The UCP Is Not A Reasonable Party

 So, Danielle Smith was booed at the UCP annual convention last night.  Why?  Because she signed a deal with Ottawa.  Nobody should be surprised by this - least of all Danielle Smith.  

I'm not going to analyze the "MOU" that was signed in this post - that's a topic for another post when I have some time to digest the implications of that deal.  This is about the UCP and the fundamental nature of the party.  

Formation of the UCP

The UCP is not a "reasonable party", and it was never intended to be. The UCP arose not from the PCs, but from most radicalized wings of the Wildrose Party - the ones who remained after the disastrous floor crossing that Smith and Prentice engineered in 2015.  That was always the foundation group.  Then Kenney spent much of 2016-17 cobbling together an "alliance" of PCs upset that they lost the 2015 election, and a collection of increasingly radicalized groups including known neo-nazi groups, separatists, and the usual assortment of religious extremist groups and so on.  

Now, while I don't count Kenney among the separatist and neo-nazi types, his own background is hardly one of moderation.  He learned to stow his worst instincts in the mill of Ottawa politics, where moderation is an absolute because you won't get very far if you piss off various major factions.  Kenney himself comes straight out of the Prairie Reform movement, and his entry into politics had a lot to do with a stint as an anti-abortion activist in a US college.  He is rumoured to be connected to the hardline Catholic group Opus Dei.  His opposition to gay marriage was vocal and persistent, even after the fight was long lost. 

Naively, Kenney believed that he could do the same thing his buddy Harper had done federally - hold them together with a combination of identity politics and an iron fist.   That fell apart when the COVID pandemic hit, and suddenly the necessities of governing required Kenney to act pragmatically, rather than ideologically.  

Instead of acting decisively on the pandemic, Kenney waffled about attempting to both assuage the fears of everyday Albertans who were looking at what was happening in China, Italy, and other countries with horror, and simultaneously trying to keep a base of party members who had swallowed the paranoid conspiracy theories around COVID.  

Make no mistake, Kenney gave oxygen to conspiracy theorists and other radicalized types by providing direct support to the "Yellow Vest Convoy" (remember that?), and then tacit (and back channel) support to the "protestors" who occupied the Coutts border crossing as part of the larger "Convoy Protest" in Ottawa.

Kenney's Downfall

What Kenney no doubt tried to frame as "pragmatic governance" didn't mollify the radicalized types in his party like David Parker, who set about engineering Kenney's ouster in late 2022, paving the way for Danielle Smith to take over with the backing of Take Back Alberta and others. 

As he was exiting his role as party leader, Kenney darkly quipped about "the lunatics are taking over".  He was correct, but in doing so was ignoring his own role in their power in the party.  Whether he admits it or not, he gave the extremists a political home, and then fed them. 

Remember his threats about "Alberta Separatism" in 2019?  2019 Jason Kenney saw these people as tools he could control and manipulate the way that Harper did.  He misunderstood the dangers that giving extremists a voice carries in politics.  Extremists - and yes, I include Manning-era Reform backers in this group - don't want to listen, and they resent any effort to reason with them.  They're convinced they know the answers already.  

Kenney the political organizer met his match in David Parker - also a political organizer.  Kenney's miscalculation cost him his opportunity to step back into Federal politics with a reputation in CPC circles as an organizer who knows what he's doing, and with "cred" having been a "successful premier".  Kenney didn't fight back publicly against Parker's paranoid conspiracy theory laden activism.  Instead he tried to play things through the back channels of the party - a party which he constructed, but also that had the very internal weaknesses that had plagued Kenney's efforts in Ottawa.  

He acquired the nickname "Bumbles" in conservative Ottawa circles for the inevitable fumbles and overplays that seemed to follow him.  That same blindness to optics, and a belief that he could lie his way out of anything, ultimately came at a very high price for Kenney as Parker organized a backroom ouster right under Kenney's nose by leveraging paranoid conspiracy theories left and right. 

Kenney's UCP was fundamentally a vehicle for Kenney to ride back into federal politics, and hopefully the Prime Minister's offices.  From that perspective, the UCP was little more than a cynical creation of a man driven not by ideology, but by power.  Kenney was an opportunist, but he was also bounded by his experiences in Ottawa.  He wasn't a good premier per se, but he wasn't the authoritarian we see in Smith.

