In Red Deer on the final weekend in June, politically moderate refugees from the Progressive Conservative party agreed to join forces with the Alberta Party to form a "centrist" alternative to the NDP, the Wildrose or, if it comes to pass, the conjoined PC and Wildrose parties.
Outside the Main Stage room at the Black Knight Inn, the boulevards of Gaetz Avenue were still littered with tree branches downed by a vicious windstorm June 21, and elsewhere in the city power crews were finishing up the job of restoring electricity to homes.
Inside the hotel, another reconstruction was taking place using the model of the political "big tent" built half a century ago by the legendary Peter Lougheed.
Under a perfect June sky in the heat of early summer, more than 300 people from across the province accepted the Alberta Together movement's invitation to join the "kitchen-table conversation" that has been taking place about the future of Alberta politics.
The gathering of the 300 was reminiscent, to this journalist, of a weekend in May 1987 at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Vancouver when Preston Manning, Ted Byfield and other politically homeless westerners held the Western Assembly on Canada's Economic and Political Future, when 350 delegates laid the foundation for the Reform Party and ultimately the federal Conservatives.
Eighty-three per cent of the Red Deer attendees voted to pursue an Alberta Together partnership with the Alberta Party. The alternative was to create another new party.
Events at the Red Deer meeting unfolded faster than the organizing working group expected because the Alberta Liberal Party, although invited, was not present. The choice the assembly made was between two, not three, options.
Unresolved was a behind-the-scenes dilemma over continued Alberta Party leadership by Calgary Elbow MLA Greg Clark or a fresh face like former Edmonton mayor Steve Mandel.
Many Edmonton and northern Alberta delegates expect Mandel to lead the new party and are likely to ask for a leadership selection process, although the present Alberta Party executive doesn't plan one.
Is the leadership issue a deal breaker?
Clark said in his speech that he doesn't think the partnership with Alberta Together is a "takeover" by former Alberta PC members such as Mandel, a former cabinet minister in the brief Jim Prentice government and the movement's executive director Katherine O'Neill, who held the same post in the Alberta Progressive Conservative Association until Jason Kenney won that party's leadership.
"If you join the (Alberta) Party it becomes our party," Clark said.
The initial goodwill aside, the issue remains unresolved and will be an early test of the will to create a pragmatic and principled option to the ideology of the NDP and the polarization of the unite the right movement.
Alberta Together should be cautioned by the leadership issue that is fracturing the attempt to merge the Wildrose and PC parties.
Wildrose libertarian Derek Fildebrant announced United Liberty on June 23 that may be the fundraising political action group for his bid to lead the merged parties, but could morph into an extreme right-wing party should he be unsuccessful in his leadership bid.
- Frank Dabbs is a veteran political journalist, author of four books and editor of several more.
"The initial goodwill aside, the issue remains unresolved."
