Archive for the ‘Alberta Liberal Party’ Category

Last Saturday Raj Sherman was elected as Alberta Liberal Leader. On Monday he was brought in, officially, to the Alberta Liberal caucus.

A quick media scan:

Curiously, on the Saturday night the reporters surrounding the second and third place contenders pressed for an answer to the question of whether or not they’ll stay on as Liberals after losing. I find this odd on two fronts: firstly, they assumed that the party would blow up if Raj won, and secondly, there seemed to be an expectation for Hugh MacDonald to give them a juicy quote. The party, of course, didn’t blow up, and Hugh MacDonald has stated he has accepted the results (and wants to get down to work).

I think, over the last three weeks, the media has made a strong effort to portray the Liberal leadership race in a way that they find interesting: Particularly as a “Swann” song and a frustrated self-destroying group of misfits. They’re expecting us to fail. Which is odd, because that perspective is so fundamentally separated from reality. While there are challenges, and plenty of them, I don’t think it’s as terrible as Don Braid and others have written about in the media. I think the party would have been fine with MacDonald as leader, if at little scattered in approach at times, and the other candidates would have done amicably. I’m not worried about the party. I’m excited. (What I am worried about is the media and their willingness to belittle the Liberals so. I’ve written about this before.)

The particular struggles I think Raj needs to lead the party through are many. I’m confident though his leadership can get the Liberals back into shape. The party is an extraordinarily diverse group, willing to try new ideas, and then able to push for those ideas with unparalleled vigor. We have partisans that have been active int he party for 70 years and new people walking off the street and onto associations/campaigns every day. This last leadership race brought 28,000 people into the fold to judge who’d be best to lead Alberta, building a strong plank to leap from in the coming months as the Liberals ramp their preparations into high gear for an election either this fall or this spring.

I’m excited.

Why I Voted For Raj

Actually, I didn’t quite vote for Raj. He was my second choice, right after Bruce Payne. But he was my choice, if Payne didn’t win the race. If we went to the second ballot my vote would gone straight to him, like many Payne supporters, likely landing him the leader’s job. And I’m proud of this choice.

He was high up on my list because I am sick of losing. I am sick of losing. I want my agenda, I want the Liberal agenda, in government. I don’t want the Liberals to be only in the cities (and Lethbridge). I don’t want to lose in Calgary North-Hill by 5%. I don’t want to be the party of just the Edmonton-Calgary corridor. Raj is the choice to blow the doors of the party wide open and bring in people into the party and into this growing movement. Raj will bring the party to more people thananything else in the last ten years.

I want to win, I want to lead, and I want to make the province change. I’m angry with the establishment–which is why I fought for the change in leadership rules on the May convention floor to create a force in Albetan politics that challenged the status quo. I am angry with a government that is too incompetent to even listen to the oil patch during their royalty reviews–which is why I’ll never, ever vote or support an unlistening, uncaring, and ancient governing party like the Tories. I am angry with PC MLAs who still use typewriters and still don’t have an email account–who are so disconnected, so behind, and so ‘out of it’, that there needs to be a giant hose plugged into the legislature and have the place cleaned out after 40 years. I am enraged by the Progressive Conservatives; I am enraged by their hubris, their idiocy, and their backwardness.

Raj is part of the solution to getting the Liberals into government. He has those skills in compromise, in inclusion. He took me seriously as a blogger and an activist, even though I’m just a 20 year-old student and just a blogger. At every juncture of his leadership campaign he refused to attack personally the character of others, or to defame them: that takes character.

He also caught onto the system that he was in. He knew that the way to win the leadership wasn’t through a narrow appeal to a subsection of Albertans but to include many into the process. While there were hiccups with organizational capacity, he either intuitively or thought through the leadership process to such an extent that he made the mass appeals that were required of a leader of the province and a leader of the Liberals. And a mass appeal-er is just what we need.

I’m confident with him and his leadership. I’m ready to Raj and roll.

Caucus

One struggle Raj will find is caucus solidarity is an issue that has plagued the party for years. Of particular note isLaurie Blakemen openly playing with the idea of running for the Alberta Party leadership, Dave Taylor storming out, and, more recently, the very vicious attacks done by leadership campaigns against Raj Sherman. At the leadership announcement outgoing leader David Swann noted that whomever won shouldn’t be too consumed with consensus leadership: which I heartily approve. Decisions have to be made and I am, along with a lot of Liberals, quite tired of the caucus nipping and biting each other over petty issues.

