These are desperate times for the Alberta Liberals.

Party membership currently sits around 3,000, as the Liberals have been losing support to the nascent Alberta Party (which in one year gathered about 2,200 members). Many Liberal constituency associations are treading water as they lose valuable staff and resources.

In some rural ridings, Liberal members can be counted on one hand — with digits to spare. Veteran Liberal MLAs Harry Chase and Kevin Taft are set to retire before the next provincial election. Its leadership race, set to wrap up September 10, has so far barely registered with voters outside the Liberal tent.

With those harsh realities in mind, party brass, MLAs and supporters passed several “drastic” resolutions aimed at broadening their support during a two-day conference in Calgary May 28 and 29, which included a poorly attended leadership forum on the Saturday.

About 100 Liberals attending a Sunday morning meeting overwhelmingly approved six new party bylaws, which go into effect June 1, eliminating a $5-membership requirement to vote in the party leadership and constituency races, as well as adopting a weighted one-person, one-vote system for leadership races.

Corey Hogan, the party’s young executive director who crafted most of the resolutions, says shedding the membership requirement (voters must still fill out an online contact information form) may ease voters’ discomfort, particularly the younger set, in pledging allegiance to a political party without first kicking the tires.

“The fact is most people find political parties a little creepy around my age,” says 28-year-old Hogan. “There’s something a little cultish about them.”

The new leadership voting system states that for each riding there is a maximum of 500 votes; votes exceeding that number then kick into a point-based ratio systems. For example, if a riding collects 1,000 votes, the number of votes each candidate receives is divided in half. This system should, in theory, encourage leadership candidates to campaign outside of their ridings, especially in theLiberal-friendly “ghettos” in urban centres, such as Calgary and Edmonton.

“We have a choice to either embrace change to grab the bull by the horns and move boldly,” Liberal member John Santos told the forum, “or we can cower, retreat back into the Liberal ghettos which we have allowed ourselves to be restricted in and be some small marginal party.”

Liberal Leader Dr. David Swann, who announced in February he was stepping down after two years at the helm, praised his colleagues and party staff for taking the governing Tory government to task on several issues, particularly health care.

Swann also revealed the party, suffocating under a $650,000 debt when he won the leadership in late 2008, had whittled down its financial hole to $70,000. “That albatross is virtually gone,” Swann told the crowd.

Nonetheless, Swann was blunt in his assessment of the party’s future. “We must pull together as if our very survival hangs on it, I believe it does,” he said. “We cannot expect the same efforts, the same approach to generate a different result.”

Liberal leadership candidate Dr. Raj Sherman, who was punted from the Conservative caucus last year after publicly criticizing the Tory’s handling of the health care system, says the Liberal party desperately needs to branch outside of its comfort zone.

“If the Liberals are going to succeed we must crack the foundation of the Tories, which is in rural Alberta and in Calgary,” says Sherman. “For the Libs to become a relevant provincial party you have to run to represent everybody.”