4PC Leadership Campaign: The Accidental Premier (2006)

The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.

—G.K. Chesterton

Klein’s Long Goodbye

Premier Klein had announced in April 2005 that he intended to remain as premier until the next scheduled election in 2008. Over the next twelve months, this all changed. Under PC Party rules, a leadership review had already been scheduled for March 2006 at the party’s AGM. In the past, Klein had easily won these with over 90 percent approval ratings. But this time it was different. There was a growing sense that Klein was staying on simply because he enjoyed being premier. There was no longer a sense of purpose or direction. In the 2004 election, the PCs had lost both seats—eleven—and popular vote, from 62 percent to 47 percent. Party members began to worry that under Klein’s “long goodbye,” PC losses in the next election could be worse.

In an attempt to quell this unrest, in early March 2006, Klein announced that he would resign at the end of October 2007. It didn’t work. A week later, Brooks MLA and cabinet minister Lyle Oberg told his constituency association that he would not tell them to vote for Klein to stay at the upcoming AGM. This leaked to the media, and by week’s end, the PC Caucus expelled Oberg from the government. Oberg apologized, but also said it was still time for Klein to leave; that the party could not survive another eighteen months of an unofficial leadership race. The same week, Klein received sharp negative media for losing his temper during question period and throwing a copy of the Liberals’ policy book at a young parliamentary page.

I had been careful, both in public and in private, not to say that Klein should leave. I was in no hurry for a leadership race. But most of the other would-be candidates were, especially the Dinning camp. Klein’s former chief of staff, Rod Love, was now the de facto director of the Dinning campaign. He knew that more time helped me, and he had huge sway within the PC Party machine. Everyone expected Dinning to win, and when it came to appointments and contracts, they wanted to be on Rod’s friends list. Given that public approval of Klein was still above 70 percent in mid-March, it seemed probable that the Dinning machine was encouraging NO votes in the leadership review.

Still, going into the 2006 AGM, no one expected Klein to get any less than 70 percent approval. But when the votes were counted, Klein received only 55 percent. Less than a week later, he announced that he would step aside in the fall.¹ This conveniently allowed him to remain as premier for the already scheduled visit by Queen Elizabeth II in June. It also gave me and my team the green light to move our backroom, low-profile, low-budget leadership campaign into high gear.

Morton Campaign Team

My informal “advisory committee” now began morphing into a more formal campaign organization. Greg Fletcher remained my primary fundraiser and treasurer. Stan Church, Rick Sears, Andy Crooks, Don Watkins, Keith Alexander, and Robert Anderson continued to fundraise and advise. Actual operations of the campaign were shared between Sam Armstrong and Rod Blair. Gord Elliott had stepped forward to be my driver and travel companion for the “unofficial campaign” during the summer of 2005 and remained a key aide and advisor. Doug Main, a former MLA from Edmonton with a prior career as a television reporter, had stepped forward to assist me, and soon began managing our media and messaging.

We had already opened up a small campaign office in Bowness in the fall of 2005. We had been able to hire and to pay Devin Iversen and Rob Griffith to build our database and run our direct-mail efforts. They had done the same for Harper’s successful campaign to win the leadership of the Canadian Alliance Party in 2002. Along with Iversen and Griffith, we picked up Matt Gelinas, Dustin van Vugt, Hamish Marshall, and Jayce Johnson, all of whom had worked on the Harper leadership campaign.

These younger team members were critical to our success. Unlike myself and my other advisors/fundraisers, they understood how to use direct mail and telephone banks to sell memberships. With them we also acquired old federal Reform/Conservative membership lists, complete with names, addresses, telephone numbers, and emails. These lists allowed my campaign team to orchestrate a sophisticated phone-bank / direct mail / email campaign that was essential to our first ballot success in November.

Our campaign also got a big boost from the generosity of Ron and Judy Quigley, the owners of Gunnar Office Furnishings. The Quigleys gave us the entire top floor of their beautiful new office and showroom building located just off Deerfoot Trail in southeast Calgary. This allowed us to move our campaign office from the tiny, second-floor one-room rental in Bowness to the spacious and luxurious fourth floor. Having seen many campaign offices over the past few decades, I can confidently say that none came close to this. With lots of room, windows, sunshine, and free parking for the dozens of volunteers who ran our phone-bank and direct-mail operations, it made “coming to the office” enjoyable. This was a big factor in our success. During the final weeks of the campaign, our volunteers were working thirty-two phones, nine hours a day, six days a week.²

The only downside of our team’s transition was the loss of Rod Blair. From the very start of my campaign in 2003, no one had put in more time and effort than Rod. He had been invaluable in helping me win the Foothills-Rocky View PC nomination and organizing my earlier leadership events and media. We had become good friends. But Rod was used to having his way and proved unable or unwilling to work with—and cede some authority to—our expanded campaign team. If we were going to run a successful campaign, Rod had to go. For me, Rod’s departure was a sad experience. It was the first time, but not the last, that I learned politics can be hard on friendships.

Candidates

From the outset, Jim Dinning was the overwhelming favourite to become the next PC leader and premier. He had held cabinet positions under both Premiers Klein and Getty. He had the support of the party establishment and thirty-seven caucus members. He had been running an “unofficial” campaign since 2004 and had already raised over $2 million. He’d been dubbed by the media “The Prince” and the “Premier-in-waiting,” and his campaign team was confidently predicting a first-round victory. Dinning had one liability. Being the clear front-runner gave the other seven candidates an incentive to focus their criticisms on Dinning. For most of the campaign, the “anyone-but-Dinning” message was present but low key. This all changed after the first round of voting.