MacDonald will have to be reigned in and made to focus for his scandal hunting. He’s perfect for it, and we need his watch dog tenacity, but sometimes he needs to be put back on track. I think with stronger caucus control and a willingness to fight, Raj will be able to turn MacDonald into a more potent and stronger force for fighting for Albertans.

Bill Harvey should be encouraged to run for the party again, but persuaded to not indulge in the heavy handed attack politics that he exhibited in the last days of the leadership campaign. He should be encouraged to keep on his fiscal discipline and debt hawkish ways yet remove portions of his odd and quixotic platform (like a provincial police force or getting involved in federal jurisdictions like child predators). I think the party has plenty of room for fiscal hawks who want value for Albertan pocketbooks–not only because there’s a need for it in Edmonton but it’s a foundation of accountability and liberalism for society to have open, accountable, and forthright governments, which are key for fiscally sound governments. There’s a place for Bill Harvey but there is going to need to be some accommodation.

Bruce Payne is already onside and, as a fresh face with little baggage, is the best man to take a strong leadership role in the party once elected in Calgary-Varsity. He is the breath of fresh air that’ll help push the party and its caucus in newer, bolder directions–and I think Raj is more than able to encourage and empower Bruce to do so.

Blakeman should be encouraged to buckle down in Edmonton and start organizing the entire city to go red next election. Out of all the candidates in the leadership race Blakeman had the most die hard (yet fewest) supporters and, if she could inspire other leaders to take on leadership roles, Edmonton would quickly be turned into Redmonton again. Turn her sights on Edmonton and winning there she’ll make a Liberal government a reality.

Unity

Another challenge for the party is that, as with all leadership campaigns, people are unhappy with a leader that was not on their list of preferred list. This is to be expected. Bitter feelings and anguish are to be expected. There is a challenge for Raj, and a great opportunity, in this period just after the race. With the media focusing on the PC leadership race he can, along with the party, reach out to members that helped the other leadership candidates and tie them together into a new, stronger, and more effective electoral machine.

It was obvious to me that Hugh MacDonald’s team out organized the Raj Sherman team: the former had more volunteers, more ardent supporters that’d phone late into the night, and people who would, as one partisan phrased it, “give their life for him.” The latter made a mass appeal and brought in many new, many old, and many disfranchisement people into the party, but lacked the strong volunteer core that Hugh had. These two have amazing strengths and have a part to play with one another in reorganizing the Alberta Liberal Party. There needs to be the fresh invigoration of the party with new members but there has to be that balance with the members of yesteryear, who again and again, are relied on to be the backbone of the party.

It’s not only unity in the perspective of the party, however, that needs to be addressed. The Alberta Party, or the many people I’ve poached from their ranks to join the party in the last week (I have some of their execs on my slate to run Calgary-Klein) had qualms with how the Liberals had turned themselves into an Edmonton-only club where inclusion was based more on how long you’ve been there than on the quality of their ideas. While completely off base and untrue, it has never been directly confronted as it has been in this race. Raj Sherman showed himself to be the candidate open and willing to take in new blood and be more than just Liberal. With the Alberta Party partisans being peeved by their current leadership in many respects, and how their leadership race was run, I feel many will be finding a new home quite quickly with the Alberta Liberals.

Organizing

A third challenge is that the supporters aren’t quite ‘coherent’ yet in terms of being included in the party proper or being prepared for an election. There are candidates, who haven’t been encouraged to run or been told that, in fact, they should run, on those lists of new supporters and new members. There are constituencies with hundreds of new people but no person to make their voices coherent into a campaign and constituency association.

I’ve done a little bit of this “coherency building.” Last year I helped as interim president for the Calgary East Federal Liberal association, which has been called the “one of the most active of Calgary ridings” by many now. I’ve blogged on party organizing, repeatedly, and even received nationally attention in the Toronto Star for one of my pieces. I’d like to think I know a fair bit about party building, and I think what we need now is more of party building.

