Rancher who couldn’t beat ex-minister for UCP nomination will run as an independen
You have to go back to 1982 and a couple of angry former Social Credit MLAs to find someone who ran as an independent candidate and won in an Alberta election. Back in 1967, a rancher from Cochrane named Clarence Copithorne was an outsider who ran as an independent candidate and won.
Since then, many people have tried and failed, sometimes spectacularly, to beat established parties without their own political banner.
So why should it be any different when former county reeve Tim Hoven runs as an independent against former UCP finance minister Jason Nixon in the rural riding of Rimbey–Rocky Mountain House–Sundre? The only similarity between Hoven and Copithorne is that they both raise beef cattle.
Welcome to the grudge match between the Jason Kenney supporters in the UCP establishment and the Danielle Smith supporters in the insurgency.
It could also be the truest test of whether the conservative pressure group is effective or not.Take Back AlbertaIf their music actually has wide appeal or if all they know how to do is get what they want in UCP club politics.
Nixing Nixo
Hoven ran against Nixon for the UCP nomination in his west-central Alberta riding last spring. But the party kicked out the former mayor of Clearwater County,reportedly due toActivities on social media and claims At the Coutts blockade last year, Hoven said bad things about the RCMP.
Add the way a challenger to a key member of Kenney’s inner circle is seen as being shut down to the simmering pot of rural conservative anger over Kenney’s COVID public health rules. It fueled the Take Back Alberta campaign to get rid of Kenney as UCP leader, and Hoven was a key regional organizer for that movement.
Kenny was indeed turfed.
Then, when Smith became the leader, those who had backed takers hoped she’d give Hoven another chance, since she’d often said she would.she wouldWhen she ran for office. Smith doesn’t like Nixon, so he’s not in the cabinet, which is full of Kenney’s front-bench politicians.
But when it came down to it, Smith and her party executive said no to reopening his nomination. It turns out that other MLAs in her caucus don’t like the idea of throwing their job security in safe rural ridings back to the wolves in the party base.
This decision didn’t change even when Take Back Alberta’s internal vote-getting efforts last fall helped put the group’s favorite activists on the UCP’s provincial board and when hundreds of people in central Alberta elected a mostly pro-Hoven slate to Nixon’s riding’s constituency board in January.
No matter how much the local UCP machinery complained, the central party stuck with Nixon and kept Hoven from running.
Six weeks before the official start of the provincial campaign, Hoven and the taker-backers finally gave up on Hoven’s plan to get rid of Nixon from the inside and said they would try to do it at the polls on May 29. Hoven said, “The people in this district have never had a chance to vote for a conservative candidate who wasn’t Jason Nixon.” “They want to make sure that people hear what they have to say.”
He still says that he is behind Smith and the UCP. Hoven would be happy to join the UCP caucus if he wins. His signs will be blue and say “Conservative.”
UCPers against the UC
Sheane Meikle will be the campaign manager for the independent candidate, even though he is on the board of Rimbey’s UCP. (He says he’ll take time off during the campaign and then go back to the UCP board, but after he campaigns against the UCP, party leaders may have other ideas.)
No one knows how many other members of the local riding board will leave the UCP or stay and do nothing. They could technically keep Nixon’s campaign from getting the $60,000 in the constituency association’s bank account, but the central campaign could give the money to Nixon and punish the local organizers for going against their own candidate.
There is almost no chance that votes will be split and the opposition will come up the middle. In 2019, the NDP got 9% of the vote in the riding. Before this year, the NDP had never run a candidate who got that many votes.actually lives in the ridingNixon got 82% of the vote, but Hoven’s supporters will say it was the UCP, not Nixon, who won.
The former minister isn’t showing that he or she is worried. Smith is well-liked in his district, and Nixon will run as the candidate for her party.
In an interview, he mentioned a long line of candidates who were not allowed to run for party nominations but ran as independents anyway and lost badly. One of these candidates was a former MLA who ran against Nixon in 2019.
Nixon thought that most of his constituents are loyal UCP supporters who don’t care much about the nomination dust-ups.
Nixon told CBC News, “The NDP will come in second by a country mile in my riding.”
“Any division, even in safe districts, is bad for the party as a whole, which is why we need to spread a message of unity.”
Take tha
Since Smith became leader of the UCP, nomination fights have gone on, and Take Back Alberta has won many of them, even with their preferred candidate in Calgary–Lougheed, which was Jason Kenney’s old riding.
Not all of them have been as involved with the group as Hoven, at least not as much. If these candidates win in May, it will be hard to tell how much of their success is due to the UCP or Smith and how much is due to the people who voted for them.
But in the Rimbey riding, Hoven will be known as a TBA candidate who is against Kenney and for Smith. If he wins without the UCP name, many people will see him as that group’s most important inside delegate.
Let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves, though. Even Meikle admits that it will be hard for Hoven, who is not a member of the UCP, to beat the UCP candidate. Even if the rancher says he is the real pro-Smith candidate and wants to take power away from the conservatives in the province’s establishment, history is not on his side.