By summer, there were seven other leadership candidates, none of whom were given much of a chance of winning. From the Edmonton area there were four, none of whom had much profile or support outside of the capital region.

• Ed Stelmach, MLA, Fort-Saskatchewan-Vegreville; a farmer with no post-secondary education; a likeable but undistinguished cabinet minister under Klein. Stelmach was endorsed by thirteen MLAs, but he was virtually unknown south of Edmonton. In the first round of voting, he finished third with 14 percent of the votes, so went on to the second round.
• Dave Hancock, MLA, Edmonton-Whitemud. Trained and practised as a lawyer prior to politics. Hancock had served in several cabinet posts during the Klein dynasty, including minister of justice / solicitor general, but again had little profile outside of Edmonton. He had no support from other MLAs; finished fifth on the first ballot with only 7 percent of the votes; and subsequently endorsed Stelmach.
• Mark Norris, a businessman and one-term MLA from Edmonton-McClung. He was the only cabinet minister to lose re-election in 2004. Marc was affable but had no support from other MLAs. But he was the only candidate who voiced any support for my version of the Alberta Agenda. He finished sixth with 6.9 percent of the vote in the first round, and then endorsed Stelmach in the second.
• Gary McPherson, Edmonton. Gary was a lifelong paraplegic and inspiring advocate for people with disabilities. But he had no prior electoral politics experience and was never a serious contender.

The large number of candidates from Edmonton virtually guaranteed that because of vote splitting, no one candidate was likely to win. But when Stelmach finished third in the first round of voting, all the Edmonton-area candidates then endorsed him for the second round of voting, contributing to his eventual victory.

A sixth candidate was Lyle Oberg, the MLA from Strathmore-Brooks. A physician by training, Oberg had a decade of cabinet experience in the Klein governments. Oberg was arguably the most articulate and experienced candidate other than Dinning, but with no supporters in the PC caucus. For most of the campaign, Oberg was expected to do well in rural southern Alberta and to finish in the top three. When he finished fourth with only 12 percent of the vote, he threw his support to Stelmach in return for a promised appointment as the next minister of finance.

A seventh candidate was Victor Doerksen, the MLA from Red Deer-South. An accountant and banker prior to politics, Victor was elected four times as MLA from Red Deer-South. The previous term he’d served as Klein’s minister of innovation and science. A relatively quiet and soft-spoken man, Doerksen had no MLA endorsements; he finished seventh with less than 1 percent of the votes. He declined to endorse any candidate in the second round.

Last, and in many respects least, was me. I was another one of the long shots. I had only been elected as an MLA two years earlier. I had no PC Party history; no caucus supporters; and no experience as a minister. At the outset, the Calgary Herald gave me 500-to-1 odds of winning.³

But I had one thing that none of the other seven candidates had: a province-wide, grassroots following among the tens of thousands of Reform Party and now Canadian Alliance Party activists. They knew me for my victory in the 1998 Alberta Senate election; my extensive field work for Stockwell Day in the first (2001) Alliance leadership race; and my close association with Stephen Harper, a co-signatory of the 2001 Firewall Letter and now, as of January 26, the newly elected prime minister of Canada.

I also had friends and supporters from the more recent work I had done on the same-sex marriage and parents’ rights issues. This included several evangelical organizations and the extensive Mormon network in southern Alberta. For the same reasons, I also received the endorsement of the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada and its leader, Syed Soharwardy. My public role in supporting gun owners’ rights and the thirteen Alberta farmers who went to jail for challenging the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly also created support networks that helped us sell memberships (see chapter 2).

There was plenty of overlap between these broad groups of potential supporters, but this was good for me. Individuals and families that were part of both groups would be even more inclined to purchase PC memberships and to vote for me. Our challenge was how to mobilize these potential supporters into card-carrying PC members. But with our new team, new technology, and extensive collection of old Reform/CA membership lists, we believed we could do it. And almost did.

Issues: The Firewall Candidate

In terms of issues, my campaign was already defined by what I had been writing and speaking about for the previous six years. I was, first and foremost, the “Firewall candidate.” If elected, I promised that I would act on the reforms called for in the 2001 Alberta Agenda manifesto: a provincial police force; collecting our own income taxes; and withdrawing from the Canada Pension Plan and creating our own Alberta pension plan. These “More Alberta, Less Ottawa” policies were reforms that would strengthen Alberta’s policy autonomy vis-à-vis the federal government. When my opponents criticized these as radical and dangerous, I would simply point out that Quebec already did all of these. How radical is that?

I also campaigned on the issues and principles that were embodied in Bill 208. Same-sex marriage was now the law of the land, but that did not mean that the coercive power of the state should be used to silence or punish those who disagreed with it. I believed that freedom of religion and freedom of speech, school choice, and parents’ rights are all fundamental to a free and democratic society. If elected, I promised I would protect them.

I was more outspoken on democratic reforms than the other candidates. I advocated for term limits for premiers, a lobbyist registry, citizens’ initiatives, and referendums. I also promised greater health care reform—specifically, more publicly funded, privately delivered health care. My message was clear: Equal access to a waiting list is not equal access to health care. Unlike the other candidates, my platform also included several specific environmental commitments: strengthening our Water for Life strategy; protecting the Eastern Slopes; and ending the unrestricted out-of-season hunting and fishing allowed by the recently enacted Métis Harvesting Agreement.

