Preface
This book is an autobiography of my three decades in Alberta politics. The chapters are organized chronologically, from 1981 to 2023. Readers may want to go directly to chapters that address their particular interests. Some chapters may be too detailed or too technical for a general interest reader. The primary audiences are Albertans who were active in federal and provincial conservative politics during this period; and political scientists interested in policy development, cabinet/caucus politics, and leadership selection. I also hope that this book will help current and future MLAs and cabinet ministers avoid the mistakes of the Stelmach, Redford, and Prentice governments. For future historians, it also provides a record of thirty years of Alberta politics as seen from the inside by someone who aspired to reach the top and almost did.
My dual perspective—as both a player and an academic (political scientist)—is somewhat unique and hopefully provides some original insights. It might also serve as a cautionary tale for future academics considering jumping into the political ring. As a reporter once observed, I was the intellectual godfather of the political party that ended my career. Quite an achievement! Or, as a friend remarked at my retirement party, by the time I exited, I had managed to alienate most of the members of all four major political parties in Alberta. Politics is a tricky business!
My original title for this book was “The Decline and Fall of the Alberta PC Empire.” This remains the principal theme. But as I was completing the manuscript, recent events gave me a more positive perspective on what had occurred on my watch. These included the election of Jason Kenney as the new leader of the PC Party in 2017; his successful merger of the PCs and Wildrose parties in 2018; the election of a Kenney-UCP majority government in 2019; and Danielle Smith’s takeover of the UCP leadership in 2022 and her majority government in 2023.
Suddenly, many of the “Alberta Agenda”—a.k.a. “Firewall”—policies and ideas I had championed unsuccessfully had now been supported by two successive conservative majority governments. As I told my supporters in 2006, we may have lost the leadership campaign, but we did not lose the battle for new ideas. The same reforms that were on the periphery of Alberta provincial politics twenty years ago are now front and centre. How these issues will play out remains to be seen, but they are not going away anytime soon.
In the last two provincial elections (2019 and 2023), Albertans have elected majority governments that understand Alberta’s structural vulnerability to predatory federal policies and are no longer willing to accept it. There is a fundamental misalignment between Canada’s nineteenth-century constitution and our twenty-first-century economy. Canada has changed but our constitution has not. This constitutional disconnect invites federal political parties to win national elections with policies that transfer wealth from energy-rich, voter-poor Alberta to the energy-poor but voter-rich central provinces of Quebec and Ontario. The Liberals’ election strategy—“Screw the West. We’ll take the rest!”—has worked for the past fifty years. In politics, the beneficiaries of the status quo never willingly give up their advantages. Alberta has never received anything from Ottawa without fighting for it. Change requires push. Albertans have now elected two consecutive governments that are pushing back.
I am often asked if I regretted my decision to leave my academic university life and plunge into the shadowy cave of partisan party politics. The answer is: decidedly not. I have had a lifelong interest in understanding politics, but I knew almost nothing about actually governing—being in government and making the decisions that shape public policy. My work as the minister of Sustainable Resource Development, then Finance and finally Energy gave me experiences and knowledge that I otherwise would never have had. To cut to the chase, this book would not exist if I hadn’t taken the opportunity—and its attendant risks—that I had in 2004.
My eight years in government also deepened my knowledge of and affection for Alberta. Alberta is large and unique—so large that most Albertans know only the small corners that we each live in. As an MLA, I met and worked with the communities and families in Foothills-Rocky View that I represented for eight years. As a leadership candidate and minister, I travelled the entire province multiple times. The more I saw, the more Albertans I met, the more I cared about Alberta’s future. For the past several generations, Alberta has been one of the best places in Canada—in the world—to live, to work and to raise a family. I want to keep it that way for future generations—which is another reason I wrote this book.
In 2004 I left federal Conservative Party / Reform Party politics and returned to the Alberta arena with the goal of making the Alberta government more self-reliant, more able and willing to fight unfair federal policies. This didn’t happen on my watch, but with the subsequent merger of the PCs and Wildrose parties and the majority UCP (United Conservative Party) governments elected in 2019 and 2023, it has.
I’d like to believe I contributed to this—both while in government and after my exit in 2012. No longer being in government gave me back a freedom of speech I had missed for the prior eight years. I’ve always subscribed to the theory that in politics, “the pen is mightier than the sword.” After eight years of wielding the sword, I have enjoyed picking up the pen again.