Jason Kenney likes to say he was toppled by a coup. His complaint does have a sliver of merit. After all, his leadership was brought down by 16,660 members of the United Conservative Party in May 2022 even though, just three years before, the Kenney-led UCP captured a million votes from regular citizens to form a majority government.
How was this possible? How could the leader of a majority government be brought down by so few people, especially when Kenney alleged a number of them were nothing but hateful and divisive “lunatics” who had joined the party simply to vote him out? (Of course, Kenney technically won the leadership review, but realized his position was untenable nonetheless.)
Even if a good number of UCP members were, as Kenney said, “hateful, extreme and divisive voices” out to punish him for pandemic-related mandates, Kenney was responsible for his own downfall. Not only did he pander to the “lunatics” by dragging his feet on public health mandates and initially cheering on angry trucker convoys, he issued a “grassroots guarantee” in 2017 ensuring UCP members would have the final say on, among other things, choosing and removing a leader.
Electing a leader this way wasn’t new. Ralph Klein was the first to be elected by a vote of all Progressive Conservative members in 1992. Back then, however, all members couldn’t pass judgment on a premier mid-term; that was reserved only for those at regular conventions of party delegates.
Thanks to Kenney’s promise of “grassroots” party democracy, the demise of a premier was, for the first time, left up to a one-person-one-vote system where pretty much anyone 14 years or older with $10 could join the party and vote to kick out the leader of a majority government.
Is this “democracy”?
A handful of motivated, angry people can cast out the head of a democratically elected government.
It depends on your definition of democracy. In my multiple conversations with UCP insiders and leadership campaign workers over the summer, most said the one-person-one-vote system to elect a party leader is more democratic than the old system in which a limited number of delegates chosen at the constituency level attend a convention to vote in-person for a new leader. To a new generation of operatives, the new system is better because it forces the party to look outside itself. “It puts a check and balance on the torch being passed from one group to the next,” said one long-time conservative strategist. “You have to have an ability to connect outside (the party).”
Okay, but what about the process for defeating a leader?
Very few of the Conservative operatives I spoke with, even those who aren’t fans of Kenney, viewed his demise as fair or democratic. They admitted the party needs to rethink how to deal with an unpopular premier after winning a majority government. One veteran strategist, involved with multiple campaigns over the years, said the UCP leadership review last May unfairly overruled the results of the 2019 election. His solution is simple but dramatic: “Governing parties, parties that won elections, should not have the ability to review their own leader. They won a majority government. They’ve been elected by a million people. A small minority, whether it be 16,000 or 500 delegates at a convention, should not have the authority effectively to overrule the general election.”
It’s an elegant solution—and one that would no doubt immediately be decried as “undemocratic” in an age when democracy is measured by clicks, retweets and shares.
But the one-person-one-vote system adopted by pretty much every party these days, including Alberta’s NDP, is a false democracy. I first heard that description decades ago from Ian McClelland, who entered politics as a Reform MP from Edmonton in 1993 before becoming a PC MLA in 2001. He likens the everybody-gets-a-vote system for electing and defeating a leader to the fallacy of “direct democracy,” where every citizen can vote on contentious issues in referendums.
One-person-one-vote is also vulnerable to manipulation by special-interest groups often playing to people’s ignorance or fear. “Direct democracy,” for example, gave Britain the ongoing headache that is Brexit. “Direct democracy takes the professional thought out of a contentious question and makes it one of just emotion,” McClelland told me recently. “You appeal to whatever emotional thing is going to turn (voters) on, and usually that would be something out of either the far right or the far left. Everybody else falls to the wayside.”
McClelland said his fears, at least for Conservatives, have been proven by the revolving door of Alberta premiers over the last decade.
Another danger of the one-person-one-vote structure is the prospect of unscrupulous leadership campaigns bulk-buying ballots to skew results, an issue that plagued the 2017 UCP leadership race. Just one more danger lurking in a flawed populist system where a handful of motivated, angry people can cast out the head of a democratically elected government.
Graham Thomson is a political analyst, member of the Legislature Press Gallery and former Edmonton Journal political columnist.
