It would be interesting to know what Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has to say about the call by the founder of her party’s influential Take Back Alberta faction to his supporters to use the NDP’s upcoming leadership race to infiltrate the Opposition party and try to elect its leader.
On Nov. 17 last year, David Parker promised in a rambling tweet that when Rachel Notley announced her plan to resign as leader of the NDP, “We will sell more memberships in their party than the unions and the green activists combined, and they will refuse to accept the results of their own leadership race.”
On Jan. 16, the day Ms. Notley announced her plan to step down, David Parker tweeted: “Take Back Alberta will be travelling the province in the coming months encouraging people to buy memberships in the NDP and make their voices heard. … When the NDP cancel their leadership race, we will know they no longer believe in democracy.”
Now, Mr. Parker has a lot to say on a social media on any given day, a lot of which sounds pretty unhinged, and on its face this scheme appears to be bonkers. Still, it’s said here he has presented both the UCP Government and the NDP with a problem.
The UCP’s problem is that, for most Albertans, there appears to be no light at all between Take Back Alberta and the governing party officially led by Ms. Smith.
There have been too many headlines like the one over Calgary Herald political commentator Don Braid’s column last Nov. 5 – “social conservatives completely control Danielle Smith’s party” – for it to be otherwise. So plenty of Albertans are bound to be skeptical about Ms. Smith’s claim that no matter what TBA tells her she will “govern for all Albertans.”
At this point, with TBA controlling the UCP’s governance board, it appears that they are essentially the same political entity.
So this makes the call by TBA’s founder and putative leader for his supporters to join the NDP and either engineer a hostile takeover of the Opposition party or create an embarrassing battle to control it something virtually unprecedented in Canadian political history.
In the absence of a statement to the contrary from Premier Smith, it amounts to a declaration by Alberta’s governing party that it approves of an organized effort by its operatives and members to sabotage the operations of the Opposition party through the creation of a Trojan horse.
This is not a good look for a party that supposedly advocates democracy!
For the NDP – and particularly for Amanda Freistadt, the Opposition party’s newly named chief returning officer – this means that even if Mr. Parker is just blowing hot air, they need to be serious about setting rules for the leadership contest that will prevent TBA/UCP members from being able to try to hijack the party.
TBA and Mr. Parker, of course, will cry foul no matter what the NDP decides to do, so that need not be a particular concern. Moreover, it seems likely most Albertans would understand and quietly sympathize with any effort by the NDP to ensure the integrity of its leadership vote in the face of threats by an influential UCP figure to sabotage and neutralize its leadership race.
That this is not the way Parliamentary democracy is supposed to work goes without saying, although schemes like this are not completely without precedent in Alberta.
Readers will recall that in 2016, when the NDP was in power, the organizer of an anti-NDP petition campaign named George Clark advocated a similar stunt and got nowhere. At the time, then NDP provincial secretary Chris O’Halloran said about 250 would-be infiltrators were identified and had their applications rejected.
There was no question then, though, that the leaders of either of the two conservative opposition parties in the Legislature – the Progressive Conservatives or the Wildrose Party – would have endorsed such a covert scheme.
There has also been a tradition in Alberta of efforts by activist groups of various stripes to take over moribund fringe parties. The Alberta Party got its start as an alliance of far-right separatist groups in the 1980s, and when many members left to join the fledgling Wildrose Alliance in 2009, a group of more progressive members succeeded in changing the party’s focus.
And in 2016, the much-diminished Social Credit Party was taken over by a group of anti-abortion activists who renamed it the Pro-Life Alberta Political Association. It appears now to operate not as a true political party but as a social conservative political action committee that is able to issue tax receipts. This, it is fair to argue, is an attempt to abuse Canadian tax laws intended to support our democratic Canada’s system of government.
But the key difference about the TBA scheme is that there is nothing moribund about the NDP, which has formed the largest Opposition in Alberta history and, notwithstanding the hopeful claims of some UCP supporters that it will surely collapse without Ms. Notley at the helm, stands a credible chance of returning to government in Alberta with a new leader.
Assuming it’s not just an annoying ruse, that makes Mr. Parker’s scheme to encourage TBA members to support some kind of Kamikaze candidate – to borrow a phrase – an effort to engage in political sabotage.
