Ever since the current leadership of the United Conservative Party opted to lend its credibility to Alberta’s hitherto marginalized separatist movement, the creation of a pro-Canadian conservative party in this province was probably inevitable.
Still, the memory of how Rachel Notley’s NDP exploited the vote split on the right between the Progressive Conservative Party and Wildrose Party to jump from a distant third place to a strong first place in 2015 keeps folks awake at night in conservative circles here in Wild Rose Country.
So it came as something of a surprise yesterday when two exiled former members of the UCP caucus in the Alberta Legislature announced they have a plan to resurrect the Progressive Conservative Association of Alberta, as the party was legally known throughout its nearly 44 years in power.
Never mind the vote split in 2015, former infrastructure minister Peter Guthrie, MLA for Airdrie-Cochrane, and Lesser Slave Lake MLA Scott Sinclair, both of whom were expelled from the UCP Caucus for their political sins this year, announced their idea during an appearance on the Real Talk with Ryan Jespersen video podcast.
The way the two Independent MLAs described it, their idea is the only way to keep the NDP out of power in the next provincial election. That, they argued, is because the UCP under Premier Danielle Smith has become just too weird and too separatist for normal Albertans. They have a point, although whether that will end up benefiting the NDP or their PC 2.0 Party remains to be seen.
“The premier is going to be held accountable for morphing the party from what was supposed to be a mainstream, big-tent party into a separatist party,” Mr. Sinclair, who was kicked out of the UCP Caucus in March for threatening to vote against Finance Minister Nate Horner’s budget on the grounds it didn’t do enough for rural ridings like his, told Mr. Jespersen.
“We’re going to be able to provide people,” he said, “with a very comfortable option with a name that has credibility, with two MLAs to start that have reputations that I believe are reputable, are solid in their constituencies, and represent a lot more mainstream Albertans.”
Mr. Guthrie – who resigned from Cabinet in February over how the premier was dealing with the former Alberta Health Services CEO’s allegations about dodgy contracts being pushed by government insiders and was expelled from caucus in April for calling for a judge-led inquiry into those claims – also emphasized the UCP’s separatist tilt yesterday.
Under Ms. Smith, he said to Mr. Jespersen, the UCP has become a government “that has a separatist motive, and probably creeping around one third of the caucus who support that.”
On Canada Day, Mr. Guthrie posted a photo of himself clad in a red and white maple leaf jersey on social media, making it quite clear where he stands.
Say what you will about their idea, it generated enough buzz to cast some shade on Ms. Smith’s news conference to announce her government is going ahead and creating the new provincial police force that a majority Albertans have made clear they don’t want and won’t trust.
The premier’s announcement, a key part of the government’s increasingly separatist agenda, was cast as the appointment of former Calgary police officer Sat Parhar as the chief of an entity called “the Independent Agency Police Service,” to be renamed the Alberta Sheriffs Police Service, and then to operate as a Crown Corporation. But everybody in Alberta, pro and con, gets it about what’s really going on here.
Asked by a couple of reporters about the about the possibility of the PCs coming back to life, the premier insisted confidently that Alberta election law says “the name of the former legacy parties of the UCP could not be registered as new parties.”
“That is so we do not have confusion of voters,” she said, promising “to raise that with the elections officials and remind them of what the law says. We would expect the law will be followed.”
It is not, however, clear that Ms. Smith has the law on her side. For a party to maintain its status, it must have either three MLAs in the Legislature or nominate candidates in at least half the province’s ridings. Under former premier Jason Kenney, the PCs did neither, so the argument can be made the registration has lapsed and the name is available.
According to Mr. Guthrie, the name was re-registered by an unnamed person when it lapsed and has now been made available to him and Mr. Sinclair. They will need to gather around 9,000 signatures before Elections Alberta will consider their plan, but that is unlikely to be a problem.
Despite her cheerful demeanour at her news conference, Ms. Smith has to be worried about this development – as NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi likely is too.
