Tag: Social Credit Party

Categories
Alberta Politics

Get ready for a by-election in Innisfail-Sylvan Lake

Following Don MacIntyre’s resignation from the United Conservative Party caucus last week, it was confirmed by media Monday that he had also resigned as the MLA for Innisfail-Sylvan Lake.

Don MacIntyre MLA
Don MacIntyre

Information about MacIntyre’s unexpected departure is currently prohibited from publication by a court ordered publication ban, though rumours circulated fairly quickly through political networks since the weekend.

UDPATE: MacIntyre has been charged with sexual interference and sexual assault.

A by-election will need to be called in the central Alberta district in the next six months, before August 5, 2018.

Innisfail-Sylvan Lake is one of the strongest conservative voting districts in Alberta, so the likelihood of a conservative candidate being elected in a by-election is very high.

When New Democratic Party candidate Patricia Norman earned 23 percent of the vote int he 2015 election, she also earned the highest vote percentage of any candidate representing a non-conservative party in the district’s history.

The district was first created in 1993 when sections of the old Rocky Mountain House district, including the town of Sylvan Lake, were merged with the old Innisfail district.

Since then, voters in the district have elected Progressive Conservative MLAs Gary Severtson (1993 to 2001) and Luke Ouellette (2001 to 2012), and Wildrose MLAs Kerry Towle (2012-2015) and MacIntyre (2015-2018). Towle was one of 11 Wildrose MLAs to cross the floor to the PCs in late 2014. She won a contested PC nomination against Red Deer County mayor Jim Wood but was defeated in the 2015 election by MacIntyre.

Kerry Towle
Kerry Towle

As noted in yesterday’s post, Penhold town councillor Mike Walsh had already announced his plans to seek the UCP nomination. Neither Towle or Wood have announced whether he will mount another bid for provincial office in this by-election.

Also announcing his intention to run in the by-election is Reform Party of Alberta leader Randy Thorsteinson, who was already planning to run in this district in the next general election. Thorsteinson earned 20 percent of the vote when he ran in this district as leader of the Alberta Alliance into the 2004 election. In the 1997 election he earned 9.3 percent of the vote when running in the neighbouring Red Deer-South district as leader of the Social Credit Party.

Here is a look at the vote share by party in general elections from 1993 to 2015:

Only minor changes to Innisfail-Sylvan Lake boundaries in 2019

With 46,717 residents, the population of the district is virtually the same as the provincial average, meaning that its boundaries will remain nearly unchanged when the province-wide redistribution of electoral boundaries take place in 2019. A minor change in the southwest corner of the district moves the area west of Garrington into the Rimbey-Rocky Mountain House-Sundre district.

The Town of Sylvan Lake was one of the fastest growing communities in Canada, according to Statistics Canada. Between 2011 and 2016, the town grew by 19.9 percent from 12,362 to 14,816 residents.

Email
Categories
Alberta Politics

The Dream of the 30s is Alive in the Social Credit Party

Social Credit introduced recall laws in Alberta in 1936 and repealed them in 1937 when Premier William Aberhart faced a recall challenge in his own riding.
Social Credit introduced recall laws in Alberta in 1936 and repealed them in 1937 when Premier William Aberhart faced a recall challenge in his own riding.

William: Do you remember the 30’s? Y’know. People were talking about printing their own currency, restricting the sale and serving of alcohol, and buying homburg hats and knickerbokers. And people were singing about Major Douglas and his A+B theorem?

Margaret: Yeah?

William: There’s a place where that idea still exists as a reality.

Margaret: What is it?

William: The Alberta Social Credit Party.

William: Remember when the Man from Mars would ask why earthmen weren’t intelligent enough to accept Social Credit teachings as the solution to their problems? The whole family would huddle around the radio to listen?

Margaret: Right. I thought that died out a long time ago, like 70 or 80 years ago?

William: Not in the Social Credit Party.

Margaret: So from what I can surmise from what you’re positing, it’s like the Social Credit Party is almost an alternative universe. It’s like all the banks were nationalized and the newspapers are forced to print what the government tells them to? It’s like Peter Lougheed never existed?

William: Exactly! Welcome to the Social Credit Party!

(this post is inspired by The Dream of the 1890s is Alive in Portland and my previous post, The Dream of the 90s is Alive in the UCP)

Email
Categories
Alberta Politics

The Great Betrayal – what happened to the Wildrose Party?

Mass MLA defection cripples Alberta’s Official Opposition
Jim Prentice Danielle Smith Staircase
Danielle Smith and Jim Prentice make a grande entrance at yesterday’s press conference at Government House.

Anyone already cynical about politics in Alberta will have their views reinforced with yesterday’s announcement that Wildrose leader Danielle Smith and eight of her party’s MLAs have abandoned their role as the Official Opposition and joined the 43-year governing Progressive Conservatives.

