In spite of the cheerleading from the anti-NDP crowd, Jason Kenney and Brian Jean did not unite the right when they merged the Wildrose and Progressive Conservative parties.
They just split the PC party down the middle, leaving the moderates without a political home. The Kenney-Jean merger also split the Wildrose party, hiving off the true believers in grassroots democracy and the party's hard right wing.
How these two factions reorganize for the next election is being decided now in living room meetings and on social media.
The PC outliers were fragmented until Nov. 18 when the Alberta Party attracted an overflow crowd of 400 to Red Deer for its annual general meeting.
The new backbone of the Alberta Party is made up of former Progressive Conservatives, and the new leader, to be elected Feb. 7 may come from PC ranks.
At the AGM, the headliners attending were former PC cabinet ministers, MLAs and high profile organizers.
Greg Clark, the leader of the party in the 2015 election, acted wisely - if painfully - in stepping aside from the leadership to allow the moderate conservatives the opportunity to elect a stronger leader from, presumably, their own ranks.
Kenney's momentary pre-eminence on the provincial political scene has cost three political careers - Brian Jean, Greg Clark and Dave Rodney, the MLA for Calgary-Lougheed, who stepped aside (or was pushed) to let Kenney run in the safest conservative seat in Alberta.
In their four decades in government, the Progressive Conservatives monopolized Alberta's political talent and political money.
Monopolized is too mild a word. The PCs sucked up the vast majority of political resources: well paid operatives, armies of volunteers, organizational ability from constituencies to the premier's office, candidates, funds - if they needed it, they had it.
Surpluses for conservatives weren't in the budget, they were in the inventory of political resources.
Everyone wanted to be with the winner, especially if they or their company or their clients had a stake in the government's policy decisions.
Every PC premier won at least one election with a minority of the popular vote. None of them ever lost a night's sleep worrying about access to political money or talent.
From his election as premier in 1971, Peter Lougheed wouldn't name a person to cabinet unless he or she had a large constituency bank account and membership role. That decision created a Progressive Conservative political culture in which power flowed to the well-organized and the well-financed.
As Kenney will learn over this winter, his most effective opposition will come from Progressive Conservatives who he no longer leads.
They have gone elsewhere and that means, in increasing numbers, to the Alberta Party.
The talent and the money that the United Conservative Party will face come from the same political school and the same financial pool shared by Kenny's inner circle.
Unless the moderates hold their noses and support Kenney in the 2019 election, the vote split between the Wildrose and the Progressive Conservatives that helped elect the NDP in 2015 will be repeated as a split between the UCP and the Alberta Party.
- Frank Dabbs is a veteran political and business journalist, author and editor of several books and is working this autumn on the history of Trimac Transportation and the McCaig family of Calgary.