“As the official opposition with 38 MLAs dedicated to listening to and supporting Albertans, Alberta’s New Democrats remain the only choice for positive change for our province,” Mr. Nenshi said in a statement emailed to media yesterday.
“We know this Premier will do anything to protect her own power and is fighting to maintain confidence within her caucus under the pressure of massive corruption and threats of separatism,” Mr. Nenshi said. “The decision by these two former UCP MLAs to revive the PC party is another clear sign that Albertans are unhappy with this current UCP government and are demanding better for our province.”
Last night, former PC deputy premier Thomas Lukaszuk observed that “any additional parties that are right of centre will definitely pose a risk to Danielle Smith and UCP. Now she has the Republican Party to the right and the PC Party to the left.”
And Albertans are singing to Marlaina…..” Stuck in the middle with you….” ???
Never mind…lol humm..
Please, please, please let this split the conservative vote and keep Marlaina from causing more damage to Alberta.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA Oh, mercy!
If Danielle Smith can hold a referendum on the Alberta Provincial Police after she already went ahead with it, surely she will end the Canada Pension Plan in this province without a whiff of public approval. What’s stopping her from taking Alberta out of Canada, once her goons — I mean police force — is in place? I can’t decide if she’ll import alligators or crocodiles to deal with dissenters. As for the pythons, would a native species like rattlesnakes work?
@Abs,
I hope I’m wrong.
She’s setting it up as an American state. Literally, same setup as one of the states in the USA. How so many Albertans fail to see this and run screaming into the streets demanding her instant removal–I do not know.
It’s far past the point of voting. She’s not putting it up for public debate because when she does, it’s clear Albertans don’t want it. She’s just going to do it if they don’t get in the streets and remove her.
I believe I floated this at the first mention of the idea but ten to one odds they see this as their “Texas rangers” a police force loyal to the state and governor first, the country second, which makes SENSE for the rangers because they predate Texas being in the union. (This is why it’s called the lone star state btw). The firewall / “Buffalo manifesto” / diagalon / whatever separatists have massively whiffed on that aspect of the project, unfortunately for them, “alberta” sherriffs or not, they’re still likely to be made up of a majority of officers loyal to CANADA, they’re idiots though, and they think everyone thinks like they do, so this thought is unlikely to have crossed their mind.
As far as infrastructure goes, uh most of that stuff belongs to the RCMP, and it’s not like they’re just going to hand it all over because Dani wanted her pet project.
This is beyond a boondoggle. Not only because people don’t want it, not only because it will be OUTRAGEOUS in its expense, Dani can’t even run a restaurant (she still trying to sell the ole rail car ?) how on earth do they expect to instantly replace a professional, paramilitary force that has policed this province for 120 years ? It’s a foolish, arrogant fantasy. It’s going to take the rest of her time in office and BILLIONS OF DOLLARS just to get the ball rolling, let alone to break ground. She’s a foolish arrogant narcissist though so, what else can we expect at this point?
MY FINAL POINT ONCE AGAIN, is that Albertans do not now, and will not EVER wish to be part of the United States of America, and I believe many albertans are likely to become violent if they feel that may be imminent.
Not me, I’m just a bird, but there’s a lot of guns and explosives out here in oil country and one shudders to think what could happen. There’s enough of that nonsense going on already.
Bird: I reported this rumour in April 2024. https://davidclimenhaga.wpcomstaging.com/2024/04/planned-provincial-police-to-be-called-alberta-rangers-brace-yourselves-for-more-conservative-cowboy-cosplay/ DJC
I remember! Has it been so long now ? Having another day to think on it, this bird thinks it’s rather likely they’ll be rolled out symbolically in an area where we don’t have police patrols because they’re not really needed; the border between the US and Canada. It’s really the only way they could hope to have a force up and running before they have to call the next election, and have something shiny to point at to try and own the feds.
Pythons would not do well in our cold climate, but Prairie rattlesnakes manage it well, at least as far north as the Red Deer River.
