A crowd: They have wine and balloons, and they’re all dressed in white. Does this make them progressives? Have they been crowdsourced? Alberta Diary is not certain and you shouldn’t be either. Below: Calgary pollster Brian Singh, Calgary Centre Conservative candidate Joan Crockatt.
“Crowdsourcing our confidence” will get a progressive candidate elected in Calgary Centre? Just asking…
A few days ago a website appeared called 1CalgaryCentre.ca that asks voters in the central Calgary federal riding where there will soon be a by-election to take part in an “innovative and evolutionary approach to democracy.”
The by-election, whenever Prime Minister Stephen Harper gets around to calling it, is widely expected to be a coronation of Conservative nominee Joan Crockatt, the former journalist and right-wing commentator who is anything but progressive. Ms. Crockatt beat five other candidates on Aug. 24 for the federal Conservative nomination to replace department MP Lee Richardson, who quit in May to become Alberta Premier Alison Redford’s principal secretary.
The goal of 1CalgaryCentre.ca, according to the man behind the website, is to select and then elect a progressive Member of Parliament for the riding, thereby changing the face of Calgary.
Well, so far, so good, but progressive voters – and especially those progressive voters who support the New Democratic Party – have good reasons to be suspicious of this effort, which is almost certain to end up with the endorsement of a non-New Democrat candidate as the “progressive choice” for Calgary Centre.
1CalgaryCentre.ca is saturated with the vague, feel-good rhetoric of several recent political efforts of varying success associated with the mooshy middle of Alberta politics – Re-Boot Alberta, the failed Alberta Party that grew out of the Re-Boot and Renew Alberta conferences, and Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi’s successful 2010 campaign.
From this it would be reasonable to assume the same group of people involved in all those efforts may have something to do with this one. However, that’s quite hard to say for sure after talking with Brian Singh, the Calgary pollster whose company Zinc Research was associated with the Nenshi campaign and whose name is one of only two that actually appears on the website. (The other name belongs to the guy who developed the website, which makes sense because the site is pretty good.)
For his part, Mr. Singh isn’t saying who, other than himself, is involved in 1CalgaryCentre, other than to promise that, eventually, more will be revealed. (If you think this sounds a lot like the pre-election Alberta Party policy dance of the thousand veils, you’d be right.)
Mr. Singh sees himself, I have been told, as something of a political provocateur and social media guru, so it’s possible he’s doing this to be provocative and generate some media coverage.
“I know it sounds cryptic,” he told me, somewhat apologetically, “but as they come forward we’ll be putting them up on the website.” Whoever they are, he added, there are is core of about eight people currently involved in this effort at this point, but there has been input from many more, including supporters of all political parties.
Other than that, though, we are on our own for the time being – although there is plenty of speculation about who these people may be among the politically obsessed.
It’s safe to state categorically, for starters, that this effort has nothing to do with the Democratic Renewal Project, Athabasca University history professor Alvin Finkel’s longstanding campaign to get progressive Albertans to vote strategically against this province’s conservative juggernaut.
And it’s also reasonably safe to conclude that not much will come from it, since, Mr. Singh’s wide circle of friends notwithstanding, no one in any of the major political parties likely to run a candidate seems very interested in 1CalgaryCentre.ca.
From the New Democrat and Green perspectives in particular, I think it’s safe to conclude that whomever those parties nominate, their candidates will not be the choice of the participants in the 1CalgaryCentre process, whatever it may be and whoever they may be.
It is predicted here that 1CalgaryCentre will ultimately endorse someone with ties to Alberta Party/federal Liberal/Nenshi campaign circles – say, Calgary lawyer Chima Nkemdirim, Mayor Nenshi’s chief of staff and still a potential Liberal contender despite his best efforts to avoid that fate, or former Alberta Liberal/Independent/Alberta Party MLA Dave Taylor.
Beyond that, at least as things appear from here, it seems quite unlikely 1CalgaryCentre will have much impact at all on the outcome of the Calgary Centre by-election.
