"I'm from Ottawa and I'm here to help."
The last time the Progressive Conservative Association of Alberta heard that line it came from Jim Prentice, who arrived on a white stallion in 2014 offering himself as the perfect candidate to lead the embattled party to glory. Where he wound up leading it was to its worst defeat in four decades, plummeting their seat count from a 61 majority to a third-place 10, and their share of the popular vote from 44% to 28%.
As an ex-cabinet minister in the Harper government, Prentice had respectable conservative bona fides, but was woefully miscast for the job. In the increasingly scrambled world of Alberta politics, the Progressive Conservative party circa 2014 had actually become the preferred vehicle for much of the province's center-left community thanks to the rebranding efforts of the previous party boss, Allison Redford. In Alberta's 2012 election, her liberalism saw the party's traditional conservative base drift to the upstart Wildrose, who catapulted from zero seats to 17, while allowing the PC to deflate the-then official opposition Liberals, who shrunk from 16 to 5.
Prentice's destiny was to be caught in the pincher of being simultaneously too conservative to placate the Redford progressives, who migrated to the Rachel Notley-led NDP in the 2015 election (the Liberals, for whatever reason, received no such love), and too liberal to satisfy Wildrose conservatives, who returned their party to second-place in the legislature.
It is into this context that Jason Kenney now rides in, cocksure he can succeed where Prentice, his former Ottawa colleague, failed. Kenney is particularly confident he can instigate a merger between the PCs and the Wildrose — something Prentice tried to resounding, humiliating failure — and then, with himself presumably as boss of the ensuing right-wing mega party, unseat Premier Notley and return his home province to its partisan norm.
Very little of the Kenney plan seems sensitive to Alberta's complicated political realities. Like most of what Kenney has done throughout his political career, it appears motivated more by crass personal ambition buoyed by undeserved media praise than anything particularly wise.
Kenney may believe he is uniquely equipped to offer an articulate, conservative denunciation of Premier Notley's disastrous rule, but the province already has someone performing that job quite well in the person of Brian Jean, the mature and principled leader of the Wildrose party. There is no ideological reason for Kenney to seek to lead the PCs, which, as noted, have drifted steadily left to the point where MLAs are already vowing to quit if he becomes leader, other than it was looking for a boss and Wildrose was not. Prentice's attempted instigation of a PC-Wildrose shotgun marriage flopped in large part because Wildrosers resented the presumptuousness. Kenney will try again with even less shame.
In any case, as a matter of strategy mergers are deeply overrated. The media loves them because they posit a simple arithmetic theory of political parties (1+1=victory) but there isn't much evidence to suggest a party can only succeed if its rivals are abolished. The federal Liberal Party, for instance, jumped from third place in the 2011 election to a majority government in 2015 without merging with anyone — indeed, Justin Trudeau actively resisted the advice of elders like Jean Chretien who insisted a merger with the NDP was unavoidable.
The uncomfortable fact is most voters simply do not understand concepts like "right" or "left" or care what party they "should" proceed to vote for once their options are restricted. When the federal PC party merged with the Canadian Alliance in 2003, the new mega-party went on to lose the 2004 election with a share of the popular vote lower than their combined total in 2000. A new Alberta conservative party could theoretically unite the 53% of Albertans who voted for nominally right-of-center parties in 2015, or Kenney's leadership could prove repellant enough to drive a significant chunk of that base to support Notely's NDP. That might not make sense according to rigid partisan logic, but it could easily occur in the context of a binary competition of promises and personalities.
What's often forgotten is that Notley herself has emerged as leader of Alberta's united left, a faction which has traditionally been split at least three ways over the last forty years. If Kenney is truly interested in seeing conservatives make a comeback, a wiser strategy might be to sit out the PC race and encourage a strong left-winger to enter. I hear Tom Mulcair is looking for a job.
Written by J.J McCullough
