Tomb

The Alberta Alliance Party and the Wildrose Party, two right-of-centre political parties, announced late last month that they plan on merging to form the Wildrose Alliance Party — a move that could benefit Kevin Taft’s Alberta Liberals in the next election, says a Calgary political scientist.
“If this party gains any kind of momentum, then it means that those votes will be taken away from the Tories,” says the University of Calgary’s David Taras. “If there are a lot of close races… then that five or six per cent [taken by the Wildrose Alliance] becomes decisive in perhaps defeating a Tory candidate and allowing the Liberals to push through in some places.”
Kieran Leblanc, the Liberals’ executive director and provincial campaign manager, agrees her party would benefit from the merger. “The Conservatives are the ones who would be concerned, I would think, about the merger of these two parties, because it would take votes away from them,” she says. “It wouldn’t take votes away from us.”
Alberta Alliance leader Paul Hinman says the new party would be “a true conservative alternative that’s putting Alberta first.” “We already have a tough battle ahead of us, and to be divided doesn’t give us any strength,” he says of the upcoming election, which is expected to happen this spring. “Divided we’ll fail. That’s the bottom line…. I think it’ll make a huge difference to see a united front.”
On December 30, the Alliance and Wildrose parties sent letters to their members alerting them to a meeting on January 19 in Calgary. At the meeting, members will vote on whether or not the parties will merge. Hinman, the Alberta Alliance’s sole MLA, says he expects his membership to vote in favour. “We’re basically going ahead like it is approved,” says Hinman, who represents the southern Alberta riding of Cardston-Taber-Warner. “And I guess we’ll cross that bridge if it doesn’t work. But [of] everybody I’ve talked to, 90 per cent are optimistic and excited about it.” (Fast Forward tried to contact Wildrose president Rob James, but couldn’t speak with him by press time.)
Project Alberta, a small-c conservative Internet message board, hummed with approval in the days following the announcement. One writer praised the possible end of a “useless duplication.” The Wildrose Party, which was founded last June, has very similar policies to the Alberta Alliance, which has been around since 2002. Both parties want to see more private health care, and both want lower taxes. The parties also vocally opposed hikes to the province’s oil and gas royalty rates.
Since the Wildrose Party’s birth in June, Hinman has expressed frustration that the party didn’t just join with his. “It doesn’t make sense to me,” he told Fast Forward in early November. “They want notoriety. They want to be famous — being the ones who did it. [That’s] what I read between the lines.” Hinman also went on the offensive, calling the Wildrose Party’s signature drive “deceptive” in the same interview. (The Wildrose Party needed to collect more than 6,000 signatures to register as an official party with Elections Alberta — a feat the party accomplished last month.) A video on the Wildrose website encouraged volunteers to avoid talking about what the party stands for while collecting signatures.
James also had harsh words for the Alliance when Fast Forward spoke to him in early November, saying the party wasn’t “resonating with Albertans in any way, shape or form.” However, Hinman is optimistic that the parties will be able to put aside their differences and work together. “We’ve got to think about Alberta, not about our political parties,” he says. “The big picture is about Alberta, and needing to protect our prosperity and our opportunity here in the province.” He sees the new party collecting more seats in the legislature in the next election. “The Liberals have been there,” he says. “The New Democrats have been there. And they don’t have the answers that Albertans are looking for. So it won’t be either one of those two. That means it’s got to be a new party.”
Taras says that even though the Liberals could benefit from the merger, it likely won’t make any serious changes to Alberta’s political landscape. “At this point [the merger] doesn’t add up to very much,” says Taras. “These are parties at the edges. I mean, this is the margins of the margins…. The history is that these parties don’t go very far.”
In the 2004 election, the Alberta Alliance took 8.7 per cent of the popular vote — just 1.5 per cent less than the NDP, which elected four MLAs. The Alliance was founded in 2002 as a “credible conservative alternative to Ralph Klein’s Tories,” according to the party’s website. The Wildrose Party, which has former Alberta Report publisher and senator-in-waiting Link Byfield on its executive, was also formed as an alternative to the ruling Conservatives.