According to Carrie Tait’s excellent piece in the Globe, there’s a coup brewing in the UCP.
She reports that UCP board member Vince Byfield sent out an email with a motion proposing that Patrick Malkin (a TBA-affiliated board member) be put in charge of everything related to the upcoming Annual General Meeting. The party president ruled the motion out of order, but the TBA-affiliated board members voted for it anyway, and then Byfield declared victory and congratulated Malkin on his new role.
This is roughly the equivalent of taking Rostov-on-Don and heading north to Moscow.
Like the hapless Prigozhin, Byfield seems to have lost momentum on the road to Moscow, with the party president scolding board members and calling a meeting for June 29. But unlike Prigozhin, who was left hanging by other potential coupsters, Byfield has rallied support, with TBA leader David Parker chiming in to declare that party president Cynthia Moore is a “tyrant” who must be removed.
All of this makes things quite uncomfortable for party leader Danielle Smith. Does she let Byfield roll into Moscow and demand the head of the Ministry of Defence party executive, or does she start blowing up roads leading into the city and exile Byfield to Belarus Saskatchewan?
All joking aside, Smith is in a tricky situation. Half the party board pre-dates her leadership and the other half is affiliated with Take Back Alberta, a group whose influence she downplayed during the election. Under normal circumstances, a party leader who had just won an election wouldn’t tolerate shenanigans like these on her party board. Smith might have enough influence to tell the party president to stand down and let Byfield’s guy organize the convention. Could she tell TBA to stand down and stop the shenanigans? Seems unlikely.
Why all the fuss? TBA wants to ensure that AGM registration rates are low enough that they can get lots of their supporters out. This would let them get their slate elected for the remaining seats on the party’s board. Even getting a couple of their people elected would give them a majority. They’re also looking for control over the meeting’s agenda - something that we would normally expect would be largely set by the party leader.
And so, like the Ukrainian soldier on instagram, we’ll all be making popcorn while we wait to see how this plays out.
Hey don’t be dumping your problems in Saskatchewan. We are quite busy dealing with our own lack of competent leadership. :-)
Haha, good piece, laugh so we don't cry but it's just the faithful, "Unhinged Clown Posse" fulfilling its stuttering mandate.
And the world HAS become binary like computer code and in no small part BECAUSE of computer code so we DO have good versus evil, democracy versus autocracy, Putin versus Zalensky, urban versus rural. So since it's clearly the right wing that has lost its mind it should be easy to vanquish, expunge or at least relegate conservatives at this point, right? Right!
The reason we're hamstrung is because our reverence for "tolerance" and "inclusiveness" has taken over our precious ability to think critically. Why else are we tolerating the inherent INtolerance of religion (and proud of it) when it's arguably the first, worst "big lie?" Is it not likely that ubiquitous American religiosity created the initial platform for the political version currently threatening their democracy? And then social media fanned the flames of the basic disinformation? Why are we surprised?
"Take Back Alberta" has just read the room, called our bluff, and is now fully exploiting our Achilles heel as a society. Having given religion an inch in our public life, thereby breaking the cardinal rule of separating church and state, it's now officially taken the mile and is in charge at the highest level of our government.
When some version of theocracy is what's actually on the ballot, we should at least be able to identify that, but choose instead to see it as an aberrant or "extreme" interpretation of religious doctrine, somehow transient when so outrageous and unbelievable, even though the whole underlying idea of a god actually existing ANYWHERE other than in people's heads is by its very nature extreme. Not to mention the fact that it IS just another IDEA, period, so should absolutely be open to criticism, but weirdly is NOT.
So our hard-won rule of law is easily superceded by the "divine law" of this alternate authority, trumping all of us paltry humans in one fell swoop as in HA! Gotcha. This stance obviously appeals to literally billions of us, we all long to feel special, so it may well be what does us all in. Believers disproportionately do not "believe" in climate change either; recall that conservatives voted against the motion that "climate change is real" at their annual meeting. Only 50 odd percent but certainly WAY more than you would find at any progressive party's annual meeting. Conservatives COULD kill us all; it's not just a meme.
So maybe people DO get the government they deserve.