Two weeks ahead of the historic assembly of the membership to affirm its policies, the United Conservative Party’s vision is coming into focus.
Across the province, member working groups have crafted hundreds of pages of grassroots thinking about issues of the day for the inaugural UCP general meeting in Red Deer May 4-6.
Welding conservative political energy into a juggernaut that can win the general election in 2019 is the biggest challenge yet for party leader Jason Kenney since he came back to Alberta in 2016 to unite the Conservative and Wildrose parties into a single body capable of defeating the NDP after just one term in government.
Three issues dominate Alberta’s political arena in the epic showdown between Kenney and Premier Rachel Notley.
They are the provincial debt and deficit, federal-provincial relations and abortion rights.
The first two issues, public finance and dealing with Ottawa, are of Kenney’s choosing.
Abortion rights has emerged because of pressure on Kenney from UCP members in the Wilberforce Project and wants a platform and candidates who won’t be bashful to take this thorny mess on.
The UCP wants to go to the electorate with a values-based vision for the future of Alberta.
However, politics being politics, the remedies they offer have their own pitfalls.
Notley has earned the nickname “Madame Deficit."
Ironically, the last woman to hold this title was Queen Marie Antoinette. She and her husband Louis the XVI almost bankrupted France with their lavish spending, promoting the French Revolution.
Kenney and the UCP know that Alberta can’t afford to keep outspending revenues.
But the battle to end the deficit and pay the accumulated debt will require controversial cuts that will prompt fierce reaction.
In the aftermath of the Trans Mountain Pipeline fiasco, the UCP wants to handle Ottawa differently than the NDP has, tougher and focused on the federal power under Section 92(10) of the Constitution to declare intra-provincial transportation systems in the national interest.
The federal government could use the declaratory power of 92(10) to quash B.C.’s impediments to the Trans Mountain project.
Meanwhile, Wilberforce Project members who have joined the UCP want the party to be openly pro-life.
The Project takes its name from the British Christian anti-slavery politician William Wilberforce, who has become an icon for Christians on the faith-political interface in Canada.
On April 10, the NDP government tried to trap the UPC caucus with Bill C9, which will legislate a 50-metre setback for protesters at abortion clinics and make videoing or taping-recording abortion patients entering the clinics illegal.
The “bubble” protecting the patients has been decreed by the courts, but the NDP’s political tacticians wanted to draw the UCP into a fracas over this volatile social issue.
But the UPC and its leader have been around the block once or twice.
The UPC caucus didn’t show up in the legislature for the debate.
So far, Kenney is committed to not have an abortion debate in the legislature.
This may set him at odds with a powerful wing in his new party.
– Frank Dabbs is a veteran political and business journalist and author.
