Alberta Premier Jason Kenney present for money discussions in sham leadership campaign: witnesses

On a summer night in 2017, a wide-ranging cast of Alberta political operatives was sitting around Jeff Callaway's dining room table in northwest Calgary, eating Indian food, while the booze poured freely.

It was there they hatched the final plan for Callaway, a past president of the Wildrose Party, to enter the United Conservative Party leadership race in what would colloquially become known as the kamikaze campaign. 

It had one purpose: to benefit Jason Kenney's leadership bid by damaging that of his biggest political rival, former Wildrose leader Brian Jean. Callaway was ready to be the kamikaze candidate.

According to the accounts of two people who were there, Kenney personally set key conditions of that plan and was, at a minimum, present during discussions about funding it. 

Some of the individuals since fined by the Office of the Election Commissioner (OEC) after an investigation are challenging their fines by judicial review. CBC News pored over tens of thousands of pages of documents that have been filed in the Court of Queen's Bench as part of those cases.

Never-before published transcripts of interviews conducted by investigators with the OEC shed light on the events of the summer of 2017. None of the allegations within them have been tested in court. 

After successfully uniting the now defunct Progressive Conservative Party and the Wildrose Party into the United Conservative Party, Kenney was running to lead the merged parties in the leadership contest in October. 

A longtime MP and cabinet minister in Stephen Harper's federal government, he ran his leadership campaign from a blue pickup truck, criss-crossing Alberta, promising an end to the provincial carbon tax and a revitalized economy. 

There was little light between the policy direction of the Kenney campaign and that of his closest political rival Brian Jean. But the race was fractious and sometimes personal. The winner of the UCP leadership race had a better than fair chance of becoming the next premier of Alberta.  

At the table at Callaway's house that night were political communications consultant Cameron Davies and Hardyal "Happy" Mann, widely known as a political power broker in South Asian communities, who would later become co-operating witnesses with the investigation of the Office of the Election Commissioner, key to piecing together the whole scheme. 

Their interviews with investigators describe a group of loyal political operatives intent on getting Kenney elected as leader of the United Conservative Party, willing to push the boundaries of electoral norms to do it.   

CBC News provided Duane Bratt, a political scientist with Mount Royal University who has closely followed developments of the kamikaze campaign story, with copies of two key interviews.  

"This is the first real sort of stuff that we've got connecting Jason Kenney himself to what was going on with Callaway," he said.

Kenney has denied any personal knowledge of the kamikaze campaign or its funding.