Premier Smith, whenever she returns from her vacation, needs to renounce it and denounce it, although we all know how likely that is.
Ms. Freistadt needs to ensure the NDP sets clear rules and enforces them to prevent the infiltration of the party leadership race by enemies of democracy.
Well this actually also wouldn’t be the first time a group of unelected Conservatives came up with a crazy scheme that involved the government and the opposition. The difference was the previous PC Wildrose merger scheme was hatched by more mainstream Conservatives
Of course if TBA has their way, which I doubt, they would control both parties, so in the end it would effectively be the same outcome as a merger. It does seem to be another way to try limit voter choice.
As for what Smith thinks, I suspect secretly she is glad TBA is now focused on meddling with another party, in the same way a prisoner is glad when the guard is distracted by something else.
I feel there is more than a bit of overreach, hubris and foolishness by TBA here. Failure of a second takeover and the resulting embarrassment might be what finally starts to reduce their influence on Alberta politics.
Take Back Alberta is pretty much a cult. It’s led by someone who wasn’t elected, has no known present employment, and has totally lunatic ideas. Democracy is something the UCP doesn’t respect, or stand for. There have been members in the UCP camp, who didn’t play by the election rules, and around $230,000 in fines were issued to them for that. The previous UCP leader still has the R.C.M.P looking into his leadership race, and it is surprising that it is taking this long to deal with. Danielle Smith has reduced the Alberta Legislature sittings to hardly anything. She also rejected calls from constituents who lacked an MLA in vacated ridings, to have a by-election. Now, MLAs can receive more gifts, but calling them bribes is more truthful. The provincial Ethics Commissioner is stripped of their powers to investigate MLAs for wrongdoing, prior to a provincial election. Anything that is unpalatable to the electorate, such as the widely deadpanned provincial pension scam, didn’t get included on the provincial election itinerary. Municipal leaders and councilors who oppose anything the UCP does, gets bullied by the UCP. In the 1920s, and in the 1930s, in Austria and Germany, there were a small group of very crazy individuals with an agenda that was very bad, and they were enabled by the citizens of these two countries. Because the people stood by and did nothing, the results of that were catastrophic.
I will take the odds that Parker and the TBA will try something. Of course, Smith will prevaricate to the stars and back if asked of any knowledge of a plan. If any evidence is presented to Smith, we can expect she will channel her best Inspector Renault, “I’m shocked! Shocked…”
If chicanery abounds, the NDP will be on their own. The RCMP may get around to a cursory glance once they wrap up the Jason Kenney campaign finance fraud case. Post Media, as we know, will be less than useless with any investigative reporting on the matter.
Being on their own in this, will Rachel Notley permit the NDP to punch back hard or will she limit them to a strongly worded letter to the editor? I am hoping for the former but am afraid we will get the latter.
It was said (I never saw actual numbers) that many liberal and NDP supporters and sympathizers bought PC memberships in order to support Allison Redford’s outsider leadership campaign. I assume that few of these were active members of the liberal or NDP parties, since memberships were pretty low then, and you are not supposed to hold memberships in two parties. Certainly the 2012 NDP plus Liberal vote tanked in the face of the challenge form Wildrose, and looking at the numbers, it is easy to speculate that a lot of people who voted PC in 2012 voted NDP in 2022 (never guaranteed of course, given our dismal % participation in elections – we don’t know for sure how many left leaning voters just stayed home in 2012, and how many self-perceived “centrists” could not hold their noses and vote for either party in 2022).
