The Saga is Ongoing

The PC Party held a Leadership Debate in Edmonton on Sunday where Richard Starke, Jason Kenney, Stephen Khan and Byron Nelson squared off.  Kenney remains the only candidate who is campaigning for the party's destruction through a merger with the Wildrose (possibly into a completely new party).  The other three are campaigning on party renewal.

Kenney's grand idea likely stems from his own experience with a merge at the federal level. In 2003 the membership of the federal Progressive Conservative Party voted to merge with the Canadian Alliance Party and become the Conservative Party of Canada. The Liberals won in 2003 but the united conservatives won a minority government in 2006 with a Liberal Opposition.  Two years later, they formed a slightly larger, but still minority, government also with a Liberal Opposition.  In 2011 they finally won a majority government and the NDP became the Official Opposition.  Just one election later, in 2015, the Liberals won a majority with the Conservatives taking over as Official Opposition.

Alberta, however, has not seen this sort of back and forth.  In 1935 the Social Credit Party won its first majority government and stayed in power until 1971.  Social Credit was beaten by the Progressive Conservatives who ruled Alberta until 2015.  This strange history of not changing out governments could be why Kenney felt he had to leave federal politics and save us.  He's here to stop a non-conservative government from potentially governing the most conservative province in Canada for 30 or so years.

To achieve this feat, Kenney is counting on the tabulation of votes for PC and Wildrose in the 2015 election.  The logic is that Wildrose and PC votes added together beat the NDP in many cases and therefore a united party could beat the NDP in 2019.  That's it. If Albertans only have a choice between Conservative or not conservative, he and his backers believe that Albertans will vote conservative (which is how Alberta voted federally).

The flaws in this logic are many and varied but here's a sampler:

1.  More people voted against PC, and against Wildrose, than for either of them individually.  That is not necessarily the case with NDP (in one riding, the NDP clobbered the opposition by 6-8000 votes where the combined opposition vote was less than 3000 and this was not an isolated case).  Those results were non-existent for ANY other party in the 2015 provincial election.
2. People vote for different things at different levels of government. 
3. In this case, 1 + 1 does not actually equal 2.  Wildrose has a bad reputation for being anti-LGBTQ+, socially repressive, climate change denying, fact-resistant whiners.  The PC Party (from which many of the "more" conservative voters defected to Wildrose) was the "big tent party".  They were a coalition of progressives and conservatives and governed accordingly; socially progressive while still appeasing fiscal conservatives.  Kenney is not progressive (he is most accurately described as a Wildrose supporter).  He wants to "unite the right"wing voters and expel the progressives.  Those voters will not follow either Kenney or Wildrose.
4. There's no guarantee the Wildrose is going to merge with the PC Party.  Brian Jean, leader of the Wildrose, said he was opposed to a merger of the PC's and his party (though it's debatable how much his opinion matters as he is definitely standing out as not-so-Wildrose) while the number two has publicly backed it.
5. There is another fiscally conservative and socially progressive party in Alberta; the Alberta Party.  Folding the PC Party could do more for the Alberta Party than for the Conservative conglomerate (if people figure out who the Alberta Party is).
6. A united right party could push moderate small-c conservatives and social progressives straight to the NDP in fear of a hard-right conservative government (the most likely outcome in my opinion).

A sampler... each deserving of, and will likely receive, a more detailed post in the future.

D.