Laying It Out: The mirage of unity and the backstabbers behind it

By Scott Schmidt on March 26, 2022.

You gotta hand it to Premier Jason Kenney as he heads into what amounts to a second leadership battle with Brian Jean.

The first time these two tussled, it wasn’t until the dust settled that we heard much about the alleged kamikaze campaign, orchestrated to ensure Kenney’s victory and Jean’s exit from politics. This time they aren’t even in the ring yet and signs of cheating have already surfaced.

In case you missed it, controversy over a mail-in ballot decision for Kenney’s upcoming April 9 leadership review has many, including more members of the premier’s caucus, joining the club of dissent.

Ahead of the deadline to buy memberships, the only way to vote on Kenney’s future was to physically be in Red Deer on April 9. Obviously, people in, say, Fort McMurray, weren’t going to buy one unless they knew they could get there. Well, following the deadline to participate in the review, the decision was made to allow a mail-in ballot for those who could.

One might argue it’s not necessarily right for hoards of people to buy up political party memberships only to participate in leadership votes, but every candidate of every party at every level of government goes on membership sales drives during campaigns, so the practice isn’t exactly frowned upon.

What we can’t have though, is someone doing the exact opposite, which is what is happening here. Kenney and his team know people are mad at him, and had Albertans known they could buy a UCP membership and mail in their opinion, membership sales might have skyrocketed.

By underhandedly waiting until after deadline to announce it, he’s essentially saying, “I’m pretty sure Albertans don’t want me here but I’m willing to sabotage the democratic process so I don’t have to find out.”

Whether it’s a legal move is irrelevant – it’s calculated and it’s meant to prevent someone in power from facing a fair judgement.

But it’s worth noting that Kenney isn’t just fighting to keep his job, he’s fighting to keep Brian Jean from getting it. Kenney wants Albertans to have what only he can deliver.

Listen, just because conservatism is the greatest, strongest and freest ideology ever thunk up doesn’t mean just anyone can pull it off. Why do you think the first order of business upon uniting the PCs and Wildrose had to be getting rid of one the leaders forever?

After all, nothing says unity like party co-founders fighting to the political death.

And it shouldn’t be lost on people that the two men who told Albertans they needed to unite as conservatives for their own good have never once been on the same page on how this conservative party should be run.

It’s even worse at the federal level, where members of parliament from the Conservative Party of Canada are never more than three sentences away from accusing others of divisiveness while clearly being as divided a political party as any of us have known.

They eviscerate each other during leadership races – interim leader Candace Bergen even told them to tone it down this week – and then break off into cliques until they’re ready to backstab the winner and trigger the entire musical-chair process over again.

At some point folks are going to have to analyze the ideology instead of waiting for the saviour of conservatism to land at our feet while political parties fire the same stale suits at us out of a cannon.

The truth is, the idea of a big-tent conservative party has long been a mirage, while any semblance of unity has only been presented at times of election. Split conservative parties doesn’t work on a federal level, as one on its own has enough trouble winning elections, a lesson learned by Preston Manning and company. But when conservatives found out in 2015 they couldn’t even keep Alberta without the illusion of unity, nothing became more important.

However, the second the United Conservatives were born, the infighting began, and it has only picked up pace in the three years since they took the legislature. Considering the goal of the party merger was never about unifying conservatives, but about eliminating the Progressive Conservatives and removing choice for conservative voters, the fact no one left can agree on what conservative should even be is no surprise.

Even now, neither of these two men hoping to be the UCP leader in May have an ounce of progressiveness in them, and they still can’t stand each other. They’re ideologically the same but can’t co-exist if the other is in charge.

But whomever is left standing in the end will be sure to spend the next year convincing voters that unity is alive and well within the party.

Life-long PC voters who wanted nothing to do with the Wildrose (an election in 2012 suggested there are a lot of you) likely bought the idea of a United Conservatives in 2015, but that sell ought to be a little harder in 2023.

The effort to do so will no doubt be there, of course, as Albertans – and Canadians on the federal level – need to know we can all unite behind that one person who has all the answers to a better future. But we’re once again going to have to wait until they finish ruining each other’s careers before we know who it is.

United we stand, I suppose.