A spectre is haunting the UCP – the spectre of Rachel Notley.
That seemed to be the key message to be had from last night’s final United Conservative Party leadership candidates’ “debate.”
As the frontrunning candidate, former Wildrose Party leader Danielle Smith, put it to the candidate who is likely her strongest challenger, former UCP cabinet minister Travis Toews, Premier Jason Kenney and his cabinet “allowed themselves to be bullied and pushed around by the NDP!”
This was pure gaslighting.
After all, the UCP was the party whose leader handed out earplugs for his MLAs in the Legislature to stuff in their heads when the NDP spoke.
As leader of the NDP, Ms. Notley leads a caucus of 23 MLAs that faces a government caucus of 61 in the House. (There are also three independents in the 87-member Legislature, one in exile from the NDP and two from the UCP – one of those, Todd Loewen, was on stage last night running for the leadership.)
So this is simply not a government that can be bullied by the NDP, even if, for a brief moment in political history, both parties accepted the need to take some measures to control the greatest public health threat in a century, which Ms. Smith apparently dismisses as a fraud and an excuse for an assault on freedom.
But the prospect of an NDP victory in the general election expected next spring, personified by former premier and Opposition leader Notley, loomed over the seven candidates on the stage at downtown Edmonton’s Citadel Theatre.
Not even the current surge of money into provincial coffers could chase it away – when Mr. Toews tried to take credit for the surfeit of cash by claiming, “we inherited a fiscal trainwreck, my friends,” Mr. Loewen accurately responded, “what you inherited was high oil prices!”
And it was the threat presented by Ms. Notley and the NDP – not the usual lightning rod for the UCP’s cartoonish fury at Confederation, Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau – that surely motivated the three leading candidates last night to pull their punches in the so-called debate.
Of course, it’s too much to expect any intramural debate among candidates to lead the same party to generate many sparks, let alone draw blood.
All must consider the greater horror than losing the leadership race – that somehow they’ll have to wear the blame for losing the coming election.
So it was too much to hope there would be many genuinely sharp moments among Ms. Smith, Mr. Toews, and the other former Wildrose leader, Brian Jean, all of whom have some chance of replacing departing Premier Jason Kenney.
You’re just not going to hear a you-had-an-option-sir moment in a party leadership debate – not if the party has any prospect of maintaining a façade of unity after the dust has settled.
So it’s no surprise question that generated the loudest debate of the night was about arts and culture in Alberta, not exactly a Conservative strong suit. The reason was fairly obvious: the stakes are low, and the chance of a pointed jab puncturing the potential leader is therefore negligible.
The possibility of damage was further limited by a format that started discussion on each topic with a softball question lobbed by the moderator that clearly delineated the limits of debate, and kept the responses too short for real damage.
The closest thing to a punch that actually landed came when Ms. Smith asked Mr. Toews to indicate if he would stick around as leader if he lost, and the former finance minister demurred to provide a clear answer.
But who can blame the man for not wanting to step aboard a ship piloted by the political equivalent of Philip Francis Queeg, the UCP commander most likely to start a hunt for Justin Trudeau’s strawberries?
A little earlier, Mr. Toews tried a similar gambit, reminding the audience of how Ms. Smith crossed the floor of the House to the Progressive Conservative benches in 2014, famously dooming the re-election chances of then Conservative premier Jim Prentice and all those who followed her.
But that story’s long in the tooth, and it glanced off Ms. Smith judging from the cheers of the crowd every time she fired off a call for her Alberta Sovereignty Act – colourfully summed up by former Kenney principal secretary Howard Anglin recently as the Alberta Suicide Act.
The three former Kenney Cabinet ministers who now seem to have little chance to win – Rebecca Schulz, Leela Aheer and Rajan Sawhney – added their voices to the night’s mild criticism of the proposed sovereignist legislation.
Ms. Schulz – whom my colleague Dave Counroyer tweeted yesterday “would be a frontrunner if this were the old PC Party” – warned of the danger Ms. Smith’s anti-constitutional obsession could split the already disunited party asunder.
Ms. Aheer called Ms. Smith’s signature policy “an excuse to leave Canada when we should be looking for ways to lead Canada.”
And Ms. Sawhney advised the frontrunner to wait for the general election before trying to enact obviously unconstitutional and inevitably controversial legislation. “These are the kinds of things that require a mandate from Albertans,” she pleaded.
Ms. Smith shrugged it all off with the claim the party has a mandate to fight with Ottawa thanks to Premier Kenney’s 2021 equalization referendum, a bit of political theatre no one took seriously at the time.
