Meet the party no one wants to lead: Alberta’s beleaguered Liberals are at a fateful crossroads

“There is no denying this is a challenging time for our party and for politics in this province,” party president Helen McMenamin said.

“We see signs of a brighter future for the Alberta Liberal party. We will keep working towards that future and a better tomorrow for Albertans.”

It was an inauspicious end to a race launched with hope and optimism by the province’s oldest surviving political party just months earlier. In June, interim leader John Roggeveen, a Calgary lawyer who’d been holding down the fort for more than a year, said in a release that while he was proud of the work he’d done, he was excited to “pass the torch to a new, permanent leader.

“Whoever they are, I am confident they will be successful in growing the Alberta Liberal movement.”

What comes next is anyone’s guess. But it’s a crossroads for a party that once rose as high as official opposition, an offshoot of one of Canada’s most storied political brands that has long struggled to distance itself from the federal party long viewed with serious sideeye on the western Prairies.

“Being leader of the Alberta Liberal party right now is, it’s not even a thankless job, it’s whatever the next level is after thankless,” says Dave Cournoyer, a political writer who runs a blog about Alberta politics called Daveberta, and once worked in communications for the provincial Liberals. “This is a party that had formed official opposition for 20 years, was a real presence in Alberta politics and had some pretty great MLAs,” he said.

“It’s actually kind of sad.”

It doesn’t help that the race fizzled against the backdrop of one of the most closely watched contests in the country. The competition to replace Jason Kenney and lead Alberta’s governing United Conservatives continues to hurtle along, kicking up debates on everything from provincial sovereignty to the mysteries of gas prices. That race approved seven candidates, and saw three either withdraw or rejected. In a sign of just how hot that race is, that latter group included, inauspiciously, an emergency room doctor called Raj Sherman, a former provincial Liberal leader.

Formed in 1905, at roughly the same point Alberta became a province, the Alberta Liberals then formed government for the first 16 years of the province’s existence under three different premiers. Things have been slightly patchier since then.

There were low points, including in the 1960s when they were similarly flirting with oblivion, particularly after Calgary MLA Bill Dickie crossed the floor to the Conservatives, leaving the legislature without Liberal representation for the first time. “The party’s place in the spectrum of Alberta politics needs reassessing,” an editorial in The Albertan observed at the time.

In the early 1980s, the party was in such dire financial straits, with $175,000 in debt — an amount worth over double that now — it was forced to fire all its staff, according to a story in the Red Deer Advocate.

But through it all, the party was able to fundraise and find leaders and operate a functional organization, points out Duane Bratt, a political science professor at Calgary’s Mount Royal University. In the latter half of the decade, the party rallied and was able to gain a foothold in the legislature again. The party’s high-water mark — at least post First World War — came in 1993, he notes. That was the year the party swerved to the right, dominated Edmonton and became the official opposition.

Although the party managed to cling to the opposition for almost two decades — acting as a more left-leaning counter to the Progress Conservatives that dominated the province for almost half a century — it’s nonetheless been a slow decline since then, he said.

“If you were to do a graph, and you would have graphed seats from ’93 onward, it’s straight downhill.” In addition to losing MLAs, losing its last seat in 2019, the party shed votes — it got less than 1 per cent of the vote in the last election — and now, a leader. “Alberta’s oldest party is not dead, but it’s on life support,” he said.

It also suffers, some argue, of guilt by association, thanks to the dislike, bordering on hatred, for Justin Trudeau in many parts of the province. It has also been pushed aside by the rise of the NDP party, which has surged under the leadership of Rachel Notley.

“I don’t know if there’s a purpose for the Alberta Liberal party right now,” Cournoyer says. “I think that anybody who would have voted Liberal in the past … those people have moved on to other political parties, and right now, the party with almost all that territory is Notley’s NDP.

“You’re building up a political party from almost nothing at this point. And you’re competing with a party that basically offers some similar values at this point.”

But Bratt counters that Alberta may also be at the cutting edge of a larger trend. He points to the Ontario Liberals, which just suffered a resounding electoral defeat, and the Quebec party, which is struggling to relate to French speakers.

“If you hate (Justin) Trudeau, it’s all Trudeau’s fault,” he says. “But I just think centrist parties have trouble across the Western world.”

The party’s board of directors is expected to announce next steps in the coming days.