Michael: With respect (I mean that) I don’t believe this is a correct analysis, although I understand why people feel this way. In 2012, the Progressive Conservatives were a large brokerage party whose leaders (arrogantly but accurately) assumed that their leadership contest was the only election in Alberta that actually allowed voters to make a meaningful choice. They publicly encouraged that idea to engage voters, sell memberships, and raise funds. The party leadership felt secure in its ability to control the entry of candidates to the race through high registration fees, good-behaviour bonds and so on. (Perhaps the NDP will now do the same things. We shall see.) The makeup of the PC caucus, cabinet and party membership, meanwhile, was really broad – with people like Dave Hancock, later premier, who could easily have been a New Democrat in another province, moderates like Ed Stelmach, the outgoing premier, and far-right ideologues like Ted Morton, who I have always thought of as the worst premier Alberta never had, all coexisting under the same big tent. The UCP is a different creature, of course, and people like Mr. Stelmach, let alone Mr. Hancock and Ms. Redford are no longer really welcome there. Certainly lots of moderate voters came out in the general election and voted for Ms. Redford by supporting their local PC candidate (who may have been considerably farther to the right) because she was an engaging and obviously intelligent leader with interesting policy ideas. But to suggest that she was chosen as leader because of infiltration by Liberal and NDP types is a misinterpretation of what happened. DJC
I have no trouble with your analysis above. However, I am pretty sure there were right wing elements in the PCs that resented the fact that a lot of members of teachers’ unions and others (allegedly – I don’t have numbers and don’t know where I would find them) joined up to support Redford.
The whole problem is this notion of leadership candidates (and this seems to happen in all parties) going out and trying to sell memberships. This could be avoided with much tighter voting eligibility rules (such as saying, for this NDP race, that only members signed up before January 31 would be eligible to vote).
My father was a teacher and my mother was an RN. To the best of my knowledge, the old boy voted NDP at federal and provincial level, for forty years. My mother, coming from a rural Ontario Roman Catholic background voted Liberal, what with the NDP being essentially the Canadian branch of the Comintern, until 2015 when she says she voted for Rachel Notley. I know for a fact that both of my parents got PC memberships in 2011, because I help my old man sort his emails from time to time. His receipt of digital emissions from Jason Kenney after his installation as party head brought me no end of amusement and provided an opportunity to tease both my parents about supporting Tailgunner Jay. My parents’ circle of friends, most retired teachers, likewise bought PC memberships during this period. Their band constituted a tiny group of people amongst 80 000 who voted, but I know for a fact that it occurred.
Alt-rights like Parker can only throw feces. Parker and his TBA have no idea what governance actually means. This is what happens when poorly educated people get drunk on power.
I once bought a PC party membership for the sole purpose of voting for Nancy Betkowski, and let it lapse when Klein won.
I did not buy the membership because I supported the fools, but because my opinion of Klein was already low. And I never voted PC again (or UCP & Wildrose, or Reform).
Looks like time to buy an NPD membership, pay attention to whom the TBA trolls are espousing for leader, then vote against that particular tool.
And then keep the membership active. Been voting NDP provincially (and federally, with a nose hold) anyways.
Lol and I just found out it’s a family tradition – both of my parents took out UCP memberships for the sole purpose of voting against Smith.
So TBA is playing the same games that the ATA has for years…..Yawn. The ATA still has an advantage as it funded by coerced contribution.
Doug: There’s a big difference between the NDP and the UCP.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/alberta/alberta-passes-bill-banning-political-donations-from-corporations-and-unions/article25074664/
https://edmontonjournal.com/news/politics/alberta-amends-conflicts-of-interest-act-changes-rules-for-ethics-commissioner-gift-limits
Troll alert!
Didn’t TBA encourage its supporters to buy UCP memberships in order to take over the provincial council? Doesn’t the NDP ban membership by anyone who holds membership in another party? Also, memberships can be cross-referenced with past donations. Membership is certainly not automatic and can be rejected by party officials without dispute.
Fake members, “people” who don’t really exist or who don’t know their names were purloined from a voters’ list, are another story. There’s also the old trick of bulk memberships purchased from the same credit card. Surely the NDP is taking steps to prevent these tactics and others.
It’s not a stretch to think that dirty tricks of all sorts, borrowed from right-wing playbooks around the world, will be in play. These threats must be taken seriously. David Parker might be little more than a useful idiot to whoever is pulling TBA’s strings. It’s that entity’s bag of tricks and finances that are concerning.
Alberta NDP Charter
Membership
2.01 Every resident of Alberta who is 14 years of age or older and agrees to abide by the Constitution and principles of the Party, and who is not a member or supporter of another political party, shall be eligible to apply for membership in the Party.