Fiscal issues played an important but not a leading role in my leadership campaign. With Dinning having served as Klein’s minister of finance during the budget-cutting years of the 1990s, there was not much strategic advantage for me in the fiscal policy field. My fiscal policy commitments included:

• Not allowing Alberta to fall back into the deficit/debt hole that Ralph Klein had dug us out of.
• Capping the growth of public sector spending at less than annual private sector growth.
• Keeping our combined personal and corporate taxes the lowest in Canada.
• Saving 30 percent of our non-renewable resource revenues in the Heritage Savings Trust Fund, as Peter Lougheed had intended.
• Increasing Alberta’s tax credit for charitable donations.

The last two policies were the only ones that set me apart from the other candidates. Increasing the tax credit for charitable donations reflected my belief in the need to support policies that strengthen, not weaken, civil society. Whether it’s the arts, the vulnerable, health care, or education, voluntary, private-sector charities and non-profits are always competing with the public sector for service delivery. These non-profits also engage citizens in their communities, thereby strengthening civil society. The stronger the institutions of civil society, the less the need for new government programs and bureaucracies.⁴ (See Appendix 2.) The flip side is equally true: the more we cede these responsibilities to the state, the larger it becomes, and the weaker civil society becomes.⁵ This connection is well recognized in US scholarship but has generally been ignored in Canada.

Private sector provision of services—both non-profit and for-profit—provide citizens/taxpayers with alternatives, and this competition forces their public counterparts to improve.⁶ And they need to improve—not just in Alberta but in all modern welfare states. It is an unpleasant truth that public sector bureaucracies tend to be run more for the benefit of the civil servants than for the citizens they are supposed to be serving. Hospitals are run first and foremost for the benefit of doctors and then nurses. Universities routinely prioritize the interests of professors over the interests of students. The same trend is found in our public schools. This tendency is exacerbated by public sector unions that instinctively lobby (and strike) for reduced hours and higher salaries. They also prioritize protecting their poorest-performing members from being dismissed.

My wife and I knew all this first-hand from our decades of teaching—me at the University of Calgary and my wife in the Calgary public school system. We have friends and neighbours who are doctors and nurses, and they reported the same experiences. And it’s not because teachers, nurses, and professors are “bad people,” but rather because they are completely normal people: they look after their own interests first. This is the Achilles heel of public monopolies. There is nowhere else for unhappy patients, parents, or students to go. Competition from private sector alternatives provides the antidote and forces greater accountability on publicly funded services like education and health care.⁷

Campaign and Endorsements

In the fall, the PC Party organized seven leadership debates across the province—Calgary and Edmonton; but also Fort McMurray and Grande Prairie in the north; and Red Deer and then Lethbridge and Medicine Hat in the south. As far as debates go, they were deadly boring—both for the audiences and for the candidates. With eight candidates, each candidate had to be given the opportunity to answer each question—which limited responses to two minutes per candidate. This format guaranteed short, superficial, answers—”talking points,” as campaign strategists like to call them. Each candidate was given time for an opening and closing statement, five and three minutes respectively. But by the time you listened to eight of them in a row, you tended to tune out. Especially if you had already heard them five or six times.

The more interesting aspect of these debates was not what was said but who showed up. Every debate created the opportunity for each campaign to demonstrate their level of support and organization in that city or region. A strong turnout of supporters would hopefully generate some positive media and build new momentum. With the exception of the Edmonton debate,⁸ it was becoming clear that the Dinning and Morton campaigns were winning on the ground. But there was a clear difference between the two campaigns.

The turnout for Dinning was always clean, crisp, and organized. It would include whatever local MLAs were supporting him, as well as some local dignitaries and high-profile men and women from the business community. His supporters were vocal but polite.

The “I’m supportin’ Morton” crowd, many wearing our black-and-white T-shirts, was different. Actually, very different. We were numerous and well organized. But the similarities ended there. Many were not quite as clean cut and well dressed as the Dinningites. We were not impolite, but definitely louder and more enthusiastic.

If the Dinning campaign was a top-down organization filled with people who were content with the status quo, the Morton supporters were the opposite—a bottom-up movement that wanted change. The Lethbridge Herald noted that Dinning’s events “drew a crowd of who’s who made up of civic leaders, former and current politicians and business owners.” Morton’s event, by contrast, “was a gathering of ma’s and pa’s, parents with children … the ones who shop at the businesses owned by those who attended Dinning’s rally.”⁹ As another journalist put it: “If Dinning supporters believe in the man, Morton supporters believe in the cause.”¹⁰

This contrast was captured in the final weeks of the campaign by a song we received as an in-kind contribution from Bobbie Norman, a Cochrane songwriter and a Morton supporter. Recorded by one of her friends in Nashville, it caught on quickly: “Ted Morton is The Man.”¹¹

The lyrics were corny, but the tune itself was catchy. You can still find it on YouTube.¹² And soon it was playing loudly at all our events.

While I didn’t realize it at the time, we had tapped into Albertans’ recently dormant but deeply rooted populist political culture. Alberta’s political history is characterized by realigning elections in which feelings of Western alienation fuel a populist surge that destroys the incumbent governing party and replaces it with a party that hardly existed before. The United Farmers of Alberta did it in 1921. Social Credit did it in 1935. More recently at the federal level, in 1993, Preston Manning and his brand-new Reform Party—marching under the banner “The West Wants In!”—swept Alberta. In 1988, Brian Mulroney and the PCs had won twenty-five of Alberta’s twenty-six federal seats. In 1993, they did not win a single riding. Reformers won twenty-two.

My candidacy embodied the same phenomenon. I was not a new party, but I represented a clear break with the thirty-five-year PC dynasty. The decade of Reform Party ascendancy federally had created an appetite for change at the provincial level. I became the vehicle for that change.

