Ex-UCP MLAs reviving Alberta's Progressive Conservative Party

Two Independent MLAs expelled from the UCP are bidding to resurrect the old party brand of Peter Lougheed and Ralph Klein.

Peter Guthrie and Scott Sinclair are petitioning to re-register the Progressive Conservative Association of Alberta — the party that governed Alberta from 1971 to 2015, before it merged with the Wildrose Party to form the United Conservative Party late last decade.

They are pitching the PCs as another conservative option, but one that's in the political middle between Premier Danielle Smith's governing party and the left-of-centre NDP. "We're filling a void where people feel like they have no home politically right now," Sinclair told CBC News in an interview Wednesday.

"The parties in the province have taken it too far one way or another, and we just don't have a mainstream party that in Pete and my belief really forms a snapshot of what Albertans are looking for, which is a government that is balanced and has a steady hand."

Their party would appeal to those who dislike how separatist-friendly Smith has made the UCP, in his view, but also want restrained government spending, said Guthrie, the former infrastructure minister and unofficial leader of the revival PCs.

He termed their would-be party "fiscally responsible and socially reliable."

After the UCP formed in 2017, they formally de-registered the former Wildrose and Tory parties in early 2020.

Guthrie said a "friend of a friend" approached the two Independent MLAs and said an unnamed woman has reserved the PC with Elections Alberta. She was offering it to the pair.

Now, to formally register the PC party, Guthrie and Sinclair have until November to collect at least 8,819 signatures on a petition, representing 0.3 per cent of the provincial voting population.

They plan to spend the time canvassing in their own ridings and touring Alberta's summer festivals and events, with the hope of being able to launch their party this fall. But they've just begun the process; their fledgling party doesn't even have its website up yet.

Until earlier this year, neither politician had publicly voiced any doubts about Smith's UCP — until each found himself outside of it, for different reasons.

Guthrie quit cabinet in protest in February amid the developing controversy over procurement practices at Alberta Health Services. In April, his demands for a public inquiry into the AHS saga prompted the United Conservatives to expel him from caucus.

Sinclair, the member for Lesser Slave Lake, was ousted from the UCP caucus in March after he publicly criticized the provincial budget for spending too heavily in Edmonton and Calgary at the expense of rural Alberta.

Announcing the PC push On Real Talk with Ryan Jespersen, Sinclair said Smith is "almost like a 'miniature version of Donald Trump in Alberta, just so many controversial things that are radical and extreme happening almost on a daily or weekly basis."

Smith's push to dismantle Alberta Health Service shows that her government is "more about disruption than solutions."

The premier was asked Wednesday about the return of the PCs at an unrelated news conference. She referred to the 2015 election, when the right-leaning PCs and Wildrose combined for more than 50 per cent of the vote, but Rachel Notley's NDP won by eking out a plurality.

"We saw that when the movement splits, the NDP win, and I think that that is where the majority of conservative voters are," she said.

In a recent by-election in Olds-Didsbury-Three Hills, UCP candidate Tara Sawyer urged rural voters against splitting the right-of-centre vote. The separatist Republican Party of Alberta finished a distant third with less than 18 per cent of the vote, behind both the UCP and NDP.

The premier added that her UCP will "make our case in the next election no matter who ends up being on the ballot."

Smith also questioned whether the PC party name could legally return because it's similar to the UCP's name, but the Elections Alberta website already lists the name on the "reserved" list as "approved by the Chief Electoral Officer."

Guthrie said the new PCs could appeal not only to anti-separatist United Conservative voters tired of controversies, but also lapsed Tory voters who had voted for the NDP in recent contests.

NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi said the move by Guthrie and Sinclair signals further shakiness within Smith's conservative coalition, and added that "New Democrats remain the only choice for positive change for our province."

In the PCs' absence, Alberta politics has recently evolved into a two-party binary.

Only the UCP and NDP have won seats in the last two elections, and those parties combined to capture 96.6 per cent of the vote in the 2023 contest — leaving only a sliver of the electoral pie for smaller parties, including the centrist Alberta Party and two parties that use the Wildrose brand.