Does the NDP charter mention anything about refunding membership fees if the applicant is a member or supporter of a different party? Seems to me the NDP could pick up some ready cash by accepting the TBA goons’ fees and then denying their membership. (I bet that’s what the UCP would do if we who support the NDP tried to sneak into their party!)
The majority of respondents to your blogs consistently have little more than contempt to throw at the TBA forces in Alberta. This is understandable, but as unlikely to diminish them as calling right-wing zealots “the deplorables” did in the U.S.
You have already hinted at, and others have corroborated, the active campaign by the TBA wing of the UCP to take control of Alberta town and city councils, as well as school boards, in the next civic elections.
Facing down this takeover plan will take more than insults, though. Without wanting to encourage paranoia, I think all rational and reasonable Albertans will have to involve themselves more directly in the political processes. We have to be more vigilant about the dangerous schemes the far right is currently pre-occupied with. You, obviously, do a good and important job at that, David, but I just want to emphasize that hurling only invective is far from the answer.
Right on. Vote like your life depends on it…cuz sometimes it actually does.
How to you know that the posters here are doing nothing? Don’t you think they might be more likely than the average Albertan to be informed and get involved?
It’s true that Albertans in general have been apathetic about showing up at the polls and participating actively in politics before election day. This lack of involvement is not unique to Alberta, though. It’s a problem in other democracies around the world. Doing nothing is a choice. If you do nothing and a party comes to power that you don’t like, you have endorsed that party by allowing others to make that choice for you. “I didn’t vote” is not absolution from responsibility. It is the reason authoritarians are seizing power all over the world. They count on voter apathy. Democracy could disappear without a whimper.
Our “Panamama” Premier better get home soon! The mice need a cat!
An old aphorism of sorts comes to mind, something along the lines of, “If you give a determined man enough rope, eventually he will fulfill his desires and become well hung.”
The double entendre, Il Duce [normalization of corporate state power], “often spoke of himself as a “man of the people.”” and Ezekiel 23:20.
TBA and DP are fifth column useful idiots who “love the poorly educated” like their “stable genius” example to the South.
These are the politics that the CRAP party imported into Canada in the early 2000’s, after having studied at the knee of the U.S. Tea Party. Stacking the deck for nomination/leadership meetings is now an everyday event in the far right culture. It was used by neo con candidates in AB to elect riding delegates and ensure that the takeover of the PC party would proceed and their extremist policies would carry the day. The same tactic was repeated when it came time to nominate candidates within the UCP stable for the general election and purge AB conservatism of any remaining progressives. Ironically it was eventually used against JK, when they decided to give Kenny’s career the “blue juice” and deliver Danny Cray Cray the premier’s office.
These tactics are undemocratic to the extreme, I believe its been referred to as the tail wagging the dog and succeeds only when the tyranny of the minority goes unchallenged. So I understand Mr. Parker is a byproduct of the homeschooling experiment that has been ongoing in AB for decades and leads to varying outcomes for the children. I wonder how strong his parents math skills are/were? If the TBA crew wants to FAFO, as the right likes to say, how many foot soldiers do they have and how many do the NDP have? How about us progressives band together and get involved using the same tactics as TBA? This is me having a difficult time trying to adult, when faced with such disrespectful behavior as promoted by TBA.
My true preference would be that the NDP devise a system of checks that would ensure the people voting are truly interested in building on past successes and growing the dissatisfaction with the United Clown Party to form government once again. Failing that, how about they allow only members who bought memberships prior to the first words to flatulate out of Parker’ tweethole, given these grossly unethical threats. Unfortunately it would limit the participation of true progressives, but exceptional times/exceptional measures.
I trust the NDP to come up with a solution, after all their grey matter hasn’t suffered a hypoxic brain injury from having their heads so far up their arses.
Nie wieder ist jetzt.
“… or create an embarrassing battle to control it something virtually unprecedented in Canadian political history”
Unprecedented? How about the lengths that the PTB in the BC NDP had to go to in order to head off the membership drive by enviro activists during the party’s leadership campaign in the fall of 2022? See: https://thetyee.ca/News/2022/10/13/Long-Road-BC-NDP-Leadership-Mess/
So, hypothetically, and if I understand it correctly, assuming that this scheme succeeded then the right vote would be split between the UCP and the NDP (formerly known as the TBA). The old NDP members could align themselves with another party or form a new party and win the next election. A lot of ifs, but it would be amusing if this is what happens.
