This column is the opinion of Graham Thomson, an award-winning journalist who has covered Alberta politics for more than 30 years. For more information on CBC Opinion Sectionplease consult the FAQs.
After weeks of heated rhetoric in the United Conservative Party leadership race, perceived frontrunner Danielle Smith is trying to calm things down in Alberta.
Smith employs a charm offensive specifically geared towards winning the party’s complicated preferential ballot system.
It’s a strategy based on math and human nature as well as lessons learned from previous leadership races.
Smith isn’t so much trying to poach supporters from other sides as she is trying to plant seeds in their minds, hoping they will bear fruit later.
On Thursday, she issued a statement calling for party unity and posted a video segment where she praised each of her contestants, including her arch-nemesis in the race, former finance minister Travis Toews.
“People see him as a person of integrity,” said Smith, who not too long ago accused Toews of using “defamation” tactics against her.
“He thought about how we could have an Alberta Provincial Police and an Alberta Pension Plan and I look forward to working with him to implement them.”
She applauded Brian Jean’s plan to cut gas prices, called Rebecca Schulz a ‘young talent’, backed Rajan Sawhney’s call for a public inquiry into the COVID-19 response, described Leela Aheer as “charming” and called Todd Loewen “one of my favorite people.”
Smith looked a lot like a prime minister in waiting announcing his choices for a new cabinet.
(Smith even said some nice things about former Liberal leader Raj Sherman, saying his video was recorded before Sherman was denied permission to race last month).
Smith does all this because she wants to be seen, of course, as a party unifier but also, more strategically, because of the vagaries of the UCP’s preferential voting system.
On the ballot, party members rank the candidates in numerical order of preference.
Ballots will be counted on October 6. If a candidate wins a majority on the first count, the race is over. However, with seven people in the race, a first-round win is unlikely.
Thus, if no one wins on the first count, the last candidate is removed from the race and the ballots for that candidate are counted again by examining the second choice on those ballots.
The votes are then distributed among the surviving candidates.
This process will continue until one candidate obtains a majority of votes.
This means that the favorites will depend on the support of members of the “losing” camps.
That’s why Smith, who is the perceived alpha in the race, tries to butter those who aren’t on his side.
His charm offensive targets everyone, just in case. She could very well need the votes of several other camps to win.
Behind this leadership race is a specific race from the past: the Progressive Conservative Party leadership race of 2006, where nice politician Ed Stelmach rose from third place to winner.
The race 16 years ago is both a model and a cautionary tale for candidates today.
It’s a pattern for Sawhney, Schulz and Aheer who know they’re not first but try to “pull a Stelmach” by being everyone’s second choice.
It’s a cautionary tale for today’s favorites who remember how 2006 frontrunner Jim Dinning doomed his campaign by deliberately honing his attacks on arch-nemesis Ted Morton.
When Morton was knocked out of the race and his supporters’ ballots were counted, 26,000 went to Stelmach while only 4,000 went to Dinning.
The UCP’s preferential voting system is different from the old PC race in some important respects.
In 2006, for example, people could join the party and vote until the last minute.
This helped Stelmach who, in the final days of the campaign, reached out to people of Ukrainian descent living in northeastern Alberta.
The UCP, however, halted membership sales on August 12, nearly two months before the October 6 vote.
Candidates try to target specific groups of people, whether based on geography, ethnicity or ideology.
But only Smith appears to be succeeding as she leads a campaign focused on anger — anger at everything from the federal government to the Kenney government to pandemic restrictions in particular and the healthcare system in general.
But there is no anger when talking about his competition.
His official campaign slogan may be “Alberta First,” but his unofficial slogan is just one word: respect.
In Wednesday’s email, she said, “Our party will remain united by respect for the grassroots and for each other,” and added that she “looks forward to continuing to work with” her competitors in the “when I become leader” race.
At the very least, she’s trying to keep the race from turning into an Anybody-But-Smith scenario where candidates conspire to derail it or members vote strategically to defeat it.
Smith may be bringing a flamethrower to Alberta politics with policies designed to spark outrage, but when it comes to winning a preferential ballot, she turns up the air conditioner.
“Internet evangelist. Extreme communicator. Subtly charming alcohol aficionado. Typical tv geek.”