Oops

Given his views, one wonders if Jim Dinning showed up at the right convention this weekend! After numerous reprots that he was closely affiated with Paul Martin, actively recruciting Liberals and liberals and getting ringing endorsements from the likes of people like Anne McLellan, the frontrunner in the Alberta PC leadership race that ends this weekend didn’t do himself any favours this week by borrowing every idea from the federal Liberal playbook. For crying out loud, this is the Alberta PC party, so why has this race come down to a free market, social conservative visionary like Ted Morton and a closet liberal like Dinning?!

The reason, my friends, may soon be addressed by the Alberta party regardless of this weekend’s outcome.  When the National Post has an article, as it did on Friday, about various liberal Albertans holding their noses and buying APC memberships just so that they can influence the vote, there is something seriously wrong with the process.  I love one member-one vote just as much as the next guy, but personally, I’ve wondered why it has always been so easy in nomination meeting and leadership race cases for any Joe to plop down $10 and become an insta-Tory, regardless of his political dispossition or willingness to actually help the party.  I have a feeling many Alberta PCs, real Alberta PCs, are feeling this way too today and may move at the next oppertunity to curb membership rights so that only those members in good standing for, say, the last six months, will be able to vote in a leadership contest.  That way, the candidates will have a couple of months to sign up new members and get that renewal stuff that we always hear so much about with these things over with and real conservatives who have lapsed on membership back into the official fold, then spend the rest of the campaign with candidates trying to sway the membership to chose their vision.  It’s really not that hard, but if Jim Dinning wins this weekend (which I doubt), it will be a deathblow that the Alberta PCs can’t afford.  After all, do you think all those Morton et the rest supporters will stick around to help Alberta’s first Liberal government since the ’20s get re-elected?

PS: My money’s on Iggy this weekend…and for that matter, a Harper majority after the next election!