“dodgy contracts being pushed by government insiders”, “massive corruption”
Where it is assumed that, “Political corruption is the use of powers by government officials or their network contacts for illegitimate private gain.”
Like this, perhaps:
https://thetyee.ca/News/2025/07/02/Who-Angling-Store-Oilsands-Toxic-Waste-Underground/
“Ooh, I’m grifting my life away
Looking’ for a better way for me and my family
Ooh, I’m grifting my life away
Looking’ for a sunny day”
In the self interested UCP political world keeping up with the Trump family ideal is both a serious political and personal objective, apparently, i.e.,
https://www.thefp.com/p/trump-family-monetized-maga
But, then again, as Eric Trump has stated, “The only family in, probably, United States history that didn’t enrich themselves when they went into government is the Trump family.”
Well this certainly spins a new wrinkle in the Dictator Danni’s plans. Perhaps if she would listen to the people of Alberta rather than just jamming things we don’t want down our throats, like Alberta police force, Alberta Pension Plan, new unnecessary pipelines, all at the expense of seniors and disabled folks, maybe things would be better. All the time she is complaining about how Ottawa has treated us so bad, she has either forgotten or never taken the time to know that it wasn’t Trudeau that did it to Alberta, it was Kenney and Harper that gave away all that money via transfer payments to other Provinces. I certainly hope the splitting of the UCP, or at least some of the UCP Mla’s cross the floor to the real Conservatives happens. Having the UCP as a minority government may stop or slow down some the stupidity going on with the UCP.
47??-38-2??
I’m waiting for the next shoe to drop – 1 or more clown party mla’s floor crossing to the revenant pc’s. 4 would be a nice number. Not to mention the sheer irony & petard hoisting schadenfreude that will number would cause.
I remember a 2015 election post-mortem from Lukaszuk, basically saying Albertan’s had grown tired of the ABPC, and won’t be electing any until we “forgive” them. I wonder if the UCP is careening to that precipice too?
I. Just. Can’t. Any more.
We just keep adding more and more right wing nonsense into the fold, the Liberals are already middle-right-lite, the NDP are middle-left-right and there’s this tiny window of thought going on that somehow, ANY of these parties actually represent Canadians in what’s coming down the pipe with the USA, their bread-n-butter concerns of jobs, housing, healthcare and food.
It’s like a deliberate total lack of imagination going on.
I just want somebody to stand up and say, “We heard the people. Here’s what we *need*. Here’s how we’ll *get* it and if that doesn’t work well enough, we’ll go back to the drawing board and either fix it or replace it. We work for you.”–and actually mean it and do it.
B—NY mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani ,said all of those things….and d’rump is talking about arresting that “communist” ….just being a socialist doesn’t scare enough people off, so we’re back to the commies, illegal ‘aliens’, and as social media is now dubbing it “Alligator Auschwitz “.
I almost feel bad about saying Canadians should send Marlaina there….
But given her “mandate” that she quotes as to why she is doing what she wants ,yes people** should be in the streets protesting.
**There’s a new group on social media “No queen” that are organizing….we’ll see if they can gain some traction, though Stampede is going to be stealing the headlines for now.
And given that the beastly bill seems to have passed, it will be giving Marlaina more disastrous ideas….
Douglas Lamont (former Manitoba MLA) writes a lot about why this is the case in Canadian politics, not surprisingly a lot of it comes down to party discipline/ insiders / institutional power that is not elected, and the NDP is not immune to this. (If you read this blog Doug, please keep up the good work)
Canada has largely been captured by the Chicago boys, and until we get a party that has a real grasp on how economies actually work, this is what we are going to get: neoliberalism in different colours.
Man I’m with you on that B. The trouble with that is it’s the dreaded “Populism” which we have been told is heresy or worse. Populism has been banished and vilified since the Democrats nominated William Jennings Bryan for the presidency in 1896. It’s not a classic conspiracy or cabal but the elites don’t want anyone to have any dialectical thoughts. You had better be careful B or you might be cancelled buddy. “A deliberate total lack of imagination going on” is much too nice of a way of putting it…
So, stormy Danielle is at it again:
The fast majority of Albertans don’t want:
1) An Alberta Pension Plan
2) A Provincial Police Service
3) Separate from Canada
4) No coal mines
But Danielle is hell bent for leather that you shall have it.
