By every measure, the Alberta Party had a better name than every other political party in Alberta.
Surely somewhere – Saskatchewan, maybe, where the Saskatchewan Party still rules – there’s a political science PhD thesis that proves this to be the case.
But even without a learned dissertation to quote, it’s obvious! We all know in in our bones that the Alberta Party was the best political party name ever – here Wild Rose Country, anyway – and no one was ever going to come up with a better one. Certainly not the Wildrose Party, known nowadays as the United Conservative Party.
Now, Leader Peter Guthrie has announced in a tweet, the Alberta Party has decided to become the “Progressive Tory Party of Alberta,” which is, like, totally lame.
So that probably means it’ll be a huge success in the topsy-turvy world of Alberta politics.
Despite having the best name ever, for some reason the Alberta Party could never get on this province’s political radar no matter how hard it tried, and at times it tried desperately hard indeed.
It was so irrelevant, it would seem, that no scholar ever wasted his or her time trying to figure out why this should be.
It was not for a lack of thoughtful and talented leadership. Among its leaders were, Glenn Taylor, once mayor of Hinton; Sue Huff, a former Edmonton school trustee; Greg Clark, elected as an Alberta Party candidate and a popular and hardworking MLA for Calgary-Elbow; Stephen Mandel, late of the PC Cabinet and the mayor’s office in Edmonton; and Barry Morishita, once mayor of Brooks. All of them substantial people with good minds. A tip o’ the hat to former Alberta Liberal Dave Taylor, too, the party’s first MLA, of whom the same thing could be said.
So I have a theory: Alberta Party acolytes wouldn’t like this characterization, but their party was too much in concept like the Progressive Conservative Party of Alberta – which we all used to call the Tories, especially those of us who wrote headlines for a living – in that it didn’t really have a political philosophy other than existing for the sole purpose of being in power.
The Alberta Party was supposed to be the Platonic ideal of the perfect Alberta political party. Only better. But the PC’s were also the Platonic ideal of the Alberta political party, except for the name, of course.
And the PCs were in power. And by the time they weren’t, the NDP under Rachel Notley was working as hard as it could to become the same thing.
So the Alberta Party, which started out as a weirdo far-right coalition with the all-but-defunct Social Credit Party, over the years went through phases as the perfect vehicle for disgruntled Alberta Liberals, disgruntled Alberta Red Tories, and even disgruntled New Democrats. Whatever it tried, it was so perfect, it was always a flop.
And now we have a Conservative government in Alberta that is not remotely conservative and an NDP Opposition that doesn’t appear to be engaged by the idea of being the government, and the planets are apparently all in alignment for the Alberta Party to step onto the stage. So what do they do? They change their perfect name!
Well, like I said, maybe it’ll work. This is, after all, Alberta.
Anyway, now that Mr. Guthrie, a former United Conservative Party cabinet minister and still the MLA for Airdrie-Cochrane, has decided he wants to lead the Alberta Party out of the wilderness, and has been named the leader by the nearly moribund party’s board without a vote of the party’s members, his plan was to change the name to the Progressive Conservative Party of Alberta.
When the UCP passed sneaky and possibly unconstitutional legislation to prevent that, the great minds he’s been consulting came up with the Progressive Tory Party of Alberta.
To give them their due, this will work for hard-pressed headline writers, although it won’t matter as much as it would have back in the day when the only headlines were on paper.
The UCP, Mr. Guthrie told The Canadian Press, “had just about every abbreviation and acronym covered, but they missed nicknames and synonyms, and ‘Tory’ was just a natural fit for us.”
I give the credit for this development to University of Alberta political scientist Jared Wesley, who back in April 2024 lamented in his Decoding Politics Substack the lack of old-timey Tories in Alberta.
“At its core,” he wrote, “toryism is a political philosophy that blends traditional values with a progressive belief in the state’s role in promoting social welfare and economic equality. It emphasizes community and diversity over individualism and universalism, and a balanced approach to governance that upholds tradition while addressing contemporary needs through incremental change.”
This is actually a pretty good definition of modern Progressive Conservatism as practiced in Ottawa up until Brian Mulroney, anyway, and in Alberta off and on (Ralph Klein no; Ed Stelmach yes; Alison Redford sometimes) until the election of Ms. Notley and the NDP in 2015.
It certainly is nothing like the “conservatism” of Jason Kenney and particularly Danielle Smith, who practices MAGA lunacy and leans hard toward Trump-style authoritarianism and outright separatism.
Maybe Mr. Guthrie read Dr. Wesley’s post. Or maybe nostalgia for the relative sanity of the old PCs was becoming enough of a phenomenon that they both just picked up on the Tory trope.
Me, I have some problems with modern neoliberals – and that’s a category that it would be fair to say likely includes Mr. Guthrie – calling themselves Tories.
As I wrote on Independence Day 2015, while notion of Tories had its beginnings among the royalist faction in the English Civil War of 1639 to 1651, in North America it normally refers to the Loyalists of British North America who opposed American secession in the 1770s.
The treasonous and newly confident American revolutionaries weaponized the term to hurl at their patriotic fellow-Americans as political invective. Those Tories who were not murdered for their loyalty to the Crown were robbed and driven from their homes. They landed in British North America, that part of the continent we now call Canada, as what would today be called political refugees.
So in this country “Tory” became honourable shorthand for the Conservative Party of John A. Macdonald, fiercely protectionist builders of Canada, and by near-apostolic succession a long line of Conservatives prime ministers up to and including Joe Clark. After Joe, though, not so much.
That really ended with Stephen Harper, of whom I wrote in 2015: “The theft of the grand old Canadian political designation Tory by Harper and what should properly be called ‘the American Party of Canada,’ done with the connivance of a cadre of lazy newspaper headline writers, must have Mr. Macdonald, our first prime minister of any political persuasion, spinning like a top in his grave! The site of his grave, readers will note, is in Kingston.”
So we’ll need to reserve judgment about whether these new Alberta “Tories” are really Tories, in the Canadian sense of the word. Mr. Guthrie started out, after all, as a United Conservative Party MLA and cabinet minister.
In the meantime, though, it is axiomatic that Alberta can never have too many Conservative parties, as long as there’s a viable alternative somewhere to their left.