The summer was spent on an endless road trip covering all of Alberta, not just once but twice. My road team consisted primarily of Bill Bewick and my daughter Cally Morton. I had met Bill and his parents through Reform Party politics during the 1990s. Bill was from Calgary, but he had done his undergraduate studies at the University of Alberta. He then did an MA there with Dr. Leon Craig, and went to do a PhD in political theory at Michigan State with Dr. Arthur Meltzer, another Straussian. Suffice it to say that Bill and I had similar world views. I valued Bill not just for his political advice but also his collection of musical CDs—mostly newer, alternative country and western like Corb Lund—which we enjoyed as we criss-crossed Alberta. He also damn near saved my life in the last week of the campaign when the semi-trailer truck we were passing suddenly moved into our lane and pushed us into the snow-filled median!

Cally had graduated from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario in 2003, and then gone to Ottawa to work for the newly created Conservative Party of Canada. There she had the good fortune to meet and work for Vida Brodie on the 2004 Harper campaign. Vida assigned her to Harper’s advance team. This meant that Cally had more actual front-line campaign experience than either me or Bill and this made her a valued part of our team. Those who know Cally won’t be surprised to read that she was not reluctant to give me advice.

While the local weeklies usually covered my visits and meetings, our campaign was invisible in the Calgary and Edmonton media. This changed in mid-September when over 300 supporters turned out for our “official” campaign launch party. As reported in the Calgary Herald:

The room is brimming and buzzing with more than 300 people—an eclectic mix of well-manicured yuppies, serious suits, flannel-clad farmers and teenagers with complicated haircuts. … But when Ted Morton finally takes the stage, the applause isn’t polite. It’s thunderous.¹³

Suddenly, the big-city media began to pay attention. By mid-November, my nemesis in the Edmonton Journal, Graham Thomson, warned his readers that my campaign was showing “surprising strength.”¹⁴ But our big media breakthrough came two weeks later, with the front page headline in the Calgary Herald, “Dinning, Morton virtually tied in Tory race.”¹⁵ The Herald’s polling of 800 PC members found that Dinning was leading at 21 percent and that I was second at 18 percent. But with a 3 percent margin of error, it was a toss-up. Oberg and Stelmach followed well behind with 11 percent and 10 percent.

These polling numbers sent a clear message. No candidate was going to get the 51 percent to win on the first round. And with the top three going to a second-round runoff, the anyone-but-Dinning scenario was no longer just a theoretical possibility. For the Dinning team, which only six months earlier had been predicting a first-round victory, this poll was alarming. For us, it was another momentum builder.

By the final week before the first round of voting, official endorsements began to be announced. Dinning got almost all of them: the Calgary Herald, the Calgary Sun,¹⁶ even the Globe and Mail.¹⁷ Former PC Premier Peter Lougheed also stepped out of retirement to endorse Dinning.¹⁸ This did not faze us. Everyone knew that Dinning was the establishment candidate. We laughed that in Alberta, being endorsed by the Toronto-based Globe and Mail might actually be a negative. We were also encouraged that Premier Klein endorsed no one. This left the door open for someone other than Dinning.

My endorsements were fewer and less high profile. But they were from individuals my populist base listened to: Lorne Gunter in the Edmonton Journal;¹⁹ Link Byfield in the Citizens Centre for Freedom and Democracy; Joe Woodard in the Western Standard;²⁰ the Canadian Taxpayers Federation; and Licia Corbella in the Calgary Sun.²¹

Corbella’s endorsement was especially interesting because she revealed that she had written the Sun’s unsigned editorial endorsement of Dinning just a few days earlier. But in her own mind, she told her readers, “I’m supportin’ Morton,” and went on to say, “PC members should jump in bed with Ted.” This colourful metaphor did not get her in trouble, but it almost did our campaign. We thought it was so funny that we immediately ordered 500 black-and-white T-shirts emblazoned with “Get in Bed with Ted.” When they arrived forty-eight hours later, more sober voices prevailed, and the new T-shirts were quickly consigned to the garbage bin.

We also had to spend some money we didn’t have. In Alberta rural weekly newspapers, paid advertising must be bought a week before the paper actually appears. Because the rural vote was so central to our strategy, we had planned to purchase over $30,000 worth of advertising in these weeklies, both the week before round one and the week before round two. This meant that we had to purchase the second week before we even knew the first-round results. What if I didn’t even make it to the second round? Plus, we were out of money. Contrary to all my talk about fiscal responsibility, we crossed our fingers and went ahead and bought it all.

First-Round Results

November 25 finally arrived. It was bitterly cold—minus 20°C. This made our last minute GOTV even more important, and our phone bank ran full bore right up to the polls closing. We then all filed down to the Roundup Centre at the Stampede Grounds to wait for the results. We easily had several hundred supporters there to cheer on the results. But I was nervous. Two days earlier, my campaign staff had sat me down to tell me that we had sold just over 16,000 memberships. By historical comparisons, this was a lot. But was it enough? They told me they didn’t know. So as the results began to trickle in and be posted on board at the front of the room, we held our breath and hoped for the best.

And we got it. By 10 p.m. it was clear. Dinning was nowhere near a first-ballot victory. And I was clearly going to finish second. We started celebrating long before the final numbers confirmed our success. Dinning won with 29,470 votes, but this was only 30 percent of the votes. I trailed closely behind with 25,614, or 26 percent, and Stelmach was a distant third with 14,967, or 15 percent. Under the rules, only the top three finishers moved on to the second round of voting. It was exciting, and we celebrated well into the evening. Which was good. Because the very next day, a whole new election began, and there were only seven days before the second round of voting.

