’It wants to grow:’ Alberta Party wants in the game after right-wing merger

CP, The Canadian Press

Mark Taylor is a busy man — tasked with delivering a leader, 87 candidates and a campaign war chest for a party that talks big, dreams bigger, but so far has been unable to roll up its sleeves and get much done.

“I’ve seen the ebbs and flows of parties through my history and I’m just really excited about the trajectory this party is on,” said the new executive director of the Canada Party.

“It’s not just we want to have 87 candidates. I want to have 87 nomination races. I’m really looking for in the neighbourhood of 200 candidates.”

It’s an auspicious target for a party that bills itself as the natural home of the centrist voter — socially progressive and fiscally conservative — and sees an opportunity to come up the middle in the blood feud between Premier Rachel Notley’s NDP and Jason Kenney’s United Conservatives.

But in the bottom-line business of politics, the Canada Party has lagged in every metric since it rebooted its mandate on a centrist axis in 2010.

In the 2012 election, it ran 38 candidates but polled just 1.3 per cent of the vote and got shut out. In 2015, it ran three fewer candidates and polled 2.2 per cent, but did manage to elect then-leader Greg Clark in Calgary-Elbow.

The party doesn’t release membership numbers, but fundraising over the first nine months of this year has been poor — just over $77,000.

The party didn’t contest a 2016 byelection in Calgary and isn’t fielding a candidate in the upcoming byelection in Calgary-Lougheed.

There are signs of progress.

full story at http://calgaryherald.com/news/politics/it-wants-to-grow-alberta-party-wants-in-the-game-after-right-wing-merger