That survival instinct - does the UCP have it?
Did the UCP inherit the PC Party's uncanny ability to reinvent itself?
I’m Dave Cournoyer and this is the Daveberta Substack.
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TL;DR
If you don’t have time to read today’s column right away, here are some of my main points:
The PC Party that governed Alberta for 43 years had a remarkable ability to reinvent itself whenever it changed leaders. It’s unclear whether the UCP inherited that strength.
Danielle Smith enters the Premier’s Office with 22 percent of Albertans having a positive overall impression of her, according to one poll. That’s really low for a brand new Premier.
The ease with which the Take Back Alberta PAC slate swept the UCP board elections shows the party is firmly in the grasp of conservatives who support Smith’s agenda.
The same poll shows 47 percent have a positive overall impression of NDP leader Rachel Notley.
Some NDPers want the party to be boldly social democratic, but Notley is tacking to the centre with a focus is on winning seats in Calgary and boosting her credibility on economic and energy issues.
Today’s column
That survival instinct - does the UCP have it?
It wasn’t long ago that most people thought Alberta politics was boring.
For 43 years, the Progressive Conservative Party dominated Alberta politics. The big-tent party’s longevity was a result of many things but largely due to the its remarkable self-preservation instinct and ability to reinvent itself whenever it changed leaders.
As a result of that survival instinct and reinvention, the PC Party was a very different political party when Peter Lougheed led it to victory in 1971 than it was on the eve of its defeat in 2015 and many points in between. With each leader the party reinvented itself to fit the popular political narrative of the day.
Ralph Klein described it as figuring out which way the parade was going and getting in front of it. Klein had a gift for it.
The PC Party was also for most of its time in government able to bridge the political gaps that sometimes divides rural and urban Albertans.
David Wood observed in his 1985 biography of Lougheed, The Lougheed Legacy, that “[Deputy Premier Hugh] Horner made one point that Lougheed and his colleagues have never forgotten: when you start believing that the people in rural Alberta are somehow different than the people in the bigger centres, you’re making a mistake. Rural Albertans come into the cities, go to concerts, shop in the malls: they’re as sophisticated and as aware of the rest of the world as any of their city cousins.”
As a result the PC Party was more of a natural governing entity than a traditional political party, which is probably why it folded so quickly after losing power in 2015.
Danielle Smith’s shaky start
As Danielle Smith moves into the Premier’s Office and Jason Kenney is ushered out, it's still unclear whether the UCP inherited the PC’s ability to reinvent itself into something that can get re-elected. The last three years have given us a pretty good indication that Kenney’s UCP didn’t inherit the self-preservation gene.
And Smith starts on shaky ground.
A poll released by Navigator Ltd., a well-known strategic communications company, showed the UCP trailing Rachel Notley’s NDP by 15 points among decided voters. That’s majority government territory for the NDP.
The poll also showed 47 percent of Albertans had a positive overall impression of Notley compared to 22 percent for Smith.
Sometimes when a party is unpopular it can leverage its leader’s personal popularity, like the PC Party did with Klein in 1993. I can’t recall any other Alberta Premier entering office with such a low level of public support on Day 1.
Kenney had 61 percent support when he became Premier in 2019. Notley started with a 59 percent approval rating in 2015 and the year before that Jim Prentice had 43 percent.
Before I go too far, yes, that’s just one poll. A Leger poll conducted for Postmedia around the same time had a much closer result for the two parties. Things can change quickly in politics, so let’s think of it as a snapshot rather than a magic crystal ball (for that we’ll wait until Janet Brown releases her next poll).
Take Back Alberta takes the UCP
The well-attended UCP AGM at the River Cree Resort & Casino last weekend gave us an indication of the direction the governing party is headed in the months ahead of the next election.
Probably the biggest sign of that direction were the executive and board elections that saw the COVID-skeptical and Freedom Convoy-supporting Take Back Alberta PAC slate sweeping every open position. It demonstrated how much the UCP is now the party of Danielle Smith’s supporters.
Smith spoke to these supporters during the leadership race with a laser focus on their anger over COVID-19 public health restrictions and the federal government. They showed up to vote against Kenney in the leadership review, showed up for Smith in the leadership race, and showed up as an organized force at the AGM.
They were key to Smith winning the leadership but it would be a stretch to say she controls them.
The new cohort will join the Kenney loyalists of the board whose positions aren’t up for re-election until next year. It will be interesting to watch how the two groups work together, especially when Smith’s supporters push to reopen UCP nominations in Rimbey-Rocky Mountain House-Sundre and Cardston-Siksika.
Premier Distraction
Aside from the confusion of apologies and clarifications that defined Smith’s first week as Premier, her office has been releasing a steady stream of statements about issues most people might not normally expect a premier to comment on.
On Monday she called on Alberta Health Services to cut ties with the World Economic Forum (a frequent target of internet conspiracy theorists), on Tuesday she mused to Postmedia columnist Rick Bell that she wants to create municipal political parties, and yesterday she said wants a new arena for the billionaire-owned Calgary Flames.
Smith would toss out these kinds of talking points daily when she hosted a call-in radio show, sometimes because they were provocative and sometimes because she believed in them. But she’s Premier now.
Without a seat in the Legislature and any sign of a government agenda until the Throne Speech on November 29, Smith might be trying to continue the strategy that worked so well in the leadership race: sucking up all the oxygen and media attention with unexpected statements.
So far the NDP have largely avoided getting sucked into responding to Smith’s random statements, instead focusing on their own key messages.
Boring is the new orange
How Notley’s NDP should respond to Smith has been a big topic of conversation in New Democrat circles, especially at the party’s convention in Calgary last weekend, which was billed as the largest convention in the party’s history.