They want a covid vaccine, but you can’t have it
This from a fool who 20 years ago wrote that smoking cigarettes had positive health benefits, and that chemtrails are harmful.
Maybe this endeavor will work, maybe it won’t. One thing’s for certain, if a new party looks like it could be a possible threat to the government then the dark oilfield money (responsible for both the creation of the former Wildrose Party and for propping up the current UCP) will ensure these two disgruntled gentlemen are well paid to go away forever.
don’t know the two but it could be they truly believe in what they are doing and can not be bought off. It some times happens.
@abs
In re the CPP – she cannot take unilateral action.
1) the funds are NOT under her control
2) 2/3 of Canadian population in 7 provinces/territories have to agree
3) She has present a management plan equal or better than the CPP’s
In re police force – she can not unilaterally dictate municipalities must drop the RCMP and use her “gestapo”. That’s why her latest blather mentions a “hands off” police force . A partisan police force operating under her control is a constitutional breach the Lt. Gov or Gen. Gov would kick her to the curb for with extreme prejudice and at warp speed.
I can’t reply to my previous comment re: the ABPP (alberta police project) but the key I missed when talking about how the majority of officers will likely see themselves as Canadians.
They will because ALBERTANS DO. Except for a tiny crew of FREAKS that NO ONE LIKES.
recently spent some time with literally THE MOST conservative member of my family right around when the separatists were making all their noise.
This guy looks up to the elites of Canadian business, he’s a capital guy. I don’t ask him how he votes and he doesn’t ask me. We could not STOP ourselves from talking about how STUPID the UCP were for engaging with the separatists, because not only do they not have support, but all the people who normally wouldn’t give two shits what the UCP does are now enraged that they LITERALLY want to destroy the country we live in and sell us off to the Americans.
They live in an echo chamber so they largely miss that the ENTIRE PROVINCE OF ALBERTA (that pays attention anyway) is radioactively pissed off at the idea of separation. The left and the right. Except for the tiny crew of freaks who are despised by even their own families.
I’m sure Dani doesn’t read this blog but I bet her people do, and let me tell you folks I’m reserving some choice words for the day when our paths finally cross. You should quit now and find somewhere else to work before this follows you for the rest of your working days. Maybe find somewhere else to live too, ya scumbags.
Bird: The UCP, including Ms. Smith I am sure, do read this blog from time to time, else they wouldn’t have used my critique of Mr. Nenshi’s passive approach to leading to Opposition a few days back in online ads attacking the NDP. However, I am pretty sure government officials do not get copies of my posts in the daily summary of relevant news stories, if indeed that is still emailed around. I am told Mr. Kenney, or at least someone in his government, put a stop to that, and I assume no one has bothered to restart it. They really should. DJC
Say have you all got a look at the Alberta Sheriff’s uniform. I mean Smokie alert come on? Who designed that? Acme Central Casting? Are they Forest Rangers on the lam? Side arms cap guns maybe, Colt 6 shooters? I am so glad to be a former Albertan.
Bwahahaha….
the breakdown/bluesky….
has a couple of interesting clips of Marlaina being asked if she would sign Thomas Lukaszuk’s petition and her response to P.Guthrie & S.Sinclair forming a Progressive Conservative party … the floor crossing was not in the response….Hmmm???
CONs are always big on family values. Yeah, well, they seem to have all kinds of relationship issues and irreconcilable differences with themselves.
From ADHD to bipolar, why do voters keep trusting these idiots?
