Two national political parties in North America are choosing leaders for the next federal elections.
In Canada, the Conservatives are selecting a successor to Andrew Scheer in Toronto on June 27.
The date of the next election is uncertain because the minority Liberal government may be defeated in Parliament before the next scheduled vote on Oct. 16, 2023.
In the United States, the Democrats are holding primaries for delegates to select presidential and vice-presidential candidates at a convention in Milwaukee, Wis. on July 13-16.
The U.S. election will take place on Nov. 3 and Donald Trump will be the Republican candidate.
Why do people follow a leader in any area of public life, be it religion, culture, academe, entertainment, philanthropy or politics?
It is because we respond to the leader’s vision, clarity, empathy, responsiveness, competence and goals.
Sometimes we have an exceptional leader, and we say that politician has “royal jelly."
Mountain View and Red Deer counties has many rural bee yards on its farms so some readers are familiar with royal jelly in nature.
It is a secretion of the nurse bees’ salivary glands that is used in the nutrition of larvae and adult queens who are the members of a bee colony able to lay eggs.
When a beehive is making new queens, the workers construct special cells, and the larvae in these cells are fed with large amounts of royal jelly.
The royal jelly feeding triggers the development of the queen’s unique morphology including the ovaries.
Royal jelly makes queen bees and the queen bees perpetuate hives and colonies.
In politics, royal jelly is an exceptional mixture of core values, determination, integrity, authenticity, compelling attractiveness and the ability to inspire others.
Alberta has had two premiers who had the royal jelly.
William Aberhart was premier from 1935 to 1943. He was politically larger than the existing parties of the Depression, and the DNA of his creation, the Social Credit Party, lived on in the Reform Party, the Canadian Alliance Party and now the Conservative Party of Canada.
Peter Lougheed took over the Progressive Conservative Party of Alberta in 1966 when it was a political corpse, revived it with five years of hard work and led it into government in 1971.
The Social Credit Party and the Alberta Progressive Conservatives governed for a combined 80 years, creating and maintaining a stable political culture unique in Canada.
Aberhart trained his successor Ernest Manning in the fundamental precepts of western Canadian politics including skepticism about Confederation and hostility to Ottawa.
Lougheed harnessed and managed that skepticism and hostility but wisely never tried to exorcise it from Alberta politics.
Manning and Lougheed created the modern Alberta economy based on agriculture, oil and gas and urbanization.
Lougheed bequeathed Alberta’s unique politics with a fitting landscape called Kananaskis Country.
Alberta’s line of political royal jelly has an heiress, Rona Ambrose.
Some of us gather around the samovar in the winter afternoons of 2020, drink tea and ask whether Rona will ever get back into elective politics.
Frank Dabbs is a veteran business and political journalist and author.
