(January, 2016)
When the Wildrose Alliance was created its constitution and founders made it socially libertarian and fiscally conservative, but the people who gained control after Danielle Smith's election as leader remade it in their own image: fiscally naive, socially luddite, and absolutely convinced that the rightness of their beliefs will, once they achieve personal power, magically transmute Alberta society into something they imagine existed in the 1950s.
Something similar happened to the Lougheed conservatives, albeit over a much longer term: they too started as fiscally conservative and socially libertarian, but became both fiscally and socially liberal (fascist, not libertarian) as the founders retired and the careerists came in - a process that was briefly reversed during the early Klein years, but signaled its own apotheosis when the very conservative budget announced by Prentice turned out to be a very liberal action plan written by and for the bureaucracy.
Today both the Wildrose Alliance and the Progressive Conservative party are led by stubborn and opinionated people who would rather see the Alberta advantage destroyed by the NDP than accept the simple reality that the majority of their memberships want what both parties originally promised: honest, socially libertarian and fiscally conservative, government.
Ideally the parties would merge under new leadership and quietly rebrand itself to embrace the original purposes of both - but the personalities involved make a merger followed by more of the same, and therefore, another NDP victory in 2020, seem more likely.
The right answer may be to form a new party taking members from both and thereby first force them to merge with each other, then force them into a genuinely grass roots driven leadership contest, and finally merge the new party with the survivor. For that third party to gain momentum fast enough to do this it would need to fully embrace the kind of policies people want and find a way to get a majority of Albertans to pay attention long enough for them to understand what the party offers.
Trump's immigration stance in the United States suggests one way of doing this: adopt some position which, however politically repugnant, resonates with the people so that the more the NDP and their media colleagues attack it, the more people learn about the party's underlying views and policies.
To see how this might work think about the impact it would have on both the PC and Wildrose parties if someone were to organize enough people to take over the Alberta Party and transform it into the socially libertarian but fiscally conservative entity Albertans want to support - but also commits that party to holding an Alberta referendum on opting out of the federal equalization program.
Some BackgroundMany people believe that the provinces have a general "opt-out" right with respect to federal programs and legislation. This belief is not supported in either past practice or legislation, but its prevalence can be coupled to the Quebec separtist concept of the people's sovereign right to self determination to turn that belief into fact.
The principle behind the opt-out idea is that taxpayers should not pay the federal government for programs funded and delivered by their provincial governments. Thus Quebec, which seems never to have met a federal program it did not want to run, has commonly chosen to self-administer federal programs and taken off-setting grants or tax room (reductions in federal taxation which the province can then choose to match by increasing its provincial taxation) in exchange for doing so.
The principle behind the equalization program is that the provinces should provide roughly comparable services to their citizens, that taxpayers should share this burden regardless of their province of residence, and therefore that people in richer provinces should pay more per person than people in poorer provinces. In practice equalization has been a federally administered program in which, for example, taxes sourced in Alberta during fiscal 2010/11 came to roughly $14,000 per person and the federal government transfered about half of this to the governments of Quebec, PEI, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia.
The equalization idea started in the 1920s but became critical to Quebec, and the liberals, only after the first Trudeau enshrined it in the 1982 Constitution Act. Since then Alberta has contributed over $120 billion [2012 dollars; number unverified] to equalization but never received any significant benefit. This would not be an issue for most Albertans if it resulted, like decades of insurance payments made without ever filing a claim, from Alberta's good luck or good management; but it does not: the disparity is purely political in origin with the Liberals and NDP leveraging population and riding disparities between the west and the rest of Canada to retain federal power in large part by giving Quebec, PEI, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia the right to administer social programs paid for by the west.
Between vote splitting with the NDP and disparities in riding populations, liberal candidates running in Quebec and the contiguous maritimes only needed about 15,000 votes to win in 2015 - about half what it took for Kent Hehr to win a tight race in Calgary Centre. On average across the provinces the bottom line is clear: in terms of its impact on power in Ottawa a western vote is worth less than half an eastern vote, with the greatest disparities between Alberta (117,000 people per riding, 30,000+ to win) and PEI (36,500 per riding, 11,000+ votes to win).
Thus the long term liberal strategy of trading off western votes for eastern through equalization (in 2015 Alberta paid about $7,000 per person into the plan, PEI received about $2,700 per person) makes electoral sense and explains how the current Trudeau could win a slightly smaller share of the national vote than Harper earned in 2011 (39.47% vs. 39.92%) but gain a larger (15 vs. 11) majority in the house.
The optout idea would be politically incorrect but easy to argue, popular with the people, and almost impossible to defeat because:
More importantly, the NDP would be forced to tell the council of deputies to give up on implementing a sales tax in Alberta. The idea, for example, that the federal government could bypass the Alberta Taxpayer Protection Act by extending the harmonized tax idea to implement an equalized tax across all provinces, would immediately become untenable because any move in that direction virtually guarantees passage of the opt out referendum.
More importantly, the liberals would have to postpone action on national carbon taxes because these so obviously target the west.
The natural reaction of the PC and Wildrose parties facing a takeover of the Alberta Party by people committed to combining fiscal conservatism with a libertarian view of human rights and freedoms would be to claim that they already support those positions - but the referendum forces a "Trump moment" they can't duck because political correctness requires them to oppose it, the political opportunity lies in jumping on board, neither can move without the other, and the image of Trudeau and Notley sharing a political grenade with the pin removed would have both sides salivating. Their best response, therefore, will be to publically denigrate the idea while working to get a three way merger done before the recreated Alberta Party can gain significant traction.