A gathering of “like-minded” conservatives was held on Feb. 8 at the Cochrane RancheHouse to discuss the current state of the province under the NDP’s leadership.
“We’re here to have a conversation amongst all conservatives,” said Jonathon Denis, former Alberta Attorney General, who was in attendance that evening.
While the local PC constituency hosted the conversation that evening, Wildrose members were invited to attend as well. The facilitated conservation addressed a number of issues including: potentially uniting the two conservative parties, identifying the main concerns with the NDP government, engaging youth, and identifying key principles that all conservatives can agree with.
Also in attendance was Dave Rutherford, an award-winning broadcaster and representative for the Alberta Prosperity Fund, a political action committee.
“It’s all a matter of math; there are two conservative-minded parties, the Wildrose and the PC’s. In essence, they split the vote in the last provincial election and the NDP got elected. These two conservative parties were together at one time then suddenly they got a divorce,” Rutherford said.
He elaborated that Alberta Prosperity Fund’s goal is to unify the two parties again to eliminate the vote-splitting.
“This is about bringing conservative principles back to our province,” Denis said.
“There needs to be a plan in place, I think the debt is a huge issue - we’ll be sixty billion dollars in debt by the time NDP reaches the end of their term. That puts on par with Quebec’s per capita debt, which is unbelievable considering we were debt free a short time ago,” said John Williams, a concerned resident of the Banff-Cochrane constituency who organized the meeting.
A large focus of the conversation that evening was about getting feedback from “grassroots residents” that are concerned about the current government. The hope is to make this initiative a province-wide campaign.
“We hope that these kinds of meetings are going to happen all over the province, in every riding. And the Alberta Prosperity Fund is going to finance a tour with me and some other guys to have meetings like this in every corner of the province,” Rutherford said.
“I tried less than a year ago to pull off merging conservatives and obviously it failed miserably. My regret is it didn’t work. My belief is working together is better than fighting one another,” said Bruce McAllister, former MLA for Chestermere-Rockyview.
Mike Ellis, the current MLA for Calgary West, was unable to attend that evening but expressed support for the initiative in a written statement that was read at the meeting.
The meeting ended with a motion being made by Councilor Morgan Nagel with the Town of Cochrane for the unification of both conservative parties before the next election.
A summit will be held in the near-future regarding this issue.
