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Alberta Politics

No Thanks and So Long. Former PC MLA Rick Fraser leaves the UCP to sit as an Independent

Photo: Former PC MLAs Richard Starke (left) and Rick Fraser (right) at the 2016 Calgary Pride Parade (Photo from Facebook). 

The recently formed United Conservative Party may be leading in the polls but the party is looking a lot less united. One of the party’s 28 MLAs, Calgary-South East MLA Rick Fraser, announced on social media this morning that he was leaving the UCP caucus to sit as an Independent MLA.

Fraser, who was re-elected for a second term as a Progressive Conservative MLA in 2015, is the third politician to leave the ranks of the UCP since it was formed in July 2017. Vermilion-Lloydminster MLA Richard Starke declined to join the UCP and decided to continue sitting as a PC MLA in the Assembly shortly after he party was founded. Then, in August 2017, the party’s co-finance critic Derek Fildebrandt resigned from the caucus after an expenses controversy and a traffic-accident related court battle.

In his resignation letter, Fraser gave a number of reasons for his departure, ranging from social and economic issues to the party’s increasingly polarizing hyper-partisan tone. While the UCP does not yet have any official policies, or even a permanent leader, it is seems clear that Fraser is uncomfortable with the direction that the province’s largest conservative party is heading.

Social issues are the achilles heel for the UCP, just as they were for the party’s previous incarnation, the Wildrose Party.

The two main candidates for the leadership of the party,  Jason Kenney and Brian Jean, are openly appealing to the party’s social conservative and rural base of supporters and have been extremely reluctant to discuss any social issues. And as we saw in this week’s UCP leadership debate, only Calgary lawyer Doug Schweitzer was willing to come out in support of gay rights, taking Kenney to task for his silence.

Earlier this year, Wildrose MLAs were tying themselves in knots over student-organized Gay-Straight Alliances and whether school administrators should be required to inform parents if their children joined one of the anti-bullying clubs. The debate, which was triggered by comments Kenney made to the Postmedia editorial board in Calgary, was painful and acrimonious to watch.

And while the party’s interim governing board has issued a statement in support of LGBTQ rights, support for that position by some of UCP MLAs and party members is questionable.

The unanimous position among the UCP leadership candidates to repeal the carbon tax without proposing any alternatives to reform or replace it suggests that none of them see climate change as a serious issue.

Comments, tweets and Facebook posts promoting climate change denial and skepticism have been rampant among the former Wildrose MLAs in the UCP caucus. Earlier this year, Cypress-Medicine Hat UCP MLA Drew Barnes helped fund a film promoting climate science skepticism. And last year, Drumheller-Stettler UCP MLA Rick Strankman was  forced to apologize – twice – after penning an article comparing Alberta’s carbon tax to the Holodomor – the Ukrainian genocide of the 1930s.

An MLA’s first responsibility is to their constituents, and if Fraser does not feel he can effectively represent the people of Calgary-South East as a member of the UCP, he has every right to leave that caucus. He was elected under that banner of the Progressive Conservative Party and now that party is now essentially defunct.

Fraser writes in his letter that he will consult his constituents before making any future decisions, which means he might be open to joining another party sometime in the future. I am willing to bet that Greg Clark , leader of the upstart conservative-lite Alberta Party, is making some phone calls today.

6 replies on “No Thanks and So Long. Former PC MLA Rick Fraser leaves the UCP to sit as an Independent”

One does begin to wonder how much longer the redder Tories, like Grande Prairie-Wapiti MLA Wayne Drysdale, will stick with the UCP caucus. Mr Drysdale, if you recall, was a backer of Dr Richard Starke for the recent PC leadership that was won by Jason Kenney, and he has most recently endorsed Doug Schweitzer in the current leadership race. I’m sure there are others in the UCP caucus who are also uncomfortable with the way this whole situation is evolving.

To be clear, I don’t think Mr Schweitzer is any less conservative than Messrs Kenney or Jean when it comes to fiscal policy and government spending; however, he clearly doesn’t hold to the more extreme social conservative views that seem to be more de rigueur in that caucus.

The parties of the right have now lost FOUR MLA’s since Kenney arrived on the scene and it sounds like there could be a few more after the leadership race wrap up. Of course, to be fair one was due to malfeasance, so can’t blame Kenney for that particular one. However, at this rate, there might not be much a united Conservative party left by the time of the next election.

The social conservatives live on a different planet than the rest of us (red tories, secular blue tories, liberals, dippers etc.). Sooner or later there will be a sharp break between the social cons and fiscal cons throughout Canada. I for one, would welcome a hard-right party which would win ~10% of the vote, elect a handful of extremists and leave the serious business of governing to the grown-ups.

SC The only thing any Conservative government has done in Canada, in the last three decades, was hardcore corruption.

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