We are at the beginning of a new year, 2019.
Does it have a different ring to it than 2018? I think not.
From a political point of view it will be a very interesting year for us in Alberta.
If the current rules are followed there will be two elections for us to participate in.
There will be a provincial election by May of this year and a federal election in October.
For us that are real conservatives, 2018 has been somewhat of a disappointment.
The year started out with a new United Conservative Party with Jason Kenney as the leader.
It looked like a new day for Alberta politics.
He was talking about a party that was being driven by grassroots supporters rather than the top-down politics of the old PC Party.
Well, surprise-surprise!
It didn’t take long for the word ‘grassroots’ to be removed from their website.
Somehow the party establishment is being controlled by remnants of the old PC Party.
We don’t know if this is happening by direction from Mr. Kenney or if he has just gone along with the old PC Party hacks.
There appears to be a deliberate move to purge the Wildrose out of the united party.
In constituency after constituency all over the province the preferred candidate has been young people that were associated with the old PC Party.
I asked a person who is connected to the current political establishment, why they would put so much concentration on young people instead of having some candidates with experience.
The answer that I was given is that ‘if and when elected, the objective is to RULE not just govern’. In other words strict top-down control.
It seems these people have not learned why the Wildrose Party was formed in the first place.
If, in fact, this does occur by the time of the next election, there will be another grassroots conservative party in place.
The candidate in the Drumheller-Stettler Constituency, in the opinion of many, was not elected in a fair contest.
That campaign brought in over 300 people to a founding meeting, many by bus to vote for a predetermined slate of directors so as to have a controlled CA board that would favour their candidate.
The process was illegitimate but very successful for them.
The Local Constituency Nominating Committee (LCNC) that is appointed by the board is supposed to be neutral.
The chairman was a director of another political party during the nomination, a clear conflict of interest.
They tried to get away with one or two voting polls in the second largest geographic constituency in the province.
They were told they had to have six but they refused to advertise the times and location of the polls ahead of time.
In my opinion, this was to discourage members from voting for the other candidate.
Nate Horner personally told me at the founding meeting on May 17 that he was going to run a clean campaign when, in my opinion, he had already compromised his campaign.
If the way this campaign was conducted is a clean campaign, I’d hate to think what a dirty campaign would look like.
The Horner campaign thought all they had to do to be assured of a seat in the legislature was get the nomination by any means.
Not so fast. There may be consequences.
Many people in this constituency are upset with the way the nomination process was conducted and say they will not vote for Horner.
by Herman Schwenk
