12The Alberta Agenda: From Fringe to Mainstream

Kenney’s Hostile Takeover of the PC Party

In political science terminology, what Jason Kenney achieved is known as a “hostile takeover”: where an existing party is taken over by a new leader—an outsider—with new issues and new supporters. Hostile takeovers become possible when an established party loses control over its candidate nomination process and fundraising for leadership candidates.¹ This concept has been used in US politics to explain how Donald Trump won the Republican Party’s nomination for president in 2016. But it accurately captures what happened to the Alberta PC Party in 2017.

The destruction of the PC Party by Wildrose is also consistent with what political science describes as an “invasion from the margin”—where a new party tries to break into a two-party dominant system.² To succeed, the new party must successfully promote a new issue that “opens the possibility of breaking up a major party’s coalition and winning some of those voters for the minor party.”³

The recipe for success is for the new, more extreme party to find a regional base, cut deeply into its nearest rival’s traditional base of core voters, and eventually take it over by merger or drive it down to a point where it is no longer relevant or even disappears.⁴

This was written in 2014. The best Canadian example is how the Reform Party first stole the federal PCs’ Western voter base in the 1993 and 1997 federal elections, and eventually took it over via Stephen Harper’s 2003 merger. But there is a clear parallel with what happened in the 2015 Alberta provincial election, and Jason Kenney’s subsequent takeover of the Alberta PC party.

This should sound familiar. It is basically what I tried to do in the 2006 leadership, and why the PC establishment worked so hard to defeat me. In 2017, Kenney succeeded where I had failed. He succeeded in part because he had a well-organized, well-financed campaign. He was also the most effective public speaker Albertans had seen in decades.

But he also succeeded because there was no one left to defend the PC party or its brand. And with the party reduced to nine seats in the legislature and without a leader, there was nothing left to defend. This was the price the PCs paid for ignoring the new issues of Western alienation and the growing number of Albertans who supported the Reform/CA/CPC calls for a new deal—a fair deal—from Ottawa.

Equalization Referendum and the Fair Deal Report (2019)

In 2019, Kenney led the UCP to a new majority government. With the PCs and Wildrose parties now united—i.e., no more vote splitting—Kenney crushed the NDP, winning sixty-three seats and 55 percent of votes. A central issue in this election was Kenney’s commitment to hold a referendum to abolish the federal equalization program. He had initially endorsed the equalization referendum during the 2017 UCP leadership election. But he was a follower on this issue, not a leader.

In March 2017, I had published a column in the Calgary Herald⁵ (and a more extensive policy paper for the Manning Centre⁶) explaining how the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Quebec Secession Reference⁷ created a constitutional opportunity for Alberta to use a referendum to challenge the equalization program. Several months later, in July, Brian Jean announced his candidacy for the leadership of the newly formed UCP. He promised that, if elected, he would support holding a referendum to abolish equalization.⁸

At the time, Jean, the former leader of the Wildrose Party, was the only candidate who might beat Kenney in the UCP leadership election scheduled for October. Abolishing equalization was popular with Wildrose members, who now would be a key voting bloc in the UCP leadership race. To pre-empt any advantage this might give Jean, Kenney quickly announced that he too would hold an equalization referendum. This certainly helped him win his overwhelming majority—61 percent—of UCP voters in October. But it also meant that the equalization referendum became a key plank of the party he now led.

After he won the 2019 provincial election and became premier, Kenney kept this campaign promise. To minimize costs, the referendum was not held until Alberta’s next municipal elections, in October 2020. When the votes were counted, 62 percent supported the proposal to abolish the federal equalization program.⁹

A second catalyst for Kenney’s stronger challenges to Ottawa was the Liberals’ victory in the October 2019 federal election.¹⁰ Now faced with the gloomy prospects of another four years of Trudeau’s anti-oil, anti-Alberta policies, Kenney convened a meeting of several of his key outside advisers—i.e., outside of both his caucus and cabinet. On very short notice, this emergency pow-wow was held in the Jephson dining room at the Ranchmen’s Club on October 25. Other than me, the participants were a who’s who of Western Canadian conservative leaders: Stephen Harper (former prime minister of Canada); Brad Wall (former premier of Saskatchewan); Scott Moe (current premier of Saskatchewan); and Preston Manning (founder and former leader of the Reform Party of Canada).

Suffice it to say that it was one of the most interesting political meetings that I ever attended. In addition to great food, wine and scotch, there was plenty of advice on how best to counter economically harmful Liberal policies. I found it interesting—but not surprising—that the most animated advice came from Stephen Harper. There was clearly no love lost between Harper and Justin Trudeau!

