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Alberta Politics

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i'm not so sure about that...

if you're going to be a kamikaze spoiler like that, you need to be seen to be credible and likeable to the side that you're trying to defeat by getting them to vote for you.

in terms of danielle's popularity within the ucp party's two factions, it's arguable as to which one dislikes her the most after her multi-member floor-crossing fiasco from leader of the wild-rose party to a back-bencher in prentice's pc party, a move that turned out to be a political death knell for both of them.
 
ChazYEG said:
I find it hard to believe Jason Kenney.
Click to expand...

He's actually kept many of his promises from the election. But that's beside the point.

Kenney is not going to run if there is a UCP leadership race in 2022.
 
TAS said:
He's actually kept many of his promises from the election. But that's beside the point.

Kenney is not going to run if there is a UCP leadership race in 2022.
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We shall see. I'll cross-reference your certainty with some people, but I don't quite believe it.
Nothing personal, but he is not exactly the kind of politician I would trust to stay out of it...
 
TAS said:
He's actually kept many of his promises from the election. But that's beside the point.
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Also, this is one of the many reasons I don't like his premiership... I wish he'd fulfilled less of his promises and actually did a good job :)
 
TAS said:
Absolutely not. If Kenney loses the leadership review he is not going to rerun to be leader of the party that just rejected him.

And he has said it himself.

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I highly doubt that.

There are plenty of times in which leadership reviews go against the leader and the leader runs in the subsequent contest. Joe Clark got beat up pretty badly in a leadership review in 1983 and still ran in the subsequent contest (although he did lose to Brian Mulroney).

I can envision a scenario in which Kenney loses, yet jumps back into the race for the leadership based on "countless pleas from party members and ordinary Albertans."

We often see this in certain regimes around the world, in which a leader "modestly" declines to run again, only to be "unable to ignore the many citizens imploring him to heed the call to public service."
 
TravellingChris said:
I highly doubt that.

There are plenty of times in which leadership reviews go against the leader and the leader runs in the subsequent contest. Joe Clark got beat up pretty badly in a leadership review in 1983 and still ran in the subsequent contest (although he did lose to Brian Mulroney).

I can envision a scenario in which Kenney loses, yet jumps back into the race for the leadership based on "countless pleas from party members and ordinary Albertans."

We often see this in certain regimes around the world, in which a leader "modestly" declines to run again, only to be "unable to ignore the many citizens imploring him to heed the call to public service."
Click to expand...

Plenty of times? Can you name plenty?

One notable difference in this review is that Kenney has drawn a pretty specific line in the sand (basically as low as you can go) in that it's 50% + 1. Usually there is not even a specific number that is stated that will trigger a new leadership campaign although historically, at least with Redford and Stelmach - even getting 77% support in a review was considered a failure.

In 2006, Ralph Klein was ejected from office after only receiving 55 per cent support. Ed Stelmach and Alison Redford went on to both earn 77 per cent of the vote only to later resign. None of them as we know went on to run again and in fact all of them left politics for good... so far.

With Kenney setting the bar so low, even if he gets 60%, which is terrible by most standards, he can spin it saying 'look at me, I got way more than 50%', haha
 
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TAS said:
Plenty of times? Can you name plenty?

One notable difference in this review is that Kenney has drawn a pretty specific line in the sand (basically as low as you can go) in that it's 50% + 1. Usually there is not even a specific number that is stated that will trigger a new leadership campaign although historically, at least with Redford and Stelmach - even getting 77% support in a review was considered a failure.

In 2006, Ralph Klein was ejected from office after only receiving 55 per cent support. Ed Stelmach and Alison Redford went on to both earn 77 per cent of the vote only to later resign. None of them as we know went on to run again and in fact all of them left politics for good... so far.

With Kenney setting the bar so low, even if he gets 60%, which is terrible by most standards, he can spin it saying 'look at me, I got way more than 50%', haha
Click to expand...
Klein was shown the door because the lacked the ability to find it himself. Even immensely popular and successful politicians (which he was) eventually wear out their welcome. We saw this with Angela Merkel in Germany--she had a very successful early tenure and was viewed as a respected elder states(wo)man in Europe. But she hung on one term too long and ended up badly weakened in the end. She couldn't even get her successor elected and her party suffered an embarrassing defeat.

Klein served 14 years. Kenney is closing in on a mere three. The factors that helped push Klein out aren't present here.

(I would also note that Klein and Merkel each ran their final term on fumes. Both were hanging around only because they wanted to equal the tenure in office of a previous party stalwart: Lougheed's 14 years in Alberta and Helmut Kohl's 16 years in Germany. The resulting lack of vision and quality policymaking was absent in both cases.)

Redford was forced out by her own colleagues because the consensus was that she was dragging them down. They feared she was going to lose them the next election, so they turfed her. Defenestrations by caucus don't happen as often here as in Australia, but they do take place--ask Stockwell Day or Patrick Brown. The key difference is that PC MLAs feared that they might lose the next election to the Wildrose Party, which was a rival but nevertheless on the right end of the political spectrum. Kenney by contrast is able to point to a far more fearsome bogeyman: Rachel Notley's NDP. He has an argument that Redford did not: force me out and the resulting infighting will elect something worse, far worse (from a Conservative perspective at least). That's a factor in Kenney's favour that Redford lacked.
 
^

no longer true… the old pc party could point at the ndp as the bogeyman and the province has no experience to the contrary. notley’s ndp in hindsight - and in comparison to the comedy show that replaced them - actually have this province 4 years of pretty good governance as well as good government. even for those with as conservative fiscal bent, they are no longer a bogeyman and campaigning against them based on that instead of an actual platform will not fare well.
 
i don’t think at 51.4% he really had any choice - despite his recent comments about 50% plus one being all that was needed - as i don’t think the party left it up to him or could leave it up to him.

interestingly enough, the only provincial premier in Alberta to serve a full term in the 16 years since klein retired in 2006 is rachel notley!
 
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