Lorne Gunter: Effort to revive old PC party in Alberta appears futile
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Peter Guthrie of Airdrie-Cochrane and Scott Sinclair of Lesser Slave Lake, both of whom were separately expelled from the UCP caucus earlier this year for dissing the government in public, believe there is a demand for a centrist party that is committed to keeping Alberta in Confederation.
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Could Guthrie and Sinclair have hit on a winning idea? I suppose it's possible. But it's much more likely their efforts to bring back the once-might Tories will be as unsuccessful as the umpteen bids since the 1980s to resurrect the also once-mighty Social Credit party.
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Or the flat-on-its-face efforts to create a centrist Alberta Party.
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Or attempts to keep the Alberta Liberal Party alive. (Psst. It's not working. In the 2023 provincial election, the Liberals managed to field just 13 candidates and finished eighth overall with a total of only 4,259 votes provincewide.)
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One of my assignments as a novice journalist during the 1993 provincial election (the Miracle on the Prairies election won by Ralph Klein) was to follow all the also-ran parties on the right.
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There was the Alliance Party of Alberta, not to be confused with the later Alberta Alliance Party or the much later Wildrose Alliance Party.
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In '93, there was also the Confederation of Regions and perhaps the most robust effort to revive the Socreds led by Red Deer businessman Randy Thorsteinson which, despite a lot of sound and fury, nominated just 39 candidates (out of 83 constituencies) and garnered only 2.4 per cent of the total vote.
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The most successful attempt to mould a centrist alternative was likely former Edmonton mayor Stephen Mandel's Alberta Party campaign in 2019. That's the year the UCP replaced the NDP as government. The we're-above-partisan-politics Alberta Party earned nine per cent of the vote, but Mandel failed to win his own bid for a seat and his party lost all three legislature seats it held at dissolution. (In 2023, the Alberta Party's vote was well under one per cent.)
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