Why UCP activists 'hold the pen' on so many of Danielle Smith's government policies

It's an uphill battle to make the province reverse its ban on vote-counting machines in local elections, the mayor of St. Albert knows only too well.

Even if mayors and councils Alberta-wide reason that adopting manual hand counting will prolong the process and consume vast amounts of municipal resources, two factors stand in the way of Mayor Cathy Heron's push.

One: the UCP government already passed legislation this spring to prohibit the tabulators.

The "Two" that bolsters One: UCP members demanded they do so at last year's convention.

Heron would prefer that the voices of elected local representatives from the cities, towns and villages of Alberta matter more than those of a few thousand attendees of a partisan gathering.

"The government has to remember they don't just represent the UCP people at the convention — they represent all of Alberta," Heron told CBC Radio's Calgary Eyeopener this week. 

The Edmonton-area mayor and other Albertans may not love it, but Premier Danielle Smith appears set to pay disproportionate attention to UCP convention-goers until at least Nov. 2.

Her dual jobs as premier and UCP leader depend on their goodwill toward her, and their vote on that day's leadership review.

Base boost

Notably, she's spent many of her evenings over the last two months in UCP members-only town halls scattered across the province, to field questions from her party's grassroots. 

It also may explain a chunk of the Smith government's agenda this fall.

Scan the party resolutions her members passed at least year's convention and you'll find the seeds of her promised Bill of Rights upgrades and its enhanced protections for the vaccine-averse, looming reforms for transgender health and pronoun usage in schools, limits on overdose prevention sites, and the prohibition on machine vote-counting (which Smith has told UCP crowds she'll bring to provincial elections next spring).

Speaking to a UCP crowd in Red Deer last month, Smith took pains to explain why it's taken a year for party policy resolutions to become legislation, after wending their way through the law-making processes of the cabinet and government. "I know that it can feel like it takes a long time, but when you pass policy in November, the earliest we can act on it and bring it into the legislature is the following November," she said.

"And we're going to do that." 

She then enumerated many of the above-mentioned policies that began as UCP policy views, to applause from the members-only audience.

Smith is likely hoping that those intentions are in the minds and hearts of around 3,000 to 5,000 Albertans who will attend the UCP convention to render a verdict on Smith's leadership.

That is a sliver — 0.1 per cent — of the province's population. It's also a fractional subset of the United Conservative membership, and judging by the attendance at past gatherings the attendees generally represent a more activist base within the party.

Some of the UCP-friendly reforms Smith is enacting already align with her own previously stated convictions, including defences for the unvaccinated and strengthening property rights — although before party voices rose up on transgender issues, she had leaned away from the actions that she now pledges.

Any leader of an Alberta conservative party would understand the importance of not disillusioning their party base, after the Tories pushed out former premier Ralph Klein in 2006 and made successors Ed Stelmach and Alison Redford sweat, and after what the UCP did to its first leader.

Jason Kenney, when wooing UCP leadership votes, signed a "grassroots guarantee" to respect the policy wishes of United Conservatives when seeking the leadership in 2017. But he added a key loophole: that party ideas would have to be balanced against the Kenney team's assessment of what the rest of Alberta would support.

UCPers voted at their first convention to require parental notification when a student joins a gay-straight alliance. Their leader said there was no way that would become party policy.

"I will take the resolutions adopted today as important input, but I hold the pen on the platform," Kenney told reporters shortly after his base expressed its wishes.

Albertans know how the UCP's relationship with Jason Kenney wound up, and Smith has appeared keenly aware, too. He called insurgent party members the "lunatics" that were "trying to take over the asylum" — and they punished him in a leadership review.

Every political party has some sort of dialogue with the ideals of its base, the beliefs of the broader public and the realities of governing

Federal Liberal members voted at a 2012 convention to legalize marijuana, years before Justin Trudeau's party would promise it in an election and then end prohibition of the drug. On the other hand, the party's 2021 resolution to create a universal basic income didn't persuade the Liberal government.

When the Alberta NDP was in power last decade, its party organizers did their best to ensure some activist measures like a ban on fracking stayed off the convention floor, tamping down potential tensions within the membership and with governing MLAs.

Seldom has there been as clear an apparent line, however, between the party convention floor and the bill-debating legislature floor. Seldom do other party bases make their leaders sweat this much, this routinely — Notley got a 98.2 per cent approval at her review in 2021, while federal Liberals haven't made Trudeau face one as prime minister. 

While Smith has fulfilled several of her party's policy wishes, she isn't giving them everything. She's promised some new Bill of Rights provisions about refusing medical treatments, property rights and firearms rights, but has given no indication she'll embrace the myriad proposals of the "Black Hat Gang" that's lobbied heavily in government and party circles, and have won the party board's full endorsement.

The premier has said she won't change the rules to keep transgender women out of women's prisons, despite her party's convention vote on that issue last fall.

And then there's the Alberta Pension Plan proposal, in which some UCP activists believe stoutly. Smith has said she won't pursue this unless Albertans approve it in a potential plebiscite.

Will her actions on those issues mean the difference between a 65 per cent and a 75 per cent approval for Smith's leadership on Nov. 2? How will that affect her ability to proceed as party leader and premier?

Also, what does the general Alberta public think of the actions she's pushing forth?

And what priority does she place on the answers to all these questions as she makes decisions?

Convention wisdom

One other question that will be worth asking after early November is whether Smith applies the same primacy to UCP grassroots beliefs after her leadership review.

When it came time to pivot to the general election in May 2023, Smith largely dropped discussion on transgender issues, the unvaccinated and a provincial pension.

Even if she has an impulse to more heavily consider the non-UCP realm's perspectives post-review, the party members may have gotten used to wielding heavy influence on government policy.

UCP convention attendees might support a resolution banning or limiting access to mRNA vaccines in Alberta.

That's something the premier has suggested she'd rather not do, but something high-ranking party officials and many UCPers have advocated, at least for vaccine-eligible children.

These "what then?" questions could well linger as long as Smith remains UCP leader.