The voter turnout was huge—96,000 voters, almost double the number who voted in the last PC leadership contest held in 1992. The results tracked geography as well as ideology. Dinning won every riding in Calgary except Calgary-Montrose. Edmonton was badly fragmented, with Norris, Hancock, Dinning, and Stelmach each picking up several ridings. Stelmach also won four more rural ridings further east of Edmonton. We swept virtually all of central and southern Alberta. Of the twenty-one rural ridings south and west of Edmonton, I won all but four. I also carried the two urban ridings in both Medicine Hat and Red Deer.²²

The voting system for the second round was a preferential ballot. Voters are instructed to indicate both a first and a second preference on their ballots. To win, a candidate needs 50 percent-plus-one of first preferences. If no candidate receives that on the first count, then the third place finisher is dropped and his/her voters’ second preferences are redistributed to the two remaining candidates—one of whom now has the required majority and wins.

We thought this system would help us. Given Dinning’s weak lead in the first round, it was now obvious that he was going to finish well short of the 50 percent-plus-one of first preferences needed to win in round two. The winner was going to be decided by the second preferences of the third place finisher. The “anyone but Dinning” strategy suddenly took on a whole new relevance.

As I was the most obvious beneficiary, I quickly became its most vocal proponent. My message to PC voters was that they should no longer consider Dinning a viable candidate to be the leader of our party: “Conservatives in Alberta had a long hard look at Jim Dinning, and 70 percent of them said no.”²³ That left only Ted or Ed. We immediately began to message to our PC voter lists: “Vote Ted and Ed. Or Ed and Ted.” We assumed, not unreasonably, that Stelmach was too far behind to catch me in the second round. So long as he didn’t, then I would get his supporters’ second preferences, which would then push me past Dinning.

Dinning’s team had obviously made the same calculation but to the opposite conclusion. Suddenly, there was now a very explicit and loud “anyone-but-Morton” campaign. Dinning was “taking the gloves off,” declared the Calgary Sun. The very night the first-round results were announced, Dinning declared that Albertans had a choice between a leader “that can bring people together” or a leader “who is determined to fight the battles of the past and build firewalls.”²⁴

These attacks heated up in the days that followed. Graham Thomson reported that Dinning was “running a campaign of fear.”²⁵ Dinning warned that I was “too extreme”; that a Morton win “would take the progressive out of Progressive Conservative. … Ted Morton’s Alberta is not my Alberta.”²⁶ By election day Saturday, Dinning was running full-page ads in both the Calgary Herald and Edmonton Journal under the headline: “Choose the Alberta You Want,” followed by a list of “scary” campaign promises I had made.

Predictably, the worst mudslinging was done by proxies hoping to collect a cabinet appointment if Dinning won. Campaigning with Dinning, Gary Mar predicted that if I became the party’s leader, the PCs would lose the next election. He declared that he could not support a Ted Morton government and that he would not run again if I became leader.²⁷ This message was echoed in liberal media stories such as the Friday headline in the Globe and Mail, “Is this man too ‘scary’ for Alberta?”²⁸

Dinning’s public messaging was complemented by a quiet outreach to Calgarians who traditionally voted Liberal.²⁹ The message: If Dinning doesn’t win, the next premier of Alberta will be your worst nightmare—a pro-life, anti–gay marriage social conservative named Ted Morton.

The Calgary Herald reported that in the Calgary arts community both patrons and staff were being encouraged to purchase PC memberships and vote for Dinning.³⁰ Not coincidentally, Dinning had quietly promised to double public funding for the arts. This last-minute recruiting of Liberal voters clearly had some effect. “Temporary Tories cast leadership votes to head off Morton,” reported the Edmonton Journal.³¹

My response to the Dinning campaign’s personal attacks was that they were a sign of their desperation and would not work. I drew a parallel to the recent federal election. “It didn’t work when Paul Martin tried it on Stephen Harper, and it won’t work if Jim Dinning tries it on Ted Morton.”³² I continued to portray Dinning as “Liberal-lite” and way too closely tied to the “Calgary mafia”—a wealthy group of corporate insiders who had financed and advised Ralph Klein. I also pointed out more than once that Dinning had delivered a $50,000 cheque to Paul Martin in the 2004 federal Liberal leadership campaign. And when Anne McLellan, the Liberal MP from Edmonton, endorsed Dinning, I happily assured PC voters that no Liberals were endorsing me.

Stelmach stayed above the fray. He pitched himself as the “unity candidate” and stayed out of the Dinning-Morton dogfight. He had concluded—correctly—that he was potentially its biggest beneficiary. If Stelmach could somehow beat one of us on first preferences, and both our supporters chose him as their second preference, he could sneak up the middle and win. But this was a big if. He had finished far behind both of us in the first round. A quarter of his support came from just two ridings—his own and the one next door. In Calgary, he did not receive more than 93 votes in any riding. How could he possibly catch up?

Well, he started by getting the endorsements of the losing candidates. Hancock and Norris immediately endorsed their fellow Edmontonian, Stelmach. Would their supporters follow their advice? Normally, this is far from certain, especially in one-person, one-vote primaries, as opposed to a leadership convention. But in this case, it was effective. Almost overnight, Ed’s third place finish mobilized a new issue, a new message: that it was Edmonton’s turn to have a premier.

It was no secret around Edmonton that the Klein inner circle was very Calgary-centric. His chief of staff, Rod Love, and most of his major fundraisers were Calgarians. When the legislature was not in session, Ralph clearly preferred to be in Calgary and work from his southern office at McDougall Centre. It was widely rumoured that he had once remarked, “Edmonton is not the end of the Earth … but you can see it from there.” True or not, it fed a feeling of benign neglect in the north. Now suddenly, with Dinning and Morton pounding each other, Ed Stelmach opened the window for a premier from the north.