This is going to be a challenge, as it is for all opposition parties. We do not have the graft from the Tories or the angry castoffs of the Conservatives in the Wildrose to buffer us. What we do have, though, is the power of being the Official Opposition, a leader with a vision and good political instincts, and a call by many in the party to get’er done, especially by outgoing leader Dr. Swann and elder figures in the party. Also, there are the people who just voted in the recent leadership race: those people will make the teams, the associations, and the backbone of the next election. The organizers of the different campaigns can work together as a bigger team, bringing together the different things they did into a stronger, more effective whole.  I’m optimistic that the Liberals can pull off an organizing feat in the next month and a half, getting new and old Liberals to get back into the party.

The ‘Other’ Leadership Campaign

An inescapable reality is the dynamics of the Progressive Conservative leadership race. What happens there will change the dynamics of Albetan politics. Just as one example, If Mar gets in, Sherman will get the Liberal more support by virtue of the issue of Healthcare coming in the Liberal’s favor. Mar has come out in favor of private delivery and that position is a great foil to that of the Liberals. I’m not sure about the other leadership candidates in the PC race however.

At the end of the day, though, the Liberals have a race to run and win to form government in Alberta. Lets Raj & roll.

Introduce Yourself (Part I)

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Leadership (Part II)

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Issues: (Part III)

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Introduce Yourself (Part I)

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Leadership (Part II)

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Issues (Part III)

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There are challenges to the Alberta Liberal Party forming government in Alberta. In this series of posts I’ll write about some of the challenges that Liberals face in this province and some solutions to them.

(4) The Challenge: Learning to repeat ourselves. (Or, alternatively, ‘message control’)

The Problem: We’re not targetting the issues and controlling the debate… and we’re not repeating ourselves.

The Story: Liberals see nuance, they see “topics of concern”, and Liberals seek the answers to solve society’s complex questions.  This is problematic on two fronts: firstly, a dissertation on solving the health care crisis will not be read by the people of Alberta and secondly, Liberals get bored when they hear the same things over and over again. It is human nature to crave the simple, the orthodox, and what is already see as “true.” Liberals are therefor ill-equiped to handle the environment they’re in with politics: too nuance-seeking to be understandable, too ready to delve into in-depth policy discussion to hit key messages, and too unwilling to take a step back and repeat ourselves to every new (and old!) audience we meet.

To rehash the previous paragraph: there are two distinct types of messaging. The first type is an underlying message that is already in the public’s mindset, that is longer than six months in length, and is the source of many reactions to the next type of messaging. This next type of messaging is on the tactical level, pulls from the long term underlying messaging, and is what you see in the newspapers. We need to understand what environment we are in–the long term underlying trends–and adjust for them by either jumping onto ongoing trends or attempting to change them, one person at a time. And then we need to repeat ourselves.

And the only way to change things and take charge of those changes is to find them, lead them, and ultimately get into a position where we can steer the long term story lines of Albertan politics and do the things that need to be done. Liberals need to sit down, hammer out some themes, and then hit them again, again, and again, in words that candidates, the party, and regular volunteers can recite blindfolded and hanging upside down. Extreme? A little bit. However, it hits upon a key theme: message control.

I really like what the party has begun to do in the last year and a half. Particularly, they’re starting to hammer a story line on numerous fronts. One  story line that has caught my attention is emphasizing the young executive: adding both our executive director’s and president’s ages they’re quite a ways beneath the age of the presidents or the leaders of the other parties. We have a young and vibrant leadership that excels at innovative thinking and explores uncharted territories. This story line was started after Erick Ambtman, our current president, was elected and his age, ideas, and willingness for change was pushed out into the public’s perception. Of course, it’s difficult to get noticed as a rookie and a Liberal in Alberta–but the party kept talking about it. And now we have articles talking about Alberta Liberal innovation and successes some two years later.

The Solution: I like what the Alberta Liberals were doing before the end of session with Dr. Swann, leading the other parties, and getting our messaging out there. It’s beginning to work and is pushing the Liberal message to the next level. It’s not enough though. I propose the following: (1) the creation of a “Alberta Notes” listserv or mailing list to send–for every issue–a set of talking points to be created in tandem with press releases but only set to party people, (2) in line with problem #2 (to be seen to have a plan) we ought to publicize our plans so that people interested in our message can then start repeating it themselves, and (3) have Harry Chase, teacher, educator, and education critic, give regular lessons to every Liberal partisan on how to repeat themselves and refocus on Liberal bases of strength. We ought to have Mr. Chase give lectures on his herculean ability to redirect issues toward education and learn from it.