And then there were five.
The race for the leadership of the Progressive Conservative party has another contestant.
Sandra Jansen, PC MLA for Calgary-North West, ended the worst kept secret in Alberta politics on Wednesday by announcing her candidacy.
“I am thrilled to join this race because I am excited about the future of the PC party,” said Jansen in an emailed news release. “I am running because I want to build a modern, forward-looking team that will take the Progressive Conservatives into the future.”
That was the extent of her formal launch. There was no news conference, no gaggle of reporters in a hotel conference room peppering her with questions.
Instead, Jansen met with journalists for one-on-one chats wherever was most convenient for the media. I met her in a Starbucks near the legislature.
I imagine Jansen kept things low-key because she knew there wouldn’t be many journalists interested in covering the launch of yet another candidate in the leadership contest for the third-place party in the legislature.
Another reason is that helping run her campaign is strategist Stephen Carter.
Calgary-North West MLA Sandra Jansen speaks confirmed Wednesday she is joining the race to become the next PC leader.
The fireside-chat campaign launch is from Carter’s trademark game plan. He says it allows reporters to develop a conversation with the candidate in a more intimate setting than a regular campaign speech in front of a crowd.
Carter used this strategy to launch Naheed Nenshi’s come-from-behind victory in Calgary’s mayoral race in 2010. And again when he ran Alison Redford’s long-shot victory for the PC leadership race in 2011.
In a long career that has seen him also work for Stephen Harper, Joe Clark, Jim Prentice and Danielle Smith, Carter has won a reputation for being something of a magician for pulling electoral rabbits out of last-place hats.
The good news for Jansen is that Carter has experience in running a successful PC leadership campaign.
The bad news for Jansen is that Carter helped make Alison Redford premier.
Redford is arguably Alberta’s most unpopular former PC premier.
Prentice may have lost the 44-year PC dynasty to the NDP, but Redford was the one who started the party’s downhill slide.
Having Carter help run a campaign for Jansen — a fiercely progressive woman from Calgary and one-time acolyte of Redford’s — is sure to invite comparisons to the former premier.
Actually, it already has.
Jason Kenney — the leadership candidate who wants to save the PC party by destroying it — issued a Facebook post Wednesday purportedly to welcome Jansen to the race that ended with this: “We must not go back to the divisive, failed politics of the Redford era. Instead, we must move forward united with a positive vision to renew the Alberta Advantage and get our province back on track.”
Kenney is still the only candidate in the race who wants to unite the PC party with the Wildrose to form a new right-wing party that he would lead in the 2019 provincial election.
But first things first. He has to win the PC leadership.
Already, Jansen is providing a taste of what’s to come when discussing Kenney’s unite-the-right strategy.
“It’s a slogan and you can’t run on a slogan,” said Jansen, who is not one to back down from a fight. “You have to run on policy and so if the slogan is uniting the right and no one’s ever sitting down to talk about what our shared values are, then it’s very empty.”
Also in the race: PC MLA Richard Starke, former PC MLA Donna Kennedy Glans and Calgary lawyer Byron Nelson.
Nominations are open until Nov. 10 — so there’s plenty of time for others to declare their candidacy. So far, there’s nobody from Edmonton and the likely suspects, including former MLA Stephen Khan and city councillor Michael Oshry, are reportedly backing away.
The leadership convention isn’t until March 18 — so there’s plenty of time to get good and bored by the whole process.
But then again, Jansen’s entry into the race just made things a little more interesting.