Oberg’s endorsement was more calculated. Most of his supporters came from the same areas that I’d done well in—communities in rural central and southern Alberta. In the PC Caucus meetings, seating is assigned alphabetically, so I had been sitting next to Oberg for the past two years. We had become friendly. With his decade of experience, he often was able to explain procedural and organizational issues that were new to me. In retrospect, I think his helpful manner was partly motivated by Oberg’s belief that when the time came for the leadership, he would finish ahead of me and be able to persuade me to throw my support to him. At the time, that was not an unreasonable assumption. But now the shoe was on the other foot.

I wanted his support. I phoned Oberg Saturday night, and several more times Sunday morning. He never picked up the phone. That evening, he announced that he too would be supporting Stelmach. It later came out that Oberg had offered his support to Stelmach in return for a promise to appoint him as the next minister of finance. Stelmach agreed. But it did not end the way Oberg planned.

On the Monday following the first round, we set out on our last road trip of the campaign. We were optimistic. A number of Alberta MPs from the Harper government had returned to Alberta to help us get out the vote. Jason Kenney, Monte Solberg, Rob Anders, and Stockwell Day all helped out. As the front page of the Calgary Herald observed, it was “bordering on a war between federal and provincial Tories.”³³ This was okay with us. Canadian Alliance members outnumbered PC members three to one.

I also picked up two last minute endorsements from Tory MLAs: Hung Pham, Calgary-Montrose, and Tony Abbott, Drayton Valley-Calmar.³⁴ Tony had helped me win this rural northern riding in the first round. Pham told us that he had sold 9,000 memberships to the Vietnamese community in northeast Calgary to support Lyle Oberg in the first round of voting. Now he was ready to support me.

Our spirits were also buoyed by the large number of unsolicited cheques and donations that were being hand delivered to our campaign office on Monday morning. A lot of people who had ignored us for the past twelve months suddenly wanted to be on our “friends list.” That was fine with us. We suddenly had more money than we knew what to do with. We easily paid off all the bills for the advertising in the rural weekly newspapers that we’d had to buy before the first round of voting. For the first time in the entire campaign, we actually thought we had a good chance of winning.

This thought actually created a problem. What if I did win? What does a “premier-elect” do in his first days and weeks? Choose a cabinet? I’d never been in a cabinet. Messaging to the press? To party members? To Albertans from their new premier? First impressions are important. This is all part of “the transition”—something we had not given a moment’s thought to. To this end, we were able to get Bill Boyd, a Saskatchewan Party MLA, to meet me in Medicine Hat to discuss some of the start-up decisions that a new premier needs to make. Bill was part of Brad Wall’s inner circle, and, like Brad, was supportive of the “More Alberta, Less Ottawa” themes of my campaign.

Within a day and a half, we came up with a plan. Sunday afternoon, we would hold a press conference. Messaging to the party: unity—everyone is welcome. Messaging to the province: business as usual. Spring session and budget would commence in February, as scheduled. Also on Sunday, establish liaison with the premier’s office: request a meeting with Klein as soon as possible and also a meeting with senior civil servants. By end of day Monday, cobble together a “transition team” of seven current MLAs I thought would be supportive and strengthen the party unity message. This included leadership candidates Stelmach, Hancock, and Norris (sending a message to Edmonton and the north that they would be at the table). Mel Knight and Doug Horner were also on this list—both of whom were also from northern Alberta and had helped me with Bill 208. For this same reason, I wanted Greg Melchin, a Calgary MLA and Klein cabinet minister. I also wanted MLA and Minister of Finance Shirley McLellan for her expertise and influence. This transition team was to be introduced at a press conference in Edmonton on Tuesday. Less urgent but not less important, we began discussing the recruitment of new PC candidates for the next election. These would be individuals who had helped my leadership campaign and supported my Alberta Agenda policies. At the top of my list was Danielle Smith. If only…

Predictably, the last week held some unscripted funny moments. In our visit to Medicine Hat, we were met by Dean Shock and his family. Dean was from the Hat and had played an invaluable role in our Calgary campaign office by providing IT and programming assistance. Now, in front of dozens of flashing cameras, Dean’s daughter Danielle approached me and presented me with her new four-month-old Jack Russell terrier. She had named it Tedmorton! Our picture was not only in the Medicine Hat News³⁵ the next day, but also the Calgary Herald.³⁶ What other campaign had a mascot!?

Hung Pham’s endorsement also entailed a surprise. In return for his endorsement, Hung wanted my assurance that, as premier, I would support a matching grant for a proposed seniors’ retirement home being developed by the Vietnamese community in Edmonton. This led to a marathon end-of-day bargaining session in Edmonton with representatives from the Vietnamese community. During the campaign, I had stated repeatedly that, unlike the other candidates, I would not make spending promises in return for votes. So I was uncomfortable with what Pham was asking me to do. As I dithered, my daughter Cally, who was part of my road team, started kicking me under the table. She shared none of my qualms. She just wanted to seal the deal and get the votes. I finally said yes. Then came the surprise. To celebrate the agreement, we were escorted off to an eleven-course Vietnamese wedding feast. This was not on our agenda. And we didn’t get back to Calgary until well after midnight.

This may help to explain why I began to come down with a cold and sinus infection later in the week. I made it through the last debate of the campaign Thursday evening, but then spent Friday just making telephone calls (which I hated) and visiting the volunteers at our phone bank (which I loved). But by Saturday, voting day, I was really sick, with a temperature over 39°C. That afternoon we flew up to Edmonton in a private plane generously provided by my friend Archie Nesbitt. I was such a mess that nobody wanted to sit next to me. My campaign team went immediately to the Alberta Aviation Museum, where the results would be announced that evening.

