Alberta's two conservative parties are divided internally about a merger but under pressure from some of their members to unite against the NDP government.
“A merger of the Wildrose and the Progressive Conservative party must be driven by the members. It must come from the grassroots,” said Wildrose MLA Nathan Cooper in an interview.
“It cannot be manufactured by political elites,” warned the Olds-Didsbury-Three Hills member of the legislature. “Not in an ivory tower, not in a backroom.”
Wildrose leader Brian Jean said in a Calgary fundraising speech Dec. 9 that uniting the right is “far more complicated” to do than to say.
He distributed a questionnaire at that event that asked, among other things, whether or not the Wildrose and PCs should create a new party made up of members of both parties.
It also asked whether or not Wildrose should change its name to “rebrand” itself or whether the two parties should merge.
There is one group of elites in both parties that is pro-merger, made up of candidates defeated in the May 5 election when the NDP won the majority of seats and formed government.
At a post-election meeting of the former Progressive Conservative caucus in Red Deer, Gordon Dirks, the defeated education minister, was the most prominent advocate of a merger, according to three MLAs and former MLAs who were at the meeting.
Several of the nine Wildrose MLAs who crossed the floor to the PC government side before the election have backed a merger, but none of the nine survived the election and are now all out of active politics.
One obstacle to a merger is the $1.5 million debt that the PCs have in the wake of the election. Wildrose members would be reluctant to pay Conservative expenses for the 2015 election, Wildrose party officials said.
Under new a new law that forbids union and corporate political donations, the PCs fell to fourth place in fundraising during the third quarter of 2015, said an Elections Alberta report.
Wildrose raised $263,675 from July 1 to Sept. 30 this year, the NDP raised $82,745, the Liberals received $29,285, the Conservatives $15,575 and the Alberta Party $4,130.
Another obstacle is that Wildrose is much more conservative in its policies than the progressive wing of the PC party. Some Conservative MLAs would not participate in the merger and might even propose a Liberal merger, PC insiders speculated.
“I think the Conservatives have not yet suffered enough to be eager to merge,” said a former PC cabinet minister who asked not to be named.