Danielle Smith Wildrose PC MLA
Danielle Smith

After a five hour meeting of the PC Caucus at Government House, Premier Jim Prentice and Ms. Smith walked side-by-side down the staircase to announce news that nine Wildrose MLAs had been accepted into the government caucus.

It was a shrewd move that could be a decisive win for Mr. Prentice in the Conservative Civil War that the two parties have waged against each other since the mid-2000s. But what led to this mass exodus of Wildrose MLAs?

Many political watchers, including myself, have pointed to Mr. Prentice’s leadership or the September 2014 by-election losses as catalysts for today’s news, but one long-time reader and observer of Alberta politics shared a different view:

“The Wildrose was not founded on political principles, like the fiscal conservatism of the Progressive Conservatives, or the social democracy of the New Democrats – but rather it was created, out of nothing, for the sole purpose of exerting political pressure on the PC government.”

Jim Prentice Premier Alberta
Jim Prentice

Since the disappearance of the Social Credit Party in the 1970s, Alberta has seen its share of conservative fringe parties, usually based in central or southern rural Alberta – including the Western Canadian Concept, the Representative Party, a short-lived SocCred revival in the mid-1990s and the Alberta First Party. The Alberta Alliance, which later became the Wildrose Alliance Party, transformed itself into something different.

While the Wildrose Party was founded on a social conservative base, the purpose of the party was to pull the meandering centrist Tories back to their conservative political roots. Over the past four years the Wildrose has excelled at using wedge issues like oil and gas royalties and property rights to drive the political agenda in Alberta.

Premier Ed Stelmach‘s meddling with natural resource royalties led the oil industry to quickly begin funnelling donations to the Wildrose, then led by a photogenic former school trustee named Danielle Smith. When the PCs abandoned plans to raise royalties, the Wildrose honed in on property rights and stirred up a considerable amount of fear and resentment among rural landowners, who were mostly traditional PC voters.

The nutty social conservatives proved to be the Wildrose’s greatest weakness in the 2012 election, costing the party a chance at forming government. But the many blunders of Alison Redford’s embarrassing government gave the Wildrose a renewed lease on life.

And now, with Mr. Prentice as leader of the PC Party, it has become difficult to point out significant policy differences between the two parties. By refusing to meddle in the marketplace, halting the poorly written Bill 10 and pledging to protect property rights, Mr. Prentice has robbed the Wildrose of their most effective critiques of the PC Party.

The Wildrose Party still exists with a significant campaign war chest and a membership role of 23,000. But it now lacks a leader, which the party executive says it will soon begin a search for. The steps taken by the party over the coming weeks could determine whether it can actually recover or whether it will join the list of conservative fringe parties after the next election.

Despite Ms. Smith’s agreement with new premier, the departure of the nine MLAs is a betrayal of the party’s hundreds of volunteers and donors and the more than 440,000 Albertans who voted Wildrose in the last election.

Life as an opposition MLA in Alberta is not glamorous, but as the Official Opposition, those nine MLAs played a critically important role in our parliamentary democracy. The timing and nature of the floor crossing reeks of political opportunism. And the quality of our democratic system will be weaker tomorrow with the loss of these nine opposition MLAs into the government backbenches.

The five remaining Wildrose MLAs will technically form the Official Opposition, but with their party in disarray, many political observers are watching to see if another political leader -NDP leader Rachel Notley – is able to form an effective opposition to the 43-year governing PC Party.

The nine Wildrose MLAs who crossed the floor to the PCs are:

– Danielle Smith (Highwood)
– Rob Anderson (Airdrie)
– Gary Bikman (Cardston-Taber-Warner)
– Rod Fox (Lacombe-Ponoka)
– Jason Hale (Strathmore-Brooks)
– Bruce McAllister (Chestermere-Rocky View)
– Blake Pedersen (Medicine Hat)
– Bruce Rowe (Olds-Didsbury-Three Hills)
– Jeff Wilson (Calgary-Shaw)

I joined Ryan Jespersen on BT Edmonton this morning to talk about the Wildrose defections:

Email
Categories
Alberta Politics

The magic of Tory reinvention. A new era for Alberta.

Social-Credit-A-new-Kind-of-leader-1971-1
“A new kind of leader,” an advertisement from the Social Credit Party published in the Calgary Herald in 1971.

As the Progressive Conservatives brandish their new slogan, “A new era for Alberta,” many Albertans might be confused about which political party has been in power for the past 43 years.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines an era as “a long and distinct period of history.”

If we were to apply the geological time scale of the Earth to Alberta politics, we would now find ourselves in the Honeymoon Period of the Prentice Era of the Progressive Conservative Eon (I will resist the temptation to name any political dinosaurs).

Alison Redford Not Your Father's PC Party
A PC Party election ad used during the 2012 election.

And despite the PC Party Eon having stretched more than four decades, PC Party candidates in four Alberta by-elections being held on October 27 are not running on their party’s record as the government since 1971. They are running on their party’s record since Jim Prentice became leader of the PC Party on September 6, 2014.

