Alberta Conservative and Wildrose vote on merger proposal

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Long-time Wildrose member Dan Davy says he will vote "yes" this weekend on the question of whether Alberta's two right-of-centre parties should merge. Yet he has struggled with the decision.

"I know the way we have to vote – for logic, and for reason. But I do have trouble with all those PCers that we left for a reason," said the 70-year-old farmer, taking a break from haying in Torrington, Alta.

This weekend is a crucial one for Alberta small-c conservatives, as well as the political history of the province. On Saturday evening, the Alberta Progressive Conservative and Wildrose parties will announce whether their respective members have voted in favour of the two political forces combining into one United Conservative Party. The results will set a new course for Alberta politics – and will shape the two-year lead-up to the 2019 provincial election.

For the governing NDP, unity on the right heightens the political risks. But unity proponents have fretted about the possibility that many devoted Wildrose members such as Mr. Davy will mark a "no" on the ballot question and kill the measure. Mr. Davy personally relinquished his Progressive Conservative membership about a decade ago, and he still harbours concerns about the party's $680,000 debt, and what he calls the PC culture of "entitlement."

However, his reservations about joining with the PCs are outweighed by his exasperation with Alberta's NDP government for "spending money like a drunken sailor" and introducing farm-worker safety laws he believes are unnecessarily heavy-handed.

"I'll hold my nose and I'll vote for unity," Mr. Davy said. "Personally, I think it will pass. And it will probably be over 90 per cent."

Most expect the unity question will easily pass amongst Progressive Conservatives, a party where some members still have reservations about joining with the Wildrose, but where party rules only require a simple majority of members vote in favour of the measure. However, the Wildrose constitution requires that more than 75 per cent of its voters say yes – a threshold that has been an unwavering source of dread amongst unity supporters.

If the measure is successful, the new party will require the writing of policy and an interim board, along with the selection of a caretaker leader who is not interested in the final prize. The debts of the legacy parties will have to be paid off. And the minute the unity question passes, the implicit political jockeying between Harper-government cabinet minister Jason Kenney and Wildrose Leader Brian Jean in recent weeks (many view Mr. Jean's remarks against a "hard-right" government as a slight against Mr. Kenney) will turn into an all-out campaign toward the Oct. 28 leadership vote.

However, if the unity measure fails, it will be the beginning of a mad scramble to roll out a Plan B, one that could include how the two parties might still work together through some kind of electoral co-operation. Mr. Kenney – the Progressive Conservative party leader – and Mr. Jean will continue to be political competitors.

"A lot of us are chewing nails over it," said Thompson MacDonald, a long-time political operator in conservative circles who was a confidant of former premier Ralph Klein. Mr. MacDonald is part of a group of backroom organizers and former cabinet ministers that have been campaigning for unity since last year. He says getting 60 per cent of people to agree to something is an uphill climb. "Everyone knows 75 per cent is a big challenge."

For unity boosters such as Mr. MacDonald, the end goal of defeating Alberta Premier Rachel Notley's NDP in the next election justifies political compromise. They blame Ms. Notley's two-year-old government for racking up a massive provincial debt and driving foreign energy investors from the province. While Alberta's economic tailspin of the past two-and-a-half years is clearly correlated with the oil-price drop that began in 2014, unity supporters believe policies such as a carbon tax, the costly phase-out of coal-fired power generation and the refusal to make significant cuts to public sector spending have made the situation far worse.

"Whether or not we have we have a united party will determine, I think, the outcome of the next election," Mr. Kenney said in an interview this week. "If a merger is vetoed, we could very well end up with a vote-split and re-elect an NDP government."

Alberta's oil-focused economy was pinched as the New Democrats took power, and the governing party has continued to spend on new programs and maintain public-sector jobs even as the provincial economy and energy royalties have shrunk – leading to deficits of more than $10 billion a year. The NDP has also pushed hard to green Alberta's image and enact tougher environmental rules, and has raised of ire of rural voters by including farm workers under in the province's Workers Compensation Board system.

Calgary and communities outside the province's two largest cities, where there has been the loudest opposition to NDP policies and where economies have been especially hammered by the downturn, are fertile grounds for a United Conservative Party.

But a unified right movement faces political challenges. Ms. Notley has characterized the new party taking shape as "extreme," and raised the spectre of massive public spending cuts, tax breaks for the wealthy and an unwelcoming environment for LGBTQ communities. The political scene also has a new player: Alberta Together, a group created by self-described centrists – many of them PC members unhappy with the potential of a harder right bent of the unified party. Increasingly, it appears that Alberta Together members will direct their political goodwill towards Greg Clark's Alberta Party.

And some of the biggest issues might be within the new party: The battles between the right-of-centre factions still loom large and the leader of the new party will have to be a unifying force.

The different camps were held together by the charismatic personality of Ralph Klein – who revived a moribund PC dynasty in 1992 and then led the party and the province until 2006. But his final years in office saw a weakening of the ties between the progressive and more conservative wings of the party. The past decade has seen a succession of PC party premiers – Ed Stelmach, Alison Redford and even former federal cabinet minister Jim Prentice weren't able to shake the perception that they had let provincial spending spiral out of control, and that they were arrogantly clinging to power and its perks.

Strong suspicion about the PCs still lingers in the "no" camp on the Wildrose side. Edmonton lawyer Marilyn Burns says the "elitist unity agreement" ignores the party base. If the vote is yes, she will start talking about creating a new party with uncompromised Wildrose principles at a meeting on July 29.

But it's unclear how much support the naysayers have. Unity boosters point to a jump in membership sales – to bring membership in the PC party to more than 50,000 and Wildrose membership to about 40,000 – as a sign that people are joining to vote "yes."

How many of those members actually turn out to vote will be key. Wildrose MLA Derek Fildebrandt said this week that he's feeling more optimistic than before about the measure's chances of passing. Mr. Fildebrandt, who is considering entering the leadership race himself should the vote pass, has worked to portray himself as the protector of true-conservative values even as he campaigns for unification.

"Some skeptics will vote against it, where some might sit on the sidelines," Mr. Fildebrandt said. "But I think we can get our 75 per cent among our traditional Wildrose members. And the flood of new members who have come in, I believe, will overwhelmingly be supportive of unification."