The Rise of Smith's UCP

In the wake of Kenney's ouster at the 2022 AGM, who should emerge as a replacement for Kenney but none other than Danielle Smith.  Smith's political history is one of making a bigger mess every time she surfaces.  Her first foray into elected politics was as a Trustee for the Calgary Board of Education (CBE).  That was cut short when the province stepped in and dissolved the board because of the levels of dysfunction and conflict that Smith herself played a central role in creating. 

Smith would disappear from elected politics for a while, surviving as a columnist for the Calgary Herald - writing such illuminating works as arguing that there might actually be benefits to smoking, among other gems of wisdom.  She would return to elected politics by becoming the leader of the Wildrose Party in 2010 - only to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in the 2012 election.  This was followed by a disastrous floor crossing exercise in 2014, which torpedoed her support. 

Again, Smith left elected politics, this time becoming a lobbyist for the energy industry, and sometime talk radio host.  

I'm sure you see the pattern by now - every time Smith gets involved in elected politics, she makes decisions which are horribly detrimental to those around her.  In this respect, "Smith's UCP" really isn't her party.  It's the party of malcontents like David Parker and TBA, with Smith as the "useful idiot" figurehead.   

Smith's UCP (or perhaps more accurately TBA's UCP) is clearly authoritarian - and not in a good way.  Smith and her government are ignoring Albertan's voices and concerns, plowing ahead with an agenda which they actively avoided campaigning on during the 2023 election cycle.  

More pointedly, the government has taken the approach that their first legislative priority is based on whatever the party slid into the "party platform" during the last AGM.  This was made abundantly clear in 2024 when Smith announced a series of legislation attacking the transgender community.  That was definitely not a matter on the election agenda, and outside of the queer community, I'm pretty sure that most people were stunned by it.  

Then, let's look at their approach to "negotiating" with teachers.  Instead of negotiating, the UCP legislated them back to work (a perfectly common approach).  However, the legislation was very telling.  Instead of committing to binding arbitration, the government simply legislated a contract that had been overwhelmingly rejected twice by teachers, and then slammed the door on any kind of "labour action" by invoking the Notwithstanding Clause (S33) in The Charter of Rights and Freedoms.  

Meanwhile, they are actively tearing apart the healthcare system, without the consent of Alberta voters.  This dismantling is again, largely driven by the manufactured outrage of TBA and its leadership in the wake of the COVID pandemic.  Policy driven by anger, or other emotions, is seldom "good policy", similarly, policy which is not carefully moderated by pragmatic consideration is also going to be bad policy.  It's not new in Alberta that there has been a faction that wants to align the province with US policy on many fronts (usually with the greatest amount of cruelty possible).  

Past governments have carefully avoided following those pressures, knowing full well that such things are contrary to the broader values of Albertans.  Not the UCP.  The UCP forges ahead in the most violent way possible - taking a wrecking ball to the infrastructure of civil society, and using moral panics like their attacks on transgender people as a distraction.  

This is not a party that actually supports individual freedom, it is now a party that supports "freedom for me, not for thee" - if they don't "approve" of your particular brand of freedom (e.g. being transgender), well - expect them to legislate it away from you and then tell you that it's their right do so.  

Smith herself may or may not be an "authoritarian", or she may simply be their "useful idiot" who is willingly standing in front of the public and doing as she is told.  It doesn't really matter - either way, she has cast her lot with people who ARE authoritarians, and have decided that instead of having a discussion with Albertans, they are going to seize power and impose their will on the rest of us. 

There is no reasoning with the UCP in its current form.  The best we can hope for is that they continue to break into factions fighting over control of the party.  Hopefully those factional squabbles will eventually tear the party apart, as it should have done once the project Kenney set the party up for collapsed on itself. 

On Pride and Inclusiveness

So, according to the bright lights on the Calgary Herald's editorial board, Pride needs to become about including everyone, including those who have a track record of oppressing the LGBT community.

Harrison Fleming, Alberta co-ordinator of LGBTory, an LGBTQ conservative organization, calls organizers’ position short-sighted and characterizes their decision to deny the party’s participation as a political statement, which it is. 

“It limits the message of inclusion that we ought to be telling the next generation — all these young kids coming up right now,” says Fleming.

