Why UCP activists 'hold the pen' on so many of Danielle Smith's government policies

It's an uphill battle to make the province reverse its ban on vote-counting machines in local elections, the mayor of St. Albert knows only too well.

Even if mayors and councils Alberta-wide reason that adopting manual hand counting will prolong the process and consume vast amounts of municipal resources, two factors stand in the way of Mayor Cathy Heron's push.

One: the UCP government already passed legislation this spring to prohibit the tabulators.

The "Two" that bolsters One: UCP members demanded they do so at last year's convention.

Heron would prefer that the voices of elected local representatives from the cities, towns and villages of Alberta matter more than those of a few thousand attendees of a partisan gathering.

"The government has to remember they don't just represent the UCP people at the convention — they represent all of Alberta," Heron told CBC Radio's Calgary Eyeopener this week. 

The Edmonton-area mayor and other Albertans may not love it, but Premier Danielle Smith appears set to pay disproportionate attention to UCP convention-goers until at least Nov. 2.

Her dual jobs as premier and UCP leader depend on their goodwill toward her, and their vote on that day's leadership review.

Notably, she's spent many of her evenings over the last two months in UCP members-only town halls scattered across the province, to field questions from her party's grassroots. 

It also may explain a chunk of the Smith government's agenda this fall.

Scan the party resolutions her members passed at least year's convention and you'll find the seeds of her promised Bill of Rights upgrades and its enhanced protections for the vaccine-averse, looming reforms for transgender health and pronoun usage in schools, limits on overdose prevention sites, and the prohibition on machine vote-counting (which Smith has told UCP crowds she'll bring to provincial elections next spring).

Speaking to a UCP crowd in Red Deer last month, Smith took pains to explain why it's taken a year for party policy resolutions to become legislation, after wending their way through the law-making processes of the cabinet and government. "I know that it can feel like it takes a long time, but when you pass policy in November, the earliest we can act on it and bring it into the legislature is the following November," she said.

"And we're going to do that." 

She then enumerated many of the above-mentioned policies that began as UCP policy views, to applause from the members-only audience.