Some New Democrats would like the party to adopt a bold social democratic agenda. But a safe and uncontroversial path into the 2023 election, with the hope that Albertans will embrace a competent alternative over the political chaos dished up by the UCP, is probably the direction they will take. The NDP’s Alberta’s Future website gives a glimpse into the policies Notley’s party could champion in the next election.
“Boring is the new orange” was the phrase used by former NDP staffer and campaign strategist Leah Ward during a discussion about this very topic on a recent episode of CBC’s West of Centre podcast.
I suspect Notley’s focus on winning seats in Calgary, boosting her credibility on economic and energy issues, and recruiting candidates that could have just as easily run under the Progressive Conservative banner gives us our answer.
It will be one thing if Notley’s NDP can win next year’s election by acting like PCs, but it will be another if they can replicate the things that made the PC Party a decades long political powerhouse. I suspect that mold is broken.
One more thing
Analyzing cabinet appointments is kind of like Kremlinology.
Premier Danielle Smith appointed a new cabinet and it’s a big one. Twenty-five full cabinet ministers, two ministers-without-portfolio and 11 parliamentary secretaries. That’s 38 members of the 60-MLA UCP Caucus who have been pulled into the positions of responsibility.
Here are some quick thoughts on Smith’s cabinet:
Smith is Premier and Intergovernmental Affairs Minister, a role that former Premiers Kenney, Notley, Prentice and Klein also took on.
There are two Deputy Premiers, which is unusual. Kaycee Madu and Nathan Neudorf both endorsed Smith in the leadership race and represent ridings that are vulnerable in the next election. The NDP have nominated public school trustee Nathan Ip to run against Madu in Edmonton-South West and former city councillor Rob Miyashiro to challenge Neudorf in Lethbridge-East.
All of Smith’s leadership opponents are in cabinet, except Leela Aheer.
Todd Loewen is back in the UCP Caucus and is Minister of Forestry, Parks & Tourism, a new ministry that has one prominent conservation group concerned. And, as noted by Jason Markusoff, Loewen might be Canada's only cabinet minister to have participated in the freedom convoy.
It’s less Calgary-heavy than Kenney’s cabinet but UCP MLAs from the province’s largest city make up just under half of the full cabinet ministers.
A surprising number of key Kenney ministers are still in cabinet. Tyler Shandro, Adriana LaGrange, Rick Wilson and Demetrios Nicolaides kept their jobs.
Jason Nixon is out. Nixon was Kenney’s chief political lieutenant. His unwavering loyalty to Kenney aside, Nixon is a skilled political operator and as Government House leader understood the workings of the legislature better than most MLAs. I suspect it won’t be long before the UCP Caucus misses having him in that role.
Ric McIver was the most underused cabinet minister of the past 3 years. He has decades of political experience, speaks in plain-language, and unlike many of his former cabinet colleagues avoided getting caught up in embarrassing political games. He’s out of cabinet and Smith says he’s her interlocutor responsible for a new Calgary Flames arena. That’s a waste of his talent.
Leela Aheer is the only UCP leadership candidate not in cabinet, which is no surprise. Her last place finish and inability to secure the support of her own constituency association board put her in a weak position coming out of the leadership race. She announced yesterday that she will not run for the UCP in the next election but was vague about whether she would run as an Independent or for another party.
While we all love reading the tea leaves, it’s important to remember that regardless of the size and composition of the cabinet the Premier’s Office is the real centre of decision making.
Correction notice: Thank you to Nicole Sparrow for kindly pointing out that it was Rebecca Schulz who finished fourth in the UCP leadership race, not Todd Loewen as I wrote in my previous column. Loewen finished fifth when he was eliminated on the third ballot.
Just like the federal conservatives a decade ago, the UCP is not a true merger, but a hostile takeover of the Progressive Conservative Party by the Wildrose. The “Red Tories” have all long since been driven from the ranks of the federal Conservative Party of Canada, and the Alberta UCP is purging itself of any remaining PC stalwarts. But Smith’s problem now will be the same one she had with her Wildrose caucus in the mid-2010s, and that Brian Jean had with his WR caucus after taking over following Smith’s disastrous floor-crossing: Wildrosers simply won’t be led. People often compare caucus management to herding cats — leading the UCP will be herding feral cats.
On top of this, we have Smith herself. She had maintained a veneer of reasonableness and respectability in the months and weeks leading up to the 2012 election — becoming a credible threat to beat Alison Redford’s PCs — and indeed as Leader of the Official Opposition during the last PC government up until that infamous floor-crossing. But now her recent years as a talk radio host have sanded away that veneer to expose the extremist heart beneath, and it isn’t pretty. There are certainly parts of Alberta where that’s a feature, not a bug, but in the two big cities where most of the votes and seats are, I think that will repel more voters than it attracts.
So whether or not we take Horner’s maxim as applying here, Brooks-Medicine Hat will be an interesting litmus test. If Dirk gains more than 30% of the vote, and Morashita also shows well, the rural dominance for Smith may not be such a slam dunk. Put another way, with the lead from 2019 that Smith has inherited and the marketing advantage of having a local Premier, she needs to do better than 40% to look strong, wouldn’t you say?
Open questions - will the WIP/IPA candidates take a meaningful chunk of the conservative vote? Will Morashita draw more votes from Dirk or from Smith? Does the weakness of the Alberta Party across the province, demonstrated by very few candidates; very little money, matter to Brooks voters? (If he won, he would be on his own in the legislature). How much of the remaining calendar will Smith be able to devote to the campaign and will that matter? How strong a campaign is each candidate putting on?
Can’t wait for a poll to come out!