Let's take this to task, since the UCP (and other "big-C" conservatives) seems hell-bent on making it out that it is they who are the oppressed party here.   I find it interesting that the Herald trots out LGBTory as if this is supposed to convince us that Canada's conservative parties "really are inclusive".  Except, LGBTory has been shockingly unwilling to engage with LGBT Canadians who are skeptical of their motives - often blocking them on social media for questioning them.

Their silence on Bill C-16 was disappointing, only speaking on the matter as the bill passed to the Senate.  Strangely, they were completely silent while Conservative Senators like Don Plett, among others, spouted utter nonsense about the bill and its implications.

Presenting LGBTory (a group whose very name implicitly erases Transgender from its scope) really doesn't do a great deal to convince Canadians that conservative parties are inclusive isn't overly persuasive.  Make no mistake - I am fully aware that there are LGBT Canadians who honestly do support conservative parties.  I sincerely hope that those people are under no illusions about the degree to which those parties actually support the legitimate civil rights.

What tremendous wisdom Fleming possesses. Calgarians are stronger when we stand together. The organizers of the pride parade, while clearly well intentioned, would do well to heed his message. Let’s have fewer fences and more conversations, more embracing of hands.

Perhaps Mr. Fleming is quietly forgetting how UCP Leader Jason Kenney voted against LGBTQ rights at every turn while he was a parliamentarian.

As if that isn't enough, shortly after forming the UCP, Kenney's entire caucus voted against Bill 24, which clarified the legislation around GSAs to explicitly protect student privacy, and at their founding convention passed resolutions that were blatantly homophobic.   Kenney tried to walk it back a bit by claiming that as leader, he had final say on what the policy would be going into the next election.  On top of that, Mr. Kenney has been frustratingly unwilling to speak plainly on the subject(s) at hand - preferring to dodge with statements like "we won't legislate on divisive social issues" (which is hardly reassuring for an LGBT community that remembers all too well the decade long fight that Delwin Vriend took to the SCC, only to have an equally reluctant Klein shelve the court's ruling.

Maybe a "dyed-in-the-wool" conservative like Mr. Harrison Fleming can overlook Mr. Kenney's history, as well as the behaviour of MLAs under his direction, or the party membership's votes on matters.  Others look at this record, and wonder "in what universe could you imagine a party led by Jason Kenney being an ally of LGBT people?".

At its roots, Pride is about inclusion.  Its roots are in overturning the oppression that LGBT people lived under in both Canada and the United States through much of the 20th century and before that.  The core of it is in fact protesting oppression - oppression which still continues today, even with legal recognition of our existence. Mr. Fleming might wish to acquaint himself with the difficulties faced by Transgender Albertans who are seeking work in this province, or for that matter the very social conditions which have made GSAs desperately needed in our schools.  The struggle for inclusion is far from over, no matter what legislative changes have been made.

We should not mistake excluding a group with a suspect record from Pride with oppression itself. Organizers of Pride parades in both Calgary and Edmonton are clear about marching groups being able to show themselves as active allies of the LGBT community. A group that has so clearly not been an ally has no right to march in the parade.  It is not oppressive to be intolerant of another's intolerance.

As others have correctly pointed out, the UCP and its members are invited to attend, just not to march in the parade itself. 

On Honesty In Politics

Politicians have always played fast and loose with the idea of truth.  Facts get weighted certain ways to support a narrative, creative "spin" is applied to manipulate the public perception of events and policy announcements and so on.  I get it - everybody is trying to make their version of the story look the best.  For most of my life, that's been "fair game" politics.  Sometimes a leader (or a party) has stepped over a line briefly, but usually has stepped back after public outrage has made it very clear they were way off base.

Then we come to the last few weeks of politics in Alberta.  To put it nicely, the newly created UCP (United Conservative Party - although other less flattering expansions of the acronym are also running about) has been playing well past the "fast-and-loose with the facts" line.

First up was their little rural crime kerfuffle where they tried to play "gotcha politics" with a combination of lies and procedural gimmickry in the legislature to try and make the government look bad.  Susan On The Soapbox has an excellent detailed run-down of the ridiculous nonsense being played out there.  From my point of view, this is just one example of fact-free politics.  Yes, rural crime is an issue, but it isn't exactly spiking - the rate of rural crime has been pretty flat for years, and is only marginally higher than that seen in urban Alberta.  Given the complexities of securing vast areas of land, this should come as no surprise to anyone. The UCP stunt in the legislature was nothing more than grandstanding, and deserves even less attention except for the fact that it is based upon a lie - that rural crime is "skyrocketing" in Alberta.

