about that independent mla that’s going to jail. I haven’t seen anything on him!
Bret: He’s not going to jail. He’s charged under the Health Information Act. I’m sure you know this. There’s a story tonight. Keep your comments civil and based in fact and they’ll get published. DJC
I told the wife your feeling about raj’s ucp leadership run. As her colleague at the Alex she didn’t appreciate your slagging him. Course it’s likely as a consequence of his asking his coworkers for support in his run. Yes not all government workers are willing to sell their vote to the highest bidder. Must really irritate Ms Notley. As somebody who signed raj’s nomination papers I look forward to him bringing his arguments to this race. Not all parties are afraid of free speech.
Bret: By all accounts Dr. Sherman is a fine ER doctor. I’m sure his colleagues’ respect is deserved. As a politician he almost single-handedly destroyed the Alberta Liberal Party, although the error that allowed non-members to vote in a leadership election made that possible. His run when the UCP clearly doesn’t want him in the race is an embarrassment and risks turning him into the punchline of a joke. I will be surprised if the UCP doesn’t take measures to keep him out of their race – I expect you to accuse them of being afraid of free speech when that happens. DJC
I think there is a place for primary healthcare as a government service. I think Raj will make it. And yes, when and if some sort of cabal in the UCP try to shut him out I wont have anything kind to say about them either.