Alberta politics is about to become VERY interesting! The UCP has been acting as if they are unassailable. Suddenly they are not, having only a small majority as it is now. Danielle Smith has been force-feeding Albertans her independence oriented agenda, despite being told clearly it isn’t palatable to the majority. The ANDP have been working to counter her plans, but not to any great effect yet. Overnight, a new front is opening up, and she’d better smarten up and find ways to backtrack quickly on some (many?) of the more contentious policies, or she’ll find herself on the outs politically before the next scheduled Provincial Elxn. With or without the PC moniker attached to the upstarts, the “Conservatives” will no longer be “united”. A number of Albertans would sooner support a non-separatist and responsive Conservative political entity. Let the games begin.
It would be ironic if the PCs whose demise was a result of concerns about corruption and entitlement may have been brought back to life because of the UCPs AHS scandals. Although it seems like separatism may be the bigger issue now.
Parties like the UCP which may at times seem invincible can easily start to disintegrate. I suppose a challenge for any party is not to become preoccupied with trying to pander to its more enthusiastic, but extreme members. The UCP now seems to be veering a bit to far from the mainstream now, perhaps in overconfidence.
It would be good to see the PCs back. I did not like how their demise was forced by the more right wing. While there were things about the past version of the PCs I did not agree with, we could use more moderate voices here again. I hope the petition succeeds.
The UCP has got to go. They are not like the true Conservatives we saw under premier Peter Lougheed. A very bad government. Actually, there were various ex Alberta PCs who compared Rachel Notley to Peter Lougheed. They sure were right.
The UCP was never a grassroots movement. It was a shotgun wedding Frankenparty cobbled together by Jason Kenney from the former Wildrose and Progressive Conservative parties, whose only ideology and reason for existence was to defeat the NDP — somewhat like the recently defunct BC “Liberal” party was.
The rivalries and divisions between the old Alberta PCs and Wildrose were not imaginary. They arose out of legitimate policy disagreements about a number of issue sets, like direct democracy versus representative government, property rights, social conservatism, and the role of government. Remember, the “merger” happened long before a certain respiratory virus emerged out of China to force even the most libertarian of governments to put severe restrictions on public behaviour in an effort to slow its spread.
But now, those divisions and rivalries, so carefully papered over by the now-departed Jason Kenney, are opening up again, as the rabid anti-Canadian base of the Wildrose side of the partnership seems to be dominating the agenda of the government, and as the government is also embroiled in the kind of self-dealing, entitlement and apparent corruption that plagued the PCs in their final years in power.
I also find it interesting that this development didn’t arise from urban MLAs representing Calgary seats, but from a pair of MLAs for a both a suburban and a truly rural seat. We tend to see the suburban and rural seats as monolithically conservative, but perhaps they’re not. (Remember, Mr Sinclair’s seat, Lesser Slave Lake, was recently even represented by a New Democrat!).
As some have said in reaction to similar events, “mo’ popcorn, please”.
What of conservatism?
In the bluntest synopsis the world’s most ancient political philosophy has reached a schizophrenic crisis as the world’s economic, strategic, and cultic globalization approaches totality. From its cradle of parochial headmanship, shamanism and superstition tens of millennia ago, conservative tradition has already weathered a number of paradigmatic crises —neolithic, metallurgic, agricultural, civic, orthographic, ritualistic, or religious—but however revolutionary, the cast simply revolved into new roles in the same top-down play where monolithic plutocracy might be recast with parochial oligarchs, or mythological polytheism rewritten as the catholic saints replete with their own calendar days. Such was the russian-roulette of Roman legacy preserved to this day: click!—click!—pow!!—whole new ballgame of Nutz’n’Boltz. Liberalism back then was just a silly phase of life a community’s traditional mores anticipated and managed until passed.
Many a prince would have his theory of how it all went to the dogs but at risk of committing the sin of presentism we would peg the real beginning-of-the-end of the ancient philosophy with relatively little retrospection, perhaps sometime when the “scientific-” or “techno-revolution” began to accelerate beyond the old tradition’s capacity to keep up.