I was relatively quiet that evening, because I had already given Kenney my advice in a three-page memo. Its core was the four initiatives listed in the Alberta Agenda. I cautioned that there was a risk of going too far, too fast—further alienating Trudeau and jeopardizing Ottawa’s support for the completion of the Trans Mountain Pipeline. But I also warned that there was “a risk of not going far enough, quickly enough, and losing support to a new rump Alberta Separatist Party.” I specifically referenced a recent op-ed by none other than Danielle Smith—”How Alberta can stop acting like Canada’s doormat”¹¹—and warned: “We don’t want to start dividing conservative voters again.”

This advice appears to have caught Kenney’s attention. Only two weeks later—on November 9—Kenney announced the creation of the “Fair Deal Panel,” chaired by none other than Preston Manning. The panel’s mandate was to determine Albertans’ support for the reforms proposed in the 2001 Firewall Letter. Seven months later, in May 2020, the Fair Deal Panel released its report.¹² Its recommendations included:

• Cancelling Alberta’s contract with the RCMP and creating our own Alberta Police Force, as Ontario and Quebec already have.
• Collecting our own personal income taxes, as Quebec and now Saskatchewan already do.
• Withdrawing from the Canada Pension Plan and creating our own provincial pension plan, something Quebec has already done.

Suddenly, the Alberta Agenda was now the Government of Alberta’s agenda. But then COVID-19 hit, and all of this was put on hold. Two years later, in 2022, Kenney was pushed out as PC leader for his handling—or mishandling—of the COVID-19 lockdowns.¹³ (For the record, I think that if COVID-19 had not hit when it did, Kenney would have gone on win several more elections. He drew a very bad card, and it was a sad ending to an otherwise outstanding political career.) Ironically, the anti-Kenney revolt was led by many of the same former Reform Party/Wildrose members who had helped him win the UCP leadership in 2019. But then, this is basically what happened to me a decade earlier. It was my former leadership supporters—now Wildrosers—who took me down in 2012.

Danielle Smith and the Sovereignty Act

In a hotly contested election to choose a new leader—there were seven candidates—Danielle Smith came out of political exile to win. A central component of her campaign was her promise to enact an “Alberta Sovereignty Act” to protect Albertans from hostile federal policies. This strategy worked. And the new Smith government’s first piece of legislation, Bill 1, was the Alberta Sovereignty Act.¹⁴

While the Sovereignty Act helped Smith win the UCP leadership race, it was a potential liability in the upcoming provincial election, already scheduled for May 2023. To moderate voters—including many who had voted for the UCP in 2019—it seemed overly aggressive. Academics warned that Smith’s populist approach was “out of step with public opinion” and advised that the “next UCP government would do well to focus less on building Fair Deal firewalls around the province and more on building bridges with the rest of the country.”¹⁵ But notwithstanding sharp criticisms from the NDP and much of the media, Smith and the UCP prevailed, winning forty-nine seats, more than enough to form a new majority government.

How this will work out over the next four years remains to be seen. But the Smith majority government clearly marks a turning point in Alberta politics. For the first time, Albertans have a provincial conservative government that explicitly recognizes Alberta’s chronic vulnerability to harmful federal Liberal policies, and that embraces reforms that would better protect Albertans’ interests. The Alberta Sovereignty Act is now law, and it is already being used to challenge the federal government’s new clean energy regulations.¹⁶ Recent academic commentary has supported the Sovereignty Act and suggests that it may part of a broader “new provincial rights movement.”¹⁷ This culminates a thirty-year struggle to persuade Alberta’s provincial conservative party to support the reforms that Albertans have been voting for at the federal level.

In her election night victory speech, Smith promised to defend Albertans against harmful federal policies, and explicitly challenged the Trudeau Liberal government to back off on their pending climate change policies—policies that would clearly hurt Alberta’s oil, gas, and electricity sectors. The next day in a radio interview Smith was more explicit. Referencing Ottawa’s proposed net zero policy for provincial electricity grids and a hard new cap on oil sands emissions, Smith warned: “There’s a big fight coming up.”¹⁸

The Next Chapter

In one sense, this is history repeating itself. In the 1920s, Premier Brownlee and his UFA government had to fight with Ottawa to gain provincial control of Alberta’s natural resources.¹⁹ In the 1980s, Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed went to political war with Ottawa over Pierre Trudeau’s National Energy Program and won the addition of section 92A to the constitution—explicitly affirming exclusive provincial jurisdiction over the development of natural resources. Alberta has never won any concessions from Ottawa by asking politely. We have had to fight for them.