Then we hit the last week of the legislative session.  The NDP tables Bill 32, which the UCP immediately starts claiming that it removes the residency requirement.  This isn't even close to reality.  To vote in Alberta, you still must be a resident of the province.  What the NDP bill does do is remove the 6 month suspension of voting rights the former PCAA put in last time the elections act was updated (sometime in the 1970s).

I suspect the rationale at the time was that you needed to live in the province for a while to understand the issues of the day, and what they mean.  In the 1970s, that idea had some merit - for the most part, provincial politics seldom made headlines outside of the province, and the odds of someone moving to Alberta from another province knowing enough about the issues to be able to cast an informed vote would be pretty slim.  But that was in the 1970s - before the 24 hour news cycle, and more importantly before the Internet made it relatively easy to access news from anywhere.  Today, that clause is an anachronism.

Further, those kind of clauses are also arguably in violation of Section 3 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (which also did not exist in the 1970s):

3. Every citizen of Canada has the right to vote in an election of members of the House of Commons or of a legislative assembly and to be qualified for membership therein.

Considering that the SCC has declared that suspending a prisoner's right to vote is unconstitutional, one can imagine that these provincial clauses (most of which likely predate the Charter, as well as the Internet) are similarly unconstitutional, should they ever be challenged.

So, what's fact-free about this?  Several things.  The residency requirement is in no way being removed.  An arguably unconstitutional clause is.  You still have to demonstrate that you actually live here on voting day.  What's the bar for proving you live here?  Provincial ID (e.g. your driver's license), or a document such as a utilities bill showing you live in the province.  The argument that this is going to enable voter fraud from other provinces is laughable.  How many people have the resources to maintain two apparent residences in different provinces?  Come to that, Saskatchewan's population is a quarter of Albertas - it would take a sizeable fraction of Saskatchewan's residents deciding to engage in this fraud in order to influence even a couple of ridings.  BC, has a much larger population, but travelling from much of BC to Alberta by car is a fairly long journey and one would have to imagine that few of BC's residents are particularly interested in engaging in fraud either.

On this file, the UCP has simply "made shit up" in an effort to stir up outrage.

The UCP's propaganda campaign on the Carbon Tax has become increasingly fact-free and outrageous as well.  Their arguments range from "it's the biggest tax increase in Alberta history" (it's not), to "they're killing people's livelihoods" (anybody else forgotten that most Alberta's electricity used to be generated from burning coal, and it's being switched to natural gas and renewables?)  Yeah - along with the rest of the world, we need to stop burning coal for a lot of good reasons.  The NDP government has also directed the funds from the Carbon Tax directly back into the Alberta economy in a variety of programs designed to enable Albertans to become more energy efficient.  This includes bridging finances to assist coal workers who will be unemployed within a decade or so.  So, are they "killing people's livelihoods"?  Yes and no.  If you work in the coal industry, chances are you need to start training for something new, but so what?  Remember when the horse and buggy went obsolete?

Lastly, we come to the dust-up between Saskatchewan and Alberta over contractor license plates.  As outgoing Premier Wall is a known ally of Jason Kenney - and has been quite public in his disdain for Rachel Notley.  I would put good money that the phone lines between the Manning Centre, Kenney and Wall have been going nonstop looking for something else to bolster Kenney as Calgary-Lougheed goes to the polls.  Again, this entire thing is manufactured.  It's about as fact-free a pack of lies as I have ever seen.

On the other side of the coin, the NDP has been attacking Jason Kenney for being "from Ontario".  Frankly, this is a silly attack.  There is a kernel of truth to it, but I think the NDP is stretching the point here.  If they want to attack Kenney on this file, they need to go after the fact he couldn't be bothered to campaign in his own riding for the last several elections.  That's a valid criticism.  The fact he was born in Ontario is irrelevant.  The fact that he maintained a residence in Ontario while an MP is also irrelevant - his absence from his riding is not.

There is an ethical issue here - not just the basics of being honest with others (as I'm sure we all learned growing up), but rather of doing one's job well.  The job of the UCP as the official opposition right now is to present Albertans with an intelligent, and useful set of alternatives to the governing party.  That means proposing meaningful amendments to bills, and articulating reasonable policy alternatives.  Not spouting whatever fictional nonsense you think your audience wants to hear.