I went with my family to the Hotel Macdonald, where we had booked a suite of rooms in anticipation of an exciting night. In addition to Bambi and Cally, my son Hutch had now joined us, as had my mother. My brother Allen and his wife, Morgan, had flown in just for the weekend. Bambi, of course, had planned a wonderful dinner in the beautiful Macdonald dining room. I managed to dress, but even after two more Tylenol, I knew I had to save what energy I had left for the rest of the night. So as everyone else enjoyed a wonderful dinner, I remained in my room. Lying on our bed, suit and tie, shoes on, eyes closed, I contemplated what was about to happen.

Second-Round Results

When we entered the Alberta Aviation Museum just after 8 p.m., our initial reception was very positive. Hundreds of supporters were there to greet us and cheer me on. But before an hour had passed, it became apparent that what we had planned for was not happening. Early returns from the Edmonton area indicated a huge increase in votes for Stelmach. We hoped this was just a regional anomaly. It wasn’t.

A wave of new voters—over 44,000—propelled Stelmach from a distant third to a virtual tie with Dinning on first preferences: 51,764 to 51,272. We had increased our vote total by more than 16,000, but with only 41,243, I was eliminated. Per the rules, the second preferences of my supporters were then counted, and 86 percent went to Stelmach, making him the new PC party leader. As we were in Edmonton, there were large numbers of Stelmach supporters at the event, and they were jubilant. As the headlines in the newspapers the next day announced, sometimes nice guys do win.

Stelmach’s jaw-dropping vote surge was a shock. I was right about Dinning being finished, but completely wrong about Stelmach’s ability to catch up with us. It was hard to say who was more surprised by this outcome: Dinning, me, or Ed Stelmach! How did this happen?

On one level, the Stelmach strategy was simply better and more effective. Publicly, Stelmach had avoided the negative rhetoric and personal attacks. Privately, his campaign launched a massive new membership sales initiative, reminding potential supporters that Dinning had been Klein’s hatchet man in the painful budget cuts of the 1990s. Stelmach also benefited from the large and connected Ukrainian population in and around Edmonton. This overlapped with a whisper campaign that “It’s Edmonton’s turn now,” which in turn tapped into the anti-Calgary sentiment latent in both Edmonton and rural Alberta. Stelmach also received the support of the three candidates eliminated in the first round. Together, they positioned Stelmach as a moderate, likeable, positive candidate, a better alternative to the two warring “fiscal hawks.” This message played well with public sector unions and municipal politicians, both of whom depend on Government of Alberta largesse. For all of this, the Stelmach strategy deserves high marks.

But there were also structural factors in the PC leadership selection process that allowed this to happen. In a three-candidate runoff election with a clear front-runner such as Dinning, the only plausible path to victory for second and third place candidates is to join forces to prevent the front-runner from crossing the 50 percent threshold on first preferences. That’s what we did. In a two-candidate run-off election, this incentive would not occur. Given that at the outset of the leadership race Dinning was a heavy favourite to win, this structural factor contributed to his defeat.

A second structural factor was the lack of any cut-off date for purchasing party memberships prior to the voting day. Often described as an “open primary system,” this rule opens the door for a candidate to sell large numbers of memberships to people who are not party members, not just on the first ballot but also in the one-week window before the second ballot.

This rule clearly benefited me on the first ballot. I was able to recruit large numbers of former Reform Party and Alliance Party supporters who had never held memberships in the provincial PC Party. Going into the first day of voting, my campaign had identified 16,784 supporters and sold 11,230 memberships. By the end of the day, I had received 25,614 votes—more than double the number of memberships we had sold prior to voting day. In Canadian nomination elections, this kind of “conversion rate” (i.e., ratio of memberships sold to actual votes cast) is unheard of. We attributed this very pleasant surprise to the “moccasin telegraph,” the informal but tightly knit network of Alberta Reformers.

In the second round, it was the Stelmach campaign that benefited from the “gate crashers.” The number of voters in the second round was 48 percent higher than in the first round. Stelmach more than tripled his first-round votes—from 14,967 to 51,764. Some members of my team still believe that if membership sales had been cut off after the first round of voting, I would have won. Dinning would still have been the vote leader, but well short of 50 percent-plus-one. Stelmach would not have caught up with me, and so many—we’ll never know how many—of his voters’ second preferences would have gone to me. The “Ted or Ed” or “Ed or Ted” strategy might have worked. But the membership sales were not cut off, and the number of new voters was much larger than the total number of voters for the candidates eliminated in the first round. Where did these new voters come from?

Public sector unions were leery of both Dinning and me. Dinning had been Klein’s minister of finance in the mid-1990s when the Tories imposed an across-the-board 5 percent pay reduction to all public sector employees—including teachers and nurses. I had campaigned on the promise of fiscal responsibility and opening up Alberta’s health care system to more private delivery and contracting out to non-unionized providers. Not surprisingly, the Alberta Union of Public Employees (AUPE), the Alberta Teachers’ Association (ATA), and the United Nurses of Alberta (UNA) did not warm to the idea of two self-proclaimed “fiscal hawks” leading the next government of Alberta. The Stelmach campaign privately exploited this anxiety to sign up thousands of new members— “two-minute Tories”—who tore up their PC membership cards as they exited the polling stations.

Third, the “two-minute Tory” window in the second round had a left-wing bias. In a dominant one-party province like Alberta, the winner of the PC leadership race immediately becomes the new premier of the province. This creates an incentive for traditional Liberal Party supporters to buy a PC membership just to help to elect the “least worst” Conservative candidate. As noted above, the Dinning campaign encouraged this. It helps to explain how Dinning increased his votes from 29,470 in the first round to 51,272 in the second.

