The Social Conservatives’ UCP Takeover Is Complete

It was finally starting to sink in with Alberta commentariat yesterday in the aftermath of the United Conservative Party’s annual general meeting that the lunatics really are running the asylum, to borrow a colourful metaphor from former premier and UCP founder Jason Kenney.

“It’s true that many moderate conservatives voted UCP in May,” wrote the Calgary Herald’s Don Braid Sunday. “But they don’t run this party anymore.”

Braid, at 81 the dean of establishment punditry in Alberta, may be a little late coming to this conclusion, but it suggests his faculties of observation remain sharp. Other mainstream pundits should now feel safe saying out loud what hitherto has been heard mostly from a few bloggers and podcasters.

Braid’s column quotes Cynthia Moore, the former party president who threw up her hands and didn’t seek re-election in the face of vicious attacks by the Take Back Alberta cadres who now own the party. “The people at this convention are not at all representative of the party’s wider base,” she said politely.

Braid also quoted an unidentified old-timey Conservative activist, who bitterly observed “this isn’t a party crowd at all. I doubt if a fraction of them give a penny to their riding associations. It’s a single-issue group.”

For evidence, consider the policy resolutions (officially, “policy proposals”) the more than 3,700 paid-up AGM delegates voted for, among them: enshrining the right to bear arms; opposing federal net-zero policies; defunding university diversity, equity and inclusion offices; banning “15-minute cities” (how one might do this remains a mystery); banning solar farms; defunding supervised consumption sites; letting parents censor school libraries; allowing professionals to break ethics rules when they’re not on the clock; not allowing trans women to serve their sentences in women’s jails; and making sure children can’t chose their own pronouns or names without telling their parents. There were also at least three intended to undermine public health measures and permit medical quackery.

If this isn’t evidence of a pervasive QAnon-adjacent MAGA mentality, what is?

In fairness, the resolution authors were not bereft of good ideas. The Conservative grassroots understand as well as the rest of us that their party has let gouging by insurance and electricity companies run wild, and something needs to be done. But will the caucus go along with that? That remains to be seen.

Surprisingly, party members voted down a resolution calling for school vouchers that was intended to undermine public education. The vote was close.

But all in all, as one wit observed on social media, the United Conservative Party’s Calgary AGM was more of a convoy reunion than an annual business meeting.

What’s changed as of this weekend is that TBA and other like-minded groups in the UCP are no longer just a powerful faction of the party, they are the whole damn thing.

Unsurprisingly, the traditional Conservative talent pool — the deep bench that kept the Progressive Conservatives in power for nearly half a century — realized what was going on well before media cottoned on.

“We’re told that many of the ‘old’ organizers from the PCs and early days of the UCP simply didn’t attend the AGM and have largely abandoned the party,” tweeted the Breakdown. “TBA was largely unopposed. We’re told not even anti-TBA UCP stalwart Chad Hallman was seen all weekend.”

In contrast to the Take Back Alberta crowd, observed University of Calgary political scientist Lisa Young in an excellent Substack published Sunday, Premier Danielle Smith is starting to look like “a voice of reason, a moderating force relative to her party.” This observation would be hilarious if it weren’t true.

Braid noted that this UCP-TBA fusion puts the party at risk: “The members are fierce in their beliefs and expect the premier to bring their resolutions into law. Smith can’t possibly do this without abandoning all hope of expanding the party base and winning another election, after almost losing the last one.”

“You just keep marching along believing that,” responds TBA founder and chief executive David Parker to such suggestions. Maybe he was channelling Pierre Trudeau’s just-watch-me moment in his remark.

Smith is left with the difficult task of balancing the demands of her party base and keeping her job — just like Kenney tried and failed to do before TBA and its fellow travellers sent him packing.

Young concluded that Smith’s references to Alberta’s potential for population growth in both the government’s throne speech last week and her AGM remarks were intended as a shot across TBA’s bow.

It raises an extremely interesting question: How is Take Back Alberta — which as the resolution suggests wants to take back Alberta from anything that smacks of diversity, equity and inclusion — going to react to a policy of encouraging Alberta’s population to double in a decade when they realize that many, perhaps most, of those new immigrants are going to come from places where most people “do not share the UCP members’ pasty complexions”?

New citizens, in other words, who aren’t likely to vote for the UCP or anything like it if it advocates what Young calls “a heaping side dish of racism and discrimination.”

It seems likely UCP members and their TBA leaders would react by turning on Smith, just as they turned on Kenney.