Kenney resigned May 18 after receiving 51.4 percent support from UCP members in a leadership review, saying it wasn’t a strong enough mandate despite being higher than the constitutional threshold of a majority. He will remain party leader until a replacement is chosen in the sequel to his tumultuous era.
Marco Navarro-Genie, president of the Calgary-based Haultain Research Institute, says Kenney entered the premiership with an enthusiasm unmatched since that received by Progressive Conservative Peter Lougheed in 1971. Then “so many things went wrong.”
“There was an enormous enthusiasm in the movement because here is a guy of principle, a guy who is intellectually capable, who is a good manager of things. He had all the pieces to conclude that this was going to make a fantastic premier, and all that stock got blown to bits,” Navarro-Genie said in an interview.
Among the challenges, he says, were the significant debt Kenney’s UCP inherited from the outgoing NDP government, the continuous fight with the federal government, which is “trying to choke the energy industry of this country,” and being forced to spend more because of the pandemic.
Still, Navarro-Genie says Kenney showed remarkable success in implementing his policy agenda despite the pandemic. However, he believes his handling of COVID-19 was his biggest failure in policy and politics.
“Who came up with the COVID policies? He’s the chief policy-maker of the province. He can pass the buck that the medical establishment and the medical bureaucracy imposed certain things in front of him and restricted his choices. Yeah, maybe, but ultimately it was his call,” he said.
He adds that whoever replaces Kenney as the UCP leader will be faced with the same issue when it comes to bureaucracy.
Trusting the Process
Kenney’s leadership review was mired in controversy before its results were announced. The vote was originally to be held in person in Red Deer, but was then changed to a mail-in process. Later, evidence emerged that many memberships were purchased on a small number of credit cards.University of Calgary political science professor Melanee Thomas says the party has no room for shenanigans in the upcoming UCP leadership race.
“The process needs to be one where it is airtight and locked, and not subject to potential manipulation. So that means, frankly, no one should be able to bulk buy memberships,” Thomas said in an interview.
“Plus [you need] really strict rules about membership with respect to voting.”
Political science professor Geoffrey Hale at the University of Lethbridge says the party has multiple aspects to consider.
“I think they will want to let the contest run over the summer to give them the opportunity for some degree of party renewal. You don’t want too long of a sign-up period, but you want enough of a sign-up period so that you find out who actually wants to be a part of the party,” Hale said in an interview.
“Will it be an in-person vote or a mail vote? If it’s a mail vote is it one ballot or two? The logistics are very different. You can run a tighter race if it is an in-person vote. In a mail vote, you end up having to use single transferrable vote or ranked voting, which is a lot more opaque.”
Alberta’s fixed election date in late May 2023 means a long process is an unaffordable luxury, Navarro-Genie notes.
“It needs to be expedient, which will favour the most recognizable names. It will favour Brian Jean and it will favour Danielle Smith. Drew Barnes is known, but not as well-known.”
Barnes, an MLA in southeastern Alberta, finished second to Jean for the Wildrose leadership before the merger with the Progressive Conservatives. Barnes endorsed the merger proposal and Kenney as leader, but was kicked out of caucus last May for criticizing the government’s COVID response and now sits as an independent.
Smith is a former leader of the Wildrose Party who crossed the floor to join the Progressive Conservatives (PC) in 2014 in a bid to unite the conservative parties. She subsequently lost her bid for the PC nomination ahead of the next election in 2015.
Both Smith and Jean have declared their candidacy in the leadership race, but Thomas says she expects “to not see much new from either of them.”
“Frankly, what I’m going to be watching most with most interest is to see who’s coming in from the outside,” she said.
Hale says Kenney’s “combative style ... made him a lightning rod for a broad cross-section of public opinion,” and it will be hard for any leader to make a United Conservative Party live up to its name and win the next election.
Voters’ loyalties, he notes, are “highly fluid.”
“Conservatives are not going to carry Edmonton in the next election—that is pretty well a given. The question is, can they find somebody who can compete effectively in Calgary and maintain the support of their small urban and rural constituencies so that they don’t bleed support to Wildrose? That is the needle they have to thread,” he said.
“Can it be done? Yes. Is the next election Rachel Notley’s to lose at the moment? Yes, but she should not be complacent.”