But the left-wing bias of the second round is structural as well as circumstantial. The window for selling new memberships is open for only one week. Time is short. This creates an incentive for leadership campaigns to target their recruiting efforts on organized interests that can be quickly mobilized through pre-existing membership lists with telephone numbers, addresses, and emails.

For Stelmach, this meant reaching out to public sector unions to block the Dinning-Morton “threat.” Dave Hancock threw his support to Stelmach and used his ATA contacts to sell PC memberships to teachers. Stelmach’s other “secret weapon” was the Alberta Association of Municipal Districts and Counties (AAMDC), the trade association for elected officials from rural Alberta. Stelmach had begun his political career at the municipal level. He was the former reeve of Lamont County, and had been active in the AAMDC, as had several of his MLA supporters. Led by Sherwood Park MLA Iris Evans, they mobilized significant support through their extensive networks of rural officeholders and employees, most of whom already knew the likeable Stelmach.

These structural factors clearly contributed to Stelmach’s come-from-behind victory. Behind its front page headlines—“STELMACH WIN STUNS TORIES,” the Edmonton Journal went on to explain that Stelmach had gone “from ‘Mr. Nice’ to ‘Mr. Premier’ because of a swell of support in Edmonton and northern Alberta.”³⁷ This was partly true. The 300 percent increase in Stelmach’s first preferences—from 14,967 to 51,764—did come mostly from northern Alberta. But this only brought him even with Dinning. It was my supporters’ second preferences—86 percent of which went to Stelmach—that made Ed Stelmach Alberta’s new premier-elect. In this sense, I had made Ed Stelmach the new premier of Alberta; a thought that haunted me until, four years later, I was the one who deposed him. (See chapter 9.)

Ed Stelmach: The Accidental Premier

Round one was a referendum on Jim Dinning, and he lost. But round two was a referendum on Ted Morton, and I lost. A quarter-million dollars of negative advertising worked. Just as Dinning had underestimated the support I was to receive from former federal Reform Party members, I had underestimated how many Liberals were willing to become “two-minute Tories” to defeat me. I was clearly perceived as a threat to the political status quo in Alberta, and its beneficiaries mobilized quickly to ensure my defeat.

While we lost the leadership race, we did not lose the battle for new ideas. We proved that campaigns matter. We went from 500-to-1 odds at the beginning to almost winning. Plus, we chose who did win. If membership sales had been cut off after the first round of voting, I might have won. Longer term, my campaign changed the culture and composition of the PC Party. As noted earlier, “Dinning supporters believe in the man, Morton supporters believe in the cause.”³⁸ The man was gone, but the cause was not. And neither were my supporters.

My campaign had brought the values and policies that animated federal Reformers into the provincial PC party. First and foremost, this meant the Alberta Agenda: the demand for a new deal—a fair deal—from Ottawa. If not Senate reform, which looked increasingly unlikely, then the “More Alberta, Less Ottawa” policy initiatives I had campaigned on. 

While I didn’t recognize this at the time, I benefited from the new federal CPC’s de-emphasis of Western issues. Stephen Harper did not seek the leadership of the Canadian Alliance and then the CPC to lead a Western rump protest party. Harper and his team wanted to win a majority government, and this meant a new emphasis on issues that played well in Ontario and Quebec. Many first-wave Reformers who did not like what they saw as the abandonment of Reform’s founding principles gravitated to my 2006 leadership campaign and, later, the Wildrose Party.³⁹

We also grew and energized the social conservative wing of the party. These new PCers wanted policies that would protect them and their children from the rapidly expanding policy demands flowing from the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage ruling. My supporters were looking for a party that would protect their freedom of speech, freedom of religion, parents’ rights, and expanded school choice.

Both the “More Alberta, Less Ottawa” and social conservative issues were especially popular in rural and small-town Alberta. Outside of Calgary, I swept virtually all of central and southern Alberta. This regional concentration of my support was essential to my success in the first round of voting. But when in the second round I did not prevail, it laid the groundwork for the future growth of the Wildrose Party (see chapters 9 and 10.)

Both Dinning and I were defeated by voters who were not normally PC party members. So where did that leave the PC Party? The “two-minute Tories” were clearly not staying. They went home to the Liberal and NDP parties. But what about the 41,000 Reformers who bought memberships to support me?

The risk going forward was whether we could keep these conservatives in the PC Party. Losing Red Tories to the Liberals was not a risk. We saw that in 1993, when Nancy Betkowski, after losing the leadership race to Ralph Klein, crossed the floor and joined the Liberals. This made no difference in the next election. What the PCs could not afford were defections to a new right-of-centre party. Dividing the conservative vote was—and is—a recipe for defeat. In BC, the split between Social Credit and the BC Liberal Party gave the NDP a free pass for the entire decade of the 1990s. Federally, the Reform-PC split gave Jean Chrétien and Liberals three easy victories and eleven years of majority government in Ottawa.

Was premier-elect Ed Stelmach up to this challenge? Publicly, I said he was. I was trying to be a gracious loser. I said that his win “probably made it easier to hold the party together”; that he would be “a very good leader—lots of experience and practical judgement.”⁴⁰

Privately I was not so optimistic. I knew then what others said later: that Ed was an “accidental premier”—elected as the default candidate between the two warring wings of the PC Party. In the second round, two-thirds of the voters had cast their first preferences for someone other than Ed. Would he be able to hold together a party that was now so clearly divided? Policy-wise there was nothing novel or inspiring about his campaign. In the public debates, he was awkward and inarticulate. Would Ed Stelmach have what it would take to keep the party together? Only time would tell.