‘Is it a party if no one shows up?’: Deadline passes, no leadership candidates revealed for Liberal Party of Alberta

‘You’re not raising money, you don’t have any MLAs, nobody wants to be your leader. At some point, you have to wind this up, right?

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After a tumultuous decade in which the Liberal Party of Alberta went from being the official opposition to having no seats in the Legislature, there appears to be little appetite for anyone to take on the task of leading reconstruction.

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The party is in the process of selecting a new leader, but the Friday night deadline for nominations has come and gone with no word from officials, or any potential candidates, on who could be on the ballot in September. .

As of Saturday, the party had not announced any candidates and the link to its “leadership” link had been removed from the home page of its website.

According to Mount Royal University political scientist Duane Bratt, it could be the death knell for Alberta’s oldest political party, one that formed the first four governments after the province’s creation, holding office from 1905 to 1921. .

“When do you close the party? You are not raising money, you have no MLA, no one wants to be your leader. At a certain point, you just have to wind this up, don’t you? Brat said. “Is it a party if no one shows up?”

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According to quarterly fundraising reports published by Elections Alberta, the Liberal Party’s fundraising has been miniscule this year.

During the first two quarters of the year, the Liberals raised nearly $37,000, while the UCP and NDP raised $1.4 million and 2.5 million, respectively. The Liberals’ fundraising figures are also below the amounts raised to date by other smaller parties such as the Alberta Party, which raised around $60,000, and the Alberta Pro-Life Political Association, which raised $162,000.

Liberals have come back from the brink before. After holding no seats between 1971 and 1986, and winning just four in that year’s election, former Edmonton Mayor Laurence Decore became leader in 1988, bringing the party back to life.

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Under Decore, the party’s tally doubled to eight in the 1989 election, then quadrupled in the 1993 election, its best electoral result since forming its final government in 1917, winning 32 seats and wresting the title of official opposition from the NDP.

Bratt said he doesn’t see a similar resurgence on the cards, especially without a permanent leader.

“They’ve never been in such bad shape,” he said. “They were unable to field candidates on all trips in the last election; they are, I think, barely on the radar for fundraising. It’s not just about seats. It’s a whole series of things. Yeah, they’ve been back before, but I don’t know where they go from here.”

The party’s popularity has trended downward since Decore’s departure in 1994, clinging to small official opposition caucuses through the 2000s before falling to third-party status after winning just five seats in the election. 2012 under leader Raj Sherman, who tried unsuccessfully to add his name to the UCP leadership ticket this year. The slide continued as the party won a single seat in 2015 under caretaker leader David Swann, the last Alberta Liberal to hold a seat in the Legislature.

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david khan he was the last permanent leader of the party. Elected as leader in 2017, he lost the Calgary-Mountain View race in the 2019 election, which saw the Liberals completely shut out of the Legislature, and resigned as leader in 2020. John Roggeveen took the reins as interim leader in March. . 2021.

“It used to be that the Provincial Liberals were stronger than the Federal Liberals. That’s not the case now,” Bratt said. “I think what’s happened is that all the Liberals (in Alberta) have gone to the NDP.”

The entry fee for the Liberal leadership nomination was $6,000, a low barrier to entry compared to that of the UCP contest. Entry cost $175,000, and was open to any party member in good standing. While it’s seemingly an easy step in the door to a high-profile position in provincial politics, Bratt said any potential candidate would have to be in it for the long haul and put in many hours to revive the party.

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“Six grand is not a lot of money, but it would be a lot of work,” he said. “You would have to be really committed to go ahead and basically rebuild the whole match from the bottom up.”

Neither Alberta Liberal officials nor Roggeveen responded to Postmedia requests for comment on Saturday, nor did the party issue a public statement since the nomination deadline on Friday.

In June, the party said that September 12 was the deadline for membership to be eligible to vote and that an online vote would take place between September 19 and 24, with the results announced on September 25.

Meanwhile, the campaign for the leadership of the UCP continues with seven candidates in the running to become the next prime minister of the province and lead the party to elections next spring. The deadline to purchase memberships to vote in the leadership contest closed on Friday.

[email protected]

Twitter: @miguelrdrguez

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