This post also appears on Rabble.ca.
So if you call it the “failed Alberta Party” because we only got 17,100 more votes than last election, can’t we also call it the failed Liberal Party… because they’ve failed to get back into power after 90 years… or the failed ND Party because it has never elected more than 16 MLAs (and not for a long time, either)?
I think it’s amazing how quickly the Alberta Party has been written off by people who don’t like the idea we might not be so easy to deter. One election loss doesn’t a failure make. Anyway, there is nothing wrong with losing if the lessons learned are acted upon.
I think what needs to be said here is that the most dogmatic and ideological political concerns may be nervous non-dogmatic progressives really might get together, form some form of accommodation between parties and then they’d have to choose… what was pragmatic and good for Alberta and a viable electoral threat to the Tories and WRP… or continue with ideological stands that will never achieve electoral success.
I agree that 1CalgaryCentre isn’t much, yet… but if that idea ever becomes a common one, the most dogmatic party followers are the ones who will be dead in Alberta’s political waters.
Don’t count your dead parrots until they’re actually dead, David.
Mr. Munsey makes an interesting point about political expectations. It was said here that the Alberta Party needed to elect at least one MLA to survive as a political party. I still believe that is true, but I have to admit as Mr. Munsey points out that neither the Alberta Liberals nor the NDP turned in particularly stellar performances. Indeed, in the case of the PCs and the Liberals, a significant decline in performance became a “victory” when both did better than expected. As for the Alberta Party, as a new phenomenon, it is said here it was (and is) considerably more fragile than either the Liberals or the NDP. That said, I will concede his point that I was premature in declaring it a failure. I will predict, however, that despite the best intentions of its supporters, the Alberta Party will not survive the next election cycle or perhaps even its next annual general meeting. I would be delighted to be proved wrong about this, however.
Kiefer Sutherland would be a good NDP candidate for Calgary Centre.
PC Party Candidate in Calgary Centre
For Immediate Release August 27, 2012
Newmarket, Ont. – The Honourable Sinclair Stevens, Leader of the Progressive Canadian Party, is pleased to announce that the PC Party will be running local businessman Ben Christensen as the first True Tory candidate in Calgary Centre since former prime minister Joe Clark was the riding’s Progressive Conservative MP.
The Progressive Canadian Party was registered in early 2004 by Progressive Conservatives as the continuation of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada. It provides Canadians with a genuine Tory alternative to the provincialism, continentalism, and neoconservatism of the party led by Stephen Harper. With “PC Party” on the ballot, it continues to offer policy directions consistent with those of progressive-conservative prime ministers from Sir John A Macdonald onward.
The Calgary Centre by-election is expected this fall following the resignation of CPC MP Lee Richardson on 31 May. Richardson left the Harper caucus to become principal secretary to Alberta’s Progressive Conservative Premier Alison Redford
Mr. Christensen, a local Calgary businessman and recently in the news as the litigation advisor to the Occupy Calgary protesters, was quick to note the continuing ideological divisions between former Progressive Conservatives and the Reform Party turned Canadian Alliance turned CPC and has been somewhat amused by attempts to dismiss the divisions between old Reformers and PCs as mythology.
“Stephen Harper is described as a libertarian not a conservative by commentators like CTV’s Craig Oliver, certainly not as a progressive-conservative, and Harper’s firewall federalism, which he terms “classical federalism”, is actually American, the opposite of the Tory vision of a united Canada.
“The newly nominated Harper candidate in Calgary Centre is identified with the Wild Rose Alliance, and that’s not Progressive Conservative – nor the choice of Calgarians or Albertans,” Christensen concluded.
PC Party Leader Stevens continued, “Ben will, over the next several weeks and into the election, be seeking opportunities to meet with his fellow Calgarians to discuss several issues of both local and national interest. Watch for him!”
- 30-
For more information on the issues raised above:
The Hon. Sinclair Stevens,
PC Party Leader,
1-888-666-3821
smstevens@epla.net