UCP faithful set to vote on Danielle Smith, bathroom bans and pollutant classification at AGM

A Danielle Smith leadership vote and policy surrounding gender and net-zero emissions targets will take centre stage when the United Conservative Party Annual General Meeting (AGM) gets underway Friday.

The gathering — billed by the party as the largest political convention in Canadian history — is expected to draw 5,600 UCP members to Red Deer.

“Our party is coming together because they’re excited about the policy discussion,” Smith said Wednesday.

“They want to meet with each other, talk about the direction of the province, and I think it’s a measure of how excited people are about what we’ve done over the last two years.”

Leadership review

Saturday will see UCP faithful vote on the premier’s future.

Stephen Carter, former chief of staff to Alison Redford, says he’s sure it’s something Smith’s office has been heavily focused on this year.

“This is how you wind up being the premier one day and not the premier the next day,” the campaign expert said.

“(Ahead of Redford’s review) we were out there working every day to make sure that we had supporters showing up in the room who would actually vote for our candidate.”

“That’s what’s happening right now.”

Redford pulled in a 77 per cent approval rating in 2013. Four years before that, Ed Stelmach drew in the same number. And in 2022, Jason Kenney received 51 per cent approval.

All three leaders left not long after their respective votes.

“I’m starting to hear expectations that Danielle Smith would be happy if her number started with a seven,” Carter told CTV News. “So, the party is trying to temper expectations.”

When Smith was asked earlier this week what would merit a vote success, she said “better than last time.”

In 2022’s UCP Leadership Race, she received 53.8 per cent of the base’s vote and won the premiership on the sixth ballot.

Carter believes all the laser focus on voting has resulted in a strange agenda as a busy fall legislative session begins.

“You wind up only targeting 10,000 people who are the members of your organization,” he said.

University of Calgary Political Scientist Lisa Young agrees, pointing to recent bills around rights and freedoms that she believes are aimed at the “party’s grassroots.”

“So, then the question becomes,” she said, “how patient is the rest of the population with a government that is preoccupied with these concerns?”

Winning over the grassroots

Young says the party has done its work this year to keep its “grassroots” — more politically active, often rural Conservative voters — happy.

“The party’s grassroots has become emboldened by the kind of policy impact that it has had,” she said.

“They’ve pushed harder than we’ve seen any party members in any Alberta party in recent memory push, in order to ensure that their policy agenda becomes the government’s policy agenda,” she said.

“And they’ve been remarkably successful in doing that.”

On the subject of policy…

A large portion of the AGM is spent voting: on the leader, on the board and on governance.

But the majority of the decisions made over the weekend will revolve around policy resolutions brought forward by party constituencies.

In 2024, the UCP will say “yay” or “nay” to 35 resolutions, some more controversial than others.

Five specifically focus on gender.

Much of the party base has made sexuality a pressