Tye Carson

U.S. grassroots organizer Jeff Blodgett speaks highly of the Alberta Party’s efforts to build a new political party.

Jeff Blodgett knows a thing or two about grassroots community and political organizing.

He helped organize American farmers during that country’s farming crisis in the 1980s, worked as a senior aide to the late U.S. senator Paul Wellstone, served as Minnesota state director for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential run, and now runs the successful leadership training centre Wellstone Action.

But even this high priest of progressive politics has a few lessons to learn about community organizing. And, oddly enough, he’s learning it from this province’s newest player on the political scene: the Alberta Party.

“I’m really interested in what the people organizing the Alberta Party are doing,” says Blodgett.

Alberta Party organizers flew Blodgett in to have him share his knowledge and experiences in organizing effective grassroots political movements and conduct an intensive training session for 80 of its party members.

The Friday evening before the training session, Blodgett stood inside Calgary’s Knox United Church, Alberta Party banners looming in the background, delivering a grassroots sermon and dissecting Obama’s 2008 campaign to more than 100 party supporters who listened intently while sitting in painfully uncomfortable pews.

Yet, Blodgett seems equally enthralled with the Alberta Party’s efforts to develop a community-based party using community-organizing principles. “That’s just a very different idea than what we see in the U.S.,” he told Fast Forward Weekly before his Friday evening speech.

“There’s very little opportunity for an alternative party to create itself in the U.S.,” he says. “Since the possibility exists up here, I’m interested in seeing the Alberta Party in action and sharing my experience in the U.S. and people can draw the lessons from it.”

It’s a strong endorsement for a party that emerged from the political wilderness just over a year ago. In early 2010, the Alberta Party and Renew Alberta united under the Alberta Party banner.

With about 50 volunteers, the reinvented party began organizing hundreds of kitchen-table style meetings — coined the Big Listen — across the province. These informal meetings and a steady stream of promotion on social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook have raised the party’s profile significantly over the past 12 months.

The party’s membership has grown more than tenfold to 1,200 (most of whom joined after the party’s November 2010 policy convention, says acting leader Sue Huff).

In the past year, party organizers have established more than 40 constituency associations across the province and raised a modest $91,000 — a drop in the bucket compared to the millions the Conservatives and Wildrose Alliance have at their disposal.

It’s also managed to attracted people from across Alberta’s political spectrum. Former Alberta Green Party members are at the core of the party. Liberal turncoat MLA Dave Taylor, who sat as an independent after leaving that party, joined the Alberta Party in January. Ron Wood, a former Tory supporter and former press secretary to Preston Manning, writes on his blog that he now supports the Alberta Party, in part because the provincial Tories have a “talent pool so shallow you wouldn’t get your socks wet if you waded in it,” and the Wildrose are just “siphoning” out of that shallow pool.

Several players from Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi’s campaign team are intimately involved with the Alberta Party, as is his chief-of-staff Chima Nkemdirim, who has been a driving force in the party since its reinvention last year.

“Most of the people who were involved in Nenshi’s campaign are either board members or hyper-engaged volunteers with us now,” says Huff. “It’s great to have that experience because they’ve done it.”

While much ink has been spilled on Nenshi’s use of social media during his mayoral campaign election, there was much more to his campaign’s success than simply tweeting 140 characters at a time — namely winning over the politically hyper-engaged and influential community members, and watching the “wave of interest” infect the typically politically apathetic.

That’s exactly what the Alberta Party is setting out to do: targeting the huge number of voters who didn’t cast a ballot in the last provincial election.

“I don’t know what other parties are doing in terms of engaging that 60 per cent of Albertans who didn’t vote in the last election,” Huff says. “But we are actively targeting them and seeking those people who have been either turned off or tuned out from politics.”

Yet there’s more to just winning over these “passionate participants” than sending out tweets, says Blodgett. The key is to keep them intimately involved with the inner machinations of the party, give them active roles and the proper supports to fulfil those responsibilities. “Don’t mistake the online component for real life engagement,” he says.

The Alberta Party has an opportunity to be “first and foremost a community organization and then a political party that puts forward candidates and tries to win its share of power,” says Blodgett. “If it does its work right then people are first committed to the values, idea and the practise of this new approach. If you do that first and build those relationships deep and broad then you can withstand the ups and downs of the political process. That’s what’s very different from what’s here in terms of the existing parties.”

It’s also very different than the codified two-party political system in the U.S. where the Democrats and Republicans have “clustered around… the safe political middle,” he says. “There are not a lot of choices, so people get pretty cynical about politics in the U.S.,” he says.

Meanwhile, other provincial political parties, observers and pundits have derided the Alberta Party’s supposed inclusive and non-partisan ethos touted, and tweeted, by its members.

However, Huff says people are “really tired of negative politics” and looking for a political alternative that seeks solutions. “We work very hard to identify the problems, of course, but then always move to solutions rather than getting stuck in this complaining victim mode, which doesn’t help anyone,” she says.

It’s that mindset that is attracting people like 32-year-old Matt Youens, who drove eight hours from Fort McMurray to attend Blodgett’s training session.

“I’ve always been engaged passively, but it wasn’t until the Alberta Party came along that it pushed me from being a political prisoner to a participant,” he says. “I’m here to learn what has worked in starting a community-based political organization,” he adds.

Glenn Taylor, the mayor of Hinton and Alberta Party leadership hopeful, joined the party after attending a Reboot Alberta conference in November 2009. “In this province it seems to be about power brokering and influence,” says Taylor. “It needs to be more about the citizens.”

MLAs have for far too long acted as little more than obedient couriers sent out to deliver the government’s message. “We need MLAs to be the citizens’ voice to government, not government’s voice to us,” he says.

Email: thowell@ffwd.greatwest.ca