But in another sense, Premier Smith and her newly elected UCP majority government are unprecedented. It’s been a long march, but there is a historical line—covered with blood, sweat, and tears—from my 2006 leadership campaign to Danielle Smith’s 2023 victory. The same reforms that were on the periphery of Alberta provincial politics twenty years ago are now front and centre. And so are some of the key players.

Almost all the people in UCP’s 2023 “war room” were involved in my 2006 leadership campaign. Rob Anderson, Danielle Smith’s top advisor, was then a law student at the University of Alberta in 2006, and he organized our campus membership sales. (His father, Calgary lawyer Robert Anderson, was on my 2006 fundraising and steering committee.) Another second-generation player was Lauren Armstrong, whose father, Sam Armstrong, was my 2006 campaign director. Lauren is now with Navigator, the influential national consulting company. Rob Griffith, Matt Gelinas, Bill Bewick, and Dustin van Vugt—all key members of my 2006 campaign—were also in the UCP 2023 war room. And of course, their boss, now premier and party leader, Danielle Smith, had been one of the eighteen people at the 2003 meeting in Red Deer where I first announced my intention to run for the PC leadership when Klein resigned.

On a personal level, it has been gratifying to see that many of the reforms that I had written about and campaigned for, but did not achieve, are now being implemented. But it also reflects a qualitative change in Alberta politics: that the Western alienation / Fair Deal movement is here to stay. It now has an intellectual substance and respectability that it lacked before.

In Alberta politics, there have always been angry populist rump parties that could garner ten percent of the votes in provincial elections: the Western Canada Concept Party in 1982; the Alberta Alliance Party in 2004. But both the national and local media could and did dismiss them as single-issue wingnuts that lacked any intellectual substance. With the new United Conservative Party, this is no longer possible.

There are direct links, both in term of policies and personnel, between the UCP and the so-called “Calgary School.” (The same is true for the federal Conservative Party of Canada.) Starting in the 1990s, the “Calgary School” has been recognized nationally and even internationally as an important “influencer” in both Alberta and Canadian politics.²⁰ More recently, our voice has been strengthened by the policy scholarship of Dr. Jack Mintz. Born and raised in Edmonton, Mintz spent most of his career in Ontario, where he taught at both Queen’s University and the University of Toronto and was director of the prestigious C.D. Howe Institute in Toronto. But in 2008, he moved to Calgary to found and direct the new School of Public Policy at the University of Calgary.

In 2020, I co-edited a book with Mintz and Tom Flanagan—Moment of Truth: How to Think About Alberta’s Future²¹—which has become the handbook of the Fair Deal movement. In addition to our own chapters, Moment of Truth includes chapters written by recognized, senior scholars and leaders from across Canada. These include one of Canada’s former ambassadors to the United States and two members of the Royal Society of Canada, none of them from Alberta.²² Moment of Truth cannot be dismissed as “fringe,” and neither can the UCP. Viewed from a different perspective, the Alberta sovereignty movement now has what Quebec has had for the past forty years.²³

This type of intellectual leadership—while new to Alberta—is an important dimension of politics in all modern democracies. It is what Adam Masters and John Uhr have described as “distributed” political leadership—leadership that includes not just first ministers but also “leading voices in academic research … politically active people in civil society.”²⁴

The mainstream media found the Smith-UCP victory alarming. And they should. The Fair Deal movement is here to stay. Smith has not only the solid backing of her caucus, but also support from new allies in the rest of Canada. Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe is clearly a soulmate. His government has already enacted the Saskatchewan First Act and plans to start collecting personal income taxes. Saskatchewan acted before Alberta to protect parents’ rights,²⁵ as has New Brunswick.²⁶ The Quebec government—always a staunch defender of provincial rights—has recently supported Alberta’s constitutional challenges to both Bill C-69 and the federal carbon tax.

And then there is the man who now leads the Conservative Party of Canada and intends to replace Trudeau as Canada’s next prime minister—Pierre Poilievre. Poilievre broke with precedent and publicly endorsed Smith and the UCP prior to the May 2023 provincial election. This was not a surprise to many of us. Both Smith and Poilievre began their political careers in the heady Reform Party politics of Alberta during the 1990s. They have both been part of the Long March. They both understand that the West wants in, not out. But they also understand that we want a new deal—a fair deal—from the rest of Canada. The next chapter has begun. And it will be written by the next generation of Alberta leaders.