Long list of COVID-19 grievances could head to UCP AGM policy debate

It's hard to imagine the old PC Party getting bogged down by this debate

Premier Danielle Smith and Innisfail-Sylvan Lake UCP MLA Devin Dreeshen at a UCP member only town hall meeting (source: United Conservative Party / Facebook)

If I had walked into the Alberta Legislature ten years ago and told an MLA, staffer, or journalist that in 2024 the province’s political landscape would be a competitive two-party system, I probably would have been laughed out of the Rotunda. They might have even alerted a security guard if I’d been so out of my mind to predict that the New Democratic Party would be competing with the conservatives to form Alberta’s government.

Until that point ten years ago, only twice in the Progressive Conservative Party’s four decades of uninterrupted majority governments had the dynasty been seriously challenged in an election. The PC Party was unquestionably Alberta’s Natural Governing Party.

The complete dominance of the PC Party for so many decades meant that its defeat to Rachel Notley’s NDP was a political earthquake that shook, shattered, and reshaped Alberta politics like never before. The mold was broken and, in the two elections since, voters in our province appear to have settled into a recognizable two-party system.

Unlike the PC Party’s big blue tent that covered a huge swath of the political spectrum, governing with right-wingers like Ted Morton and Stockwell Day sitting at the same table with Redder Tories like Dave Hancock and Robin Campbell, the political divide is much sharper today.

While I’ve described Notley’s, and now Naheed Nenshi’s, NDP as centre-leftish on the political spectrum, the United Conservative Party is much more centerish-right under the leadership of Danielle Smith. The UCP is maybe the most populist-driven government since William Aberhart’s Social Credit Party swept to power in 1935 during the desperate depths of the Great Depression.

Over the course of the past few years I often wondered how the old PC Party would have weathered the COVID-19 pandemic as Alberta’s government.

Would a moderate conservative Premier like Jim Prentice have been able to hold together the PC Party’s big tent when faced with the deeply divisive social and cultural fault lines that defined the political reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic?

The PC Party always had its own internal political struggles but it’s impossible to know whether a theoretical 50 year old PC dynasty in the early 2020s could have held itself together faced with these pressures.

With the old PC Party’s big tent in mind, I am continually surprised at how engrained the politics of the COVID-19 pandemic are in the politics of the UCP.

Even 500 days after the World Health Organization announced the end of the pandemic public health emergency of international concern, past grievances both real and twisted within conspiracy theories about how public health measures were implemented continue to be top of mind for many UCP MLAs and activists.

Instead of proposing ideas that would better prepare Alberta for the next pandemic by providing more resources to health care workers in our hospitals and supports for teachers in the classrooms, some of the loudest elements within the UCP are obsessed with re-litigating their grievances from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Calgary-Lougheed UCP MLA Eric Bouchard hosted a high-profile “An Injection of Truth” event that promoted vaccine skeptical physicians and internet conspiracy theories about people being mysteriously killed by COVID-19 vaccines. Bouchard will host a “Part 2” of the event on October 28. He also briefly claimed that a COVID-19 vaccine ban was in the works.

While most attention is focused on Smith’s leadership review, the policies that UCP members could debate at the party’s upcoming annual general meeting in Red Deer on November 1 and 2 includes a long list of COVID-19 grievances.

Party members are voting online to rank a series of proposed policies they want to debated at the AGM. While not all these policies will end up being debated or even become government policy, they provide a snapshot of the politics of the UCP’s activist base of supporters. Here are a few of the policies being ranked by UCP members:

• A policy proposal submitted by the UCP associations in Calgary-Fish Creek, Highwood, Lac Ste. Anne-Parkland, and Sherwood Park calls on the government to “halt the injection, application or other iteration of the Covid 19 mRNA vaccine in all age groups in Alberta.”

A policy proposal submitted by the Calgary-Fish Creek, Highwood, Lac Ste. Anne-Parkland, and Sherwood Park UCP associations.

• The Airdrie-Cochrane, Banff-Kananaskis, Calgary Lougheed, Calgary-Shaw, Edmonton-Whitemud, Morinville-St. Albert, Sherwood Park, and Taber-Warner UCP associations proposed a policy that is modelled after a law passed by the Louisiana State Legislature that would block the World Health Organization from having any jurisdiction within the Province of Alberta.