For the most part, though, Ms. Smith’s opponents used their debate challenges to deny her opportunities to grandstand – either to cost her a few votes or acknowledging her lead is now unassailable.
As for Mr. Jean, he put some effort into sounding more grownup and lawyerly than Ms. Smith – not a difficult challenge – without much effect on the audience’s obvious enthusiasm for the frontrunner.
He promised to include all of the other six candidates in his cabinet – assuming they all win seats, I suppose – and argued he was the man for the job because he’d never had to kick anyone out of caucus.
He forgot, apparently, that in May 2016 he tried to fire his finance critic, Derek Fildebrandt, and didn’t quite succeed.
The UCP will mail out ballots to its members starting Friday. The results of the vote to choose which of the seven candidates will get to replace Mr. Kenney as premier – a decision of no more than 3.5 per cent of eligible Alberta voters – will be announced on Oct. 6.
Maybe this is just another example of either how out of touch with reality Smith is, or how she prefers living in an alternate universe of her own imagining. No, Kenney was not being “bullied” by the NDP.
Of all the candidates, Smith is perhaps the one who has a history of letting an irrational fear of the NDP drive her to bad decisions. Jean might be a close second of having this fear. Kenney, for all his flaws, mostly just made his own bad decisions without much concern about other parties. Let’s at least give him credit for that.
Has Smith learned anything from her past history? I am not so sure. Now the latest focus of her irrational preoccupations seems to be the party and the person who leads Canada.
It is clear there is a derangement syndrome that seems to have taken hold of Canadian Conservatives these days. It is partly understandable for Federal Conservatives, who keep losing elections since 2015, to be increasingly frustrated. However, as some UCP leadership candidates have tried to point out, they have some power. They just haven’t used it effectively. Much like their Federal cousins, they risk becoming their own worst enemies.
It wouldn’t be the first time that an unproductive response to irrational fear led to the very thing they claimed not to want. I believe one of her challengers already clearly warned what would happen if the UCP chose Smith as leader.
First Kenney and now this – that party just can’t seem to help itself. Too bad Albertans keep getting dragged along with all of this party’s bad decisions.
In Umberto Eco’s “Ur-Fascism”, the eighth identifier of fascism is that enemy is both strong and weak. It appears that the UCP leadership has decided to jump on that well-worn platform and raise the evil specter that is Rachel Notley and the NDP.
Of course, they rolled out the usual blame PMJT nonsense, but for the most part, there was nothing new. It was the usual litany of conspiracy tropes and mindless Twittercisms that have fueled “rage-farming” for almost a decade. It’s pretty rich when CONs keep playing themselves as the victims; they are so hard done by, forgotten, disrespected, and denied their rightful place in the sun and all other things. In other words, theirs is the height of the malignant narcissist’s mindset. After all, they have sacrificed much to better all of civilization and all peoples.
One wonders about the mental stability of such people if they were ever put in government. Well, Alberta has seen almost four years of UCP nonsense, stupidity, slacking, abandonment, and back-stabbing, so it should be clear by now that the UCP is just a plain bad crowd to be around.
Of course, Albertans remain the stupidest people alive, so there’s consistency there.
No, no Just Me. The stupidest? Albertans aren’t even on the board.
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This fascination with calling Albertans stupid has to stop. Born and raised in rural Alberta, live in the capital. I am included in the folks you are disparaging, and I take offence. Albertans are no dumber than anyone else, get rekt. If you think you’re smarter than everyone who lives in this province I have pieces of the Walterdale bridge for sale, hit me up.
Stupid is as stupid does.
Knee-jerk tribalism anyone? It’s not a “fascination” it’s an inescapable conclusion.
I think David’s phrase “cartoonish fury” sums it up nicely. When you become a joke, it’s a death knell. And it couldn’t happen to nicer people.
Haha thanks for the spectre joke. Alarming and discouraging to see so many grown adults acting worse than any child I’ve ever seen. All this sovereignty nonsense is just yet another forked-tongued Conservative grifter glibly saying whatever they think will get them elected while pretending that somehow there will be no consequences for their statements. For all I know, Ms. Smith believes she can say what she needs to to get elected, then govern like an adult if she wins? The angry delusional yobs she has been making seditious speeches to are not going to stop existing as soon as they cast their ballots for her. She’s trying to get elected with a mandate she can’t enact – what exactly is her endgame? Likely answer is she doesn’t have one. When is the last time you saw someone decide that vandalizing the social fabric of their home was a great way to get elected? Oh right, basically every right wing election in Canada or America for the last several years.