TBA says a lot of things. I tend to give them a little slack because they are natural response of the despotic progressive agenda in Canada:
“In order to declare a public order emergency, the Emergencies Act requires that there be “an emergency that arises from threats to the security of Canada that are so serious as to be a national emergency.” The Act defers to CSIS’s definition of “threats to the security of Canada.”
Federal Court Justice Richard Mosley said the situation created by the protests did not meet that threshold.
“I have concluded that the decision to issue the Proclamation does not bear the hallmarks of reasonableness – justification, transparency and intelligibility – and was not justified in relation to the relevant factual and legal constraints that were required to be taken into consideration,” he said in his decision.”
Bret– government overreach?
Do you mean like what your idol PP keeps on saying about how he will fire people(BoC), how he will “fine cities ” who do not follow his demands, etc etc .how the UCP is doing overreach in Edmonton re: the emergency…..you can’t have it both ways, as much as you try to think you’ve just scored….upon further review “NO GOAL “….
PP is another I tend to take with a grain of salt. I actually think hes a good guy and of course, head and shoulders above Trudeau and the cadre of progressive icons keeping him in power, but he has a major flaw. He has to get elected by an eastern electorate that is fat on the steady diet of western taxes the majoritarian governments in Ottawa have provided them. Which is of course why they keep on breaking the constitution. You have to if you want to tax one jurisdiction to feed others where you need votes. Which is why Canada is coming apart at the seams.
Where to start with right-wing derpsters? You think PP is a “good guy”? Like Ralph Klein was a “good guy”?
“When did you stop beating your wife, Ralph?” “Never!”
The corporate profit rate in Alberta is the highest in any jurisdiction in the US and Canada. A vast amount of capital is generated in Alberta through the rentier exraction of hydrocarbon resources, and an unparalleled portion of that money goes to corporate profit. There are a lot of rich people in Alberta relative to the size of the population, and those rich people pay more tax than poor people, as in the rest of Canada. I still find the Kon take on regional effects of taxation in this country to be astounding in its degree of ignorance. We’re fully immersed in a new socio-economic system in which the old forms of productive capitalism are dying, but the rentier extractive class that thrived under the old system is fighting it out with the new ruling speculative finance and tech oligarchs. One side has a base of yokels, and one a base of wokels.
And did the Americans think about the blockades? The guns and death threats against the RCMP? The whole shambolic waste of billions in production revenue? You and yours seem fine with crushing unions! But their strike actions only target companies not the country!
doubt if Smith will denouce that little plot. Even if she does make some noises, I’d bet the next pension cheque she’ll be encouraging them. What smith might want to remember is, they could do it to her also.
The name of the game is getting elected and in Alberta, that takes priority over ethics, democracy, fair play, etc. The name of the game is for the poor to freeze in the cold, turn a government service into a privitized money machine, ensure oil and gas companies make as much money as possible.
I’ve seen this game played before. It doesn’t end well for any one in most cases especially if you annouce that is what you are going to do. what a dumb ass.
TBA Take Back Alberta
Project Confederation
Alberta Parents Union.
These folks aren’t the KKK, but are the RRR,radical religious right.
When Parker stated he would take over the UCP, he did.
He’s threatened to take over school boards in every region and as most school boards are rural, this is a real threat. And will our provincial government intervene? No way. You’ve seen how TBA has influenced anti trans policy. You can bet these religious, motivated zealots will do what they promise. Get elected to school boards and strangle progress. It’s not going to happen in one election, it’s a generation plan.
It took 40 years for the Republicans and Koch to take over the American legal system and the radical religious conservative decisions have just started. Abortion was just the first of many issues the RRR want changed.
Look at the goals of Project Confederation and the Alberta Parents Union and though there seems no formal association you can bet the same folks are members of all three.
And now Parker is musing about taking over the NDP. Beware, it’s possible and with his loyal followers it is real.