And it is too early to tell whether Mr. Prentice will oversee “a long and distinct period.” His two most recent predecessors each lasted less than five years in office.

The PC Party’s “new era” slogan is somewhat reminiscent of another slogan used by Harry Strom‘s Social Credit Party as the 36 year old governing party tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to win re-election in 1971. But, unlike the Socreds in the 1970s, the PC Party has become masterful at reinvention, consistently rebranding their party since Peter Lougheed retired in 1984.

Unlike Mr. Strom, who was overshadowed by his popular and larger than life predecessor, Ernest Manning, Mr. Prentice would never be caught in public uttering the words “Alison” or “Redford.” But while the PC Party tries to put their recently departed leader’s legacy behind them, the opposition parties and candidates will eagerly remind voters about the past two years of PC government.

Just two years ago, the PC Party led by Alison Redford were re-elected in a hotly contested campaign under the slogan “Real life leadership” (see the campaign advertisement above). This slogan was a reference to both Ms. Redford’s time spent overseas as a United Nations lawyer and provided contrast with her predecessor, Ed Stelmach, and the perceived inexperience of Wildrose leader Danielle Smith.

During the 2012 election campaign, a controversial advertisement published in some urban newspapers featured the slogan “Not your father’s PC Party,” which suggested to younger and more liberal-minded Albertans that the PC Party had entered a new era (and again provided a contrast to the perceived social conservative values of the Wildrose Party).

Ed Stelmach
Ed Stelmach

Six years ago, borrowing from the success of Barack Obama‘s “Change we can believe in” slogan, the PC Party led by Mr. Stelmach chose “Change that works for Albertans” as their slogan in the 2008 election. The slogan suggested that Mr. Stelmach’s main opposition, the Liberals, would provide change that would not work for Albertans.

Like his successors, the PC Party under Mr. Stelmach worked hard to distance itself from the legacy of his predecessor, Ralph Klein.

In the four by-elections being held at the end of October 2014, the opposition parties are also using new slogans to help brand their campaigns. “Send the PCs a message” is a slogan being used by the Wildrose Party, and it is meant to remind Albertans that by-elections are an opportunity to show dissatisfaction with the PC Party’s past two years of scandal and misdeeds.

The NDP are using the slogan “Albertans deserve better,” which is a true statement, but it seems unlikely that most Albertans outside Edmonton city limits are about to look to the NDP as a better choice.

While slogans alone will not win or lose an election campaign, they can cleverly help define the narrative each party or candidate is advancing and can serve as a rallying cry for or against voters choosing change at the ballot box.

If you have a few moments after reading this post, I encourage you to take a glance at the extensive ‘List of Political Slogans‘ page on Wikipedia.

Email
Categories
Alberta Politics

A closer look at PC constituency-level fundraising

Alberta Progressive Conservative PC Party Fundraising Assets 2013
Progressive Conservative Association of Alberta, Fundraising and Assets in 2013 (click to enlarge).

After 43-years in government, Alberta’s Progressive Conservative Party now faces serious competition in the fundraising field from the Wildrose Party.

Raising only $2.86 million in 2013, the PC Party ran a $136,000 deficit and owed $1.1 million on a line of credit. This shaky financial situation is unheard of for a natural governing party that is usually flush with cash.

The PC Party is are also facing criticism over a secret trust fund – the TAPCAL fund – which is a holdover from before changes were made to Alberta’s elections laws 36 years ago.

At the local-level, PC constituency associations raised more than $1.4 million in 2013. While most of the 87 PC associations reported  revenue in the thousands of dollars in the post-election year, a sharp gap in fundraising amounts has highlighted wealthy and poorer constituency associations in the PC Party.

More than $650,000 of the $1.4 million were raised by eleven local PC associations. In former premier Alison Redford‘s Calgary-Elbow constituency, the local PC association claimed more than $119,000 in revenue in 2013. In Calgary-Hays, represented by Infrastructure minister Ric McIver, the local PC association raised more than $95,000 last year. Most of the other nine associations are located in constituencies represented by cabinet ministers.

Meanwhile, PC associations in opposition held constituencies mostly reported low or insignificant levels of revenue in 2013. Many of these areas are now represented by Wildrose MLAs and had been represented by PC MLAs since the 1970s.

Last year, formerly powerful PC constituency associations in Innisfail-Sylvan Lake, Medicine Hat reported zero revenue in 2013. PC associations in Cypress-Medicine Hat, Little Bow, Fort McMurray-Wood Buffalo, Calgary-McCall, and Edmonton-Mill Woods reported less than $1,000 in revenue in 2013.

These low numbers suggest that some Tories may be having a difficult time adjusting to business without a local MLA to boost their fundraising initiatives.

———

It appears as though Randy Thorsteinson is attempting to resurrect the Reform Party of Alberta. Mr. Thorsteinson, the former leader of the Social Credit Party and the Alberta Alliance Party, has launched a Facebook page advocating for the recreation of the party that was dissolved in 2004.

Email