Ex-UCP MLAs reviving Alberta's Progressive Conservative Party

Two Independent MLAs expelled from the UCP are bidding to resurrect the old party brand of Peter Lougheed and Ralph Klein.

Peter Guthrie and Scott Sinclair are petitioning to re-register the Progressive Conservative Association of Alberta — the party that governed Alberta from 1971 to 2015, before it merged with the Wildrose Party to form the United Conservative Party late last decade.

They are pitching the PCs as an option in the political middle between Premier Danielle Smith's governing party and the left-of-centre NDP, for "people who don't feel like they have a home politically," Sinclair said Wednesday.

"We believe that rebooting the Progressive Conservative Party is going to reignite a large amount of the population who are looking for a new voice and a new vision of a party that's maybe just more balanced, normal and takes care of things that I would say a bigger snapshot of Albertans care about," Sinclair told Real Talk with Ryan Jesperson, an online video program and podcast.

After the UCP formed in 2017, they formally de-registered the former Wildrose and Tory parties in early 2020. An unnamed Albertan reserved the PC name with Elections Alberta, and recently offered it to the two independent MLAs, Guthrie told the podcaster.

To formally register the PC party, the pair has until November to collect at least 8,819 signatures on a petition, representing 0.3 per cent of the provincial voting population.

The MLAs hope to be ready to launch the new Progressive Conservatives this fall, said Guthrie, the former infrastructure minister and MLA for Airdrie-Cochrane.

He quit cabinet in protest in February amid the developing controversy over procurement practices at Alberta Health Services. In April, his demands for a public inquiry into the AHS saga prompted the United Conservatives to expel him from caucus.

Sinclair, the member for Lesser Slave Lake, was ousted from the UCP caucus in March after he publicly criticized the provincial budget for spending too heavily in Edmonton and Calgary at the expense of rural Alberta.

He's since grown harshly critical of his former party and the premier.

On Real Talk, Sinclair said Smith is "almost like a 'miniature version of Donald Trump in Alberta, just so many controversial things that are radical and extreme happening almost on a daily or weekly basis."

The return of the Progressive Conservatives could upend Alberta politics' recent shift to, effectively, a two-party system.

Only the UCP and NDP have won seats in the last two elections, and those parties combined to capture 96.6 per cent of the vote in the 2023 contest — leaving only a sliver of the electoral pie for smaller parties, including the centrist Alberta Party and two parties that use the Wildrose brand.