Some would peg it by economic metric—like the introduction of money-specie as popular currency; I prefer a technological basis such as for the joint-stock company invented to underwrite marine mercantilism which could not do without the sextant, and did even better with the gimballed chronometer, both permitting very accurate calculation of latitude and longitude without GPS, rather by celestial sightings with respect the visible horizon at a given time—which of course is the beginning of marine globalization, the harbinger of planetary globalization now nearing completion. So, did the headlong race began 600 years ago?
Perhaps. How’s about 150 years ago when the confluence of scientific method, geology and taxonomy debunked Biblical authority? Hmmm, now it’s coming into better focus because groups who still advocate for the teaching of Biblical Creationism in science classrooms are still featured on MSM human-interest slots or in omens of Rapturism on social media; but perhaps most clear for us and our typical political myopathy might be the electronic age—or better yet, the Information Age—now barely a generation old. Certainly traditionalism has been staggered by all of these, but can any combination explain the schizophrenia so blatantly visible today among so-called “conservative” parties?
One hypothesis is so simple Ockham would probably approve. It holds that today’s parties of the right aren’t conservative at all. There’s enough evidence that this might be true, but it’s superficial not to notice that these pseudoCon parties still have a considerable proportion of traditional conservatives in them even as their respective party brass pursue decidedly unconservative policies that are better labelled as “neoliberal”.
Fast-forward from the “End of History” at the Soviet Collapse to the fleeting zenith of neoliberal-usurped “conservatism” and corporate greed —or “neo-rightism”— and its quarter-century decline since 9/11, and on to the lying and cheating to shore up flagging popularity in its desperate throes over the past decade. It’s tempting to say now that there is no more conservatism anywhere, certainly not one of tradition.
That would only be true if the real Tories whom we know exist within all nominal “conservative”, or “neo-right” parties, were nothing more than a cadaverous ticket to the next election win, one that can be dropped off like a spent grandma once past the gates of the next fruit-pickers’ camp, or a grumpily puckered rump of wrathfully sour-grapes. But that’s not really true…
Who really takes seriously Poilievre’s self-congratulatory—or “Peewee-Herman”— claim that he succeeded in making conservatives out of Liberals or in forcing Carney to come towards his own position? He is barely a conservative himself and certainly ginned a decidedly nonCon tRumpublican faction during his astonishingly unsuccessful campaign against “wokeism”. He paid well over 20-points to buy 3-points from Bernier’s anti-immigrant People’s Party (and his time-payment plan looks to be costing even more). He rode moderate Eastern Tory Erin O’toole out of the leadership on a “Freedom Convoy” semi-tuck and publicly encouraged Freedumbites who demanded the overthrow of a freely-elected Liberal government while desecrating the streets of the Capital and the National War Memorial with faeces, urine, and Confederate and Nazis battle flags. He held in contempt the government and requisite judicial inquiry which carried out the resulting Emergencies Act in exactly the way a real Conservative government wrote it. He promised polices so far right that even Dippers voted tactically for a centre-right Liberal Prime Minister rather than suffer a PP win. For a guy who supposedly doesn’t know anything but conservative politics, he sure doesn’t seem to know what conservatism is or who real conservatives are.
But the real illustration of a real schism that has real potential to really give a nominal “conservative” governing party a real reality check is of course in Alberta where the solution to the dilemma on the right will manifest in the creation of a new Conservative Party of Alberta. Not even partisan strife in tRumpublican USA has produced such potential to recreate a political vehicle for real conservative-minded voters and change the whole communitarian spectrum of partisanship —possibly in the whole country (where, in Canada, only one truly Progressive Conservative Party exists, in Nova Scotia, that has avoided the distress of terminal factionalism).
Alberta is obviously an exceptional canvas —a government so far to the right, so radical that it flirts with treason by rigging an unpopular secessionist referendum. Perhaps the resurrection of a progressive party of the right could only happen here. Or, pray, that it might be the only place where it could happen first.
This was long overdue. Given that radical extremism cultivated in panicking neo-right parties has made them irredeemable, it is really the only thing that can put the right back on the right track.