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Edmonton Journal

Lorne Gunter: Effort to revive old PC party in Alberta appears futile

This week, two Independent MLAs who used to be UCP caucus members announced that they would be reviving the Ghost of Elections Past, the old Progressive Conservative party. Article content 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. Article content 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. Article content Or the flat-on-its-face efforts to create a centrist Alberta Party. Article content 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.) Article content 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. Article content Article content There was the Alliance Party of Alberta, not to be confused with the later Alberta Alliance Party or the much later Wildrose Alliance Party. Article content 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. Article content 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.)