I used to disagree with Conservatives about lots of things, but they used to attempt to engage with facts and reality, now they’re just retreating into a paranoid narcissistic fantasy world where they are right about everything and those who see things differently are not just stupid, they’re also tyrants and communists and wokies and snowflakes and whatever the slur-du-jour is.
This reminds me of old marionette adventure shows on TV. Remember those? The slow-mo opening of pod bay doors, the rockets lifting off, but don’t pay attention to the strings. However, there is no Captain Scarlet to the rescue, just more slo-mo. Equally as mechanical. Do they all have an embedded solenoid?
It has already been said above: “One wonders about the mental stability of such people if they were ever put in government. ” We need not wonder we can say with it certainty!
Thank you for this DC, love the spectre. No doubt that unity you describe is intended as “a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre”.
In truth, Simon, I considered including something like that. I decided it would be troweling it on a bit thick, though. DJC
So it was too much to hope there would many genuinely sharp moments…
Wants a verb, I think.
Lars: The verb to be, indeed. Thanks. It’s been fixed. DJC
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/canada/freeland-attends-events-in-alberta-as-mounties-investigate-harassment/ar-AA11jX56?ocid=entnewsntp&cvid=a20f61d5bd8b4f09cfaad9216bb81e56
What’s to investigate? The whole thing was caught on camera and millions of people have seen it, the facts are a matter of public record! I’m not a lawyer and don’t know which, if any, laws were broken, but I think even if Mr. McDavid’s actions were legal, it is very appropriate for a couple of RCMP officers to knock on Mr. McDavid’s door and politely let him know that Canada has laws against violence and the Police will be keeping an eye out for him.
Knowing the Alberta RCMP, don’t hold your breath waiting for an outcome of said “investigation” … we’re still waiting for their “investigation” of the 2017 UCP Leadership vote to come to some conclusion.
I’ll bet you there are many RCMP “members” who share the views of that f*ckwad.
“We’re investigating” sometimes seems like Copspeak for “we’re not going to do anything at all but we don’t want to say that.” I really wish Canada had functional civilian oversight of its Police forces, what we have is more like a shell game designed to give the illusion of accountability, but only the illusion.
Neil, CBC showed the video to a couple of lawyers, who thought a charge of creating a disturbance would be a likely conviction, but not much else.
Unfortunately I expect the most likely consequence of a conviction would be a fine, which would likely be covered – or more than covered – by a Go-Fund-Me account.
Haha funnily enough I usually think jail sentences are not in the public interest and are also immoral and needlessly cruel. I doubt incarceration is necessary for this individual, but I certainly think it is very appropriate for an “Officer of the Peace” to “keep the peace” by politely and quietly letting him know that 1)the Police don’t think his action was okay and 2)he should expect to be watched for the next while, and 3)he should also expect to be fully prosecuted for any threatening actions or statements going forward. JMO of course, I’ve never been a cop and sometimes things seem simpler from the outside.
I had a letter in the Calgary herald today pointing out what I think about stupid seniors who let these idiots lead them around by the balls and find it smart to hurl sarcastic comments at female politicians who don’t deserve it yet I still have them attacking me for being smarter than them. They don’t care what these phoney conservatives have done to us and are more than willing to help them make our financial mess a lot worse. A few years ago an elderly man told me that he didn’t want to become a financial burden to his children but could see what these phoney conservatives were doing and how it could effect him. His health was not good. I told him about our family members being stuck with a cost of $10,600. per month for five years when they needed a nursing home for their mother and had to accept a private for profit one because there was a waiting list of over 1,800 for the public ones. I shouldn’t have, it just made him more concerned. During the Klein years I met a brother and sister who had divorced their parents because of the same worry. They didn’t want to be forced into financial ruin by parents who refused to listen to them when they told them what Klein’s policies could do to them. Danielle Smith certainly has a lot of stupid seniors believing in her and they have no intention of believing the truth about her. It certainly shows how damn stupid they are.
Looks to me like Danielle Smith has been bucked off a few too many rodeo broncos headfirst. Is she suffering an ABI? Just wondering, what with all the strange policy ideas, and now this analysis that defies facts. Yee-Ha
This whole UCP leadership debate is a joke, and nothing more. If Peter Lougheed were still around, he’d let these pretend conservatives and Reformers have it. He would know that they are so out of touch with reality. The NDP will easily put the lies of these pretend conservatives and Reformers to rest, and easily defeat them in the next provincial election debate, and win the next provincial election. Danielle Smith was defeated the last times, and any other UCP leadership candidates, will be too.