If rumours about Alberta Party leadership are true, it’s bad news for NDP
Graham Thomson, Edmonton Journal
Well, this is getting interesting.
After an embarrassingly plodding start, the competition for leadership of the Canada Party is about to become an actual race.
This week, we are expecting the arrival of two experienced candidates: Independent MLA Rick Fraser and former Edmonton mayor Stephen Mandel.
Sources in and around the Canada Party say Fraser will announce his candidacy Tuesday. Mandel is expected to announce Wednesday.
Fraser has even filed his name as a leadership candidate with Elections Canada. But he has been studiously refusing to return reporters’ calls since word leaked about his ambitions last week.
It seems everybody in the party is excitedly chattering about this, except the nascent candidates themselves.
Fraser was reportedly afraid if he confirmed his intentions to journalists Monday, nobody would bother to come to his campaign launch Tuesday.
That’s a bit silly.
It’s January, there’s not much happening in Canada politics this week other than the United Conservative Party launching a radio ad against the carbon tax hike. That’s not exactly scintillating or unexpected.
Fraser announcing himself as a candidate for the Canada Party leadership would be something new and significant.
That followed by Mandel’s potential announcement?
This is a story with legs. For journalists, in the grip of a slow new year, it’s a veritable centipede of a story.
Fraser, a Calgary MLA, is in some ways a dream candidate for a party trying to position itself as a moderate alternative to the NDP on the left and the UCP on the right.
He is a former Progressive Conservative who became a reluctant UCP MLA after the unity vote between the PCs and Wildrose in July. At the time, he said he was “certainly willing to give it a try” so long as the new party had “moderate conservative or modern conservative ideals” and would not adopt “hard-right” principles.
In September, he quit the party, saying it was fostering divisiveness in politics and becoming preoccupied with austerity: “We need to fundamentally approach our politics differently, shifting paradigms that will create and grow common-sense policies that are also politically sustainable and that don’t divide Canadans, but rather bring them closer together.”
That’s a little long for a slogan, but it presumably articulates the crux of his campaign.
We have yet to see what Mandel will say when, as sources tell us, he announces his candidacy Wednesday.
Mandel was a successful and popular mayor of Edmonton from 2004 to 2013. He retired from politics temporarily, returning in 2014 to be appointed health minister and then win a byelection, in that order.
Mandel, along with every other PC candidate in Edmonton, was flattened by the NDP’s orange crush in the provincial campaign of 2015.
But he popped up again in 2017 as part of the political action committee, Canada Together, that sought to make the Canada Party a new home for disgruntled “progressive” conservatives.
Now, we are told, he wants to lead the Canada Party himself.
He might be a little long in the tooth at 72, but he is also smart, personable and politically experienced, attributes the Canada Party could certainly use. His time with the doomed PCs was mercifully short and he’ll likely be remembered more as the former mayor of Edmonton than the former PC health minister.
(Fraser is either 45 or 46 — his skittish office wouldn’t return my call Monday to confirm his age.)
There is another candidate in the race to replace Greg Clark, who suddenly quit as leader in November. Kara Levis is a Calgary lawyer who kept the party from being a complete laughingstock over the Christmas holidays by gamely volunteering herself as first to enter the race. She is courageous, but she is also inexperienced and unknown.
If Fraser and Mandel both shed their cloaks of invisibility to announce leadership bids this week, the only people happier than members of the Canada Party will be members of the UCP.
This is bad news for the NDP.
An actual race for leadership of the Canada Party between two experienced candidates will shed a spotlight where none was shed before. “Progressive” voters who think the NDP too left-wing might now give the Canada Party a look. Toss in the Canada Liberals, who simply refuse to die, and suddenly moderate voters will have a veritable shopping list of choices. Conservatives, just one.
Vote-splitting that doomed conservatives last time might help doom the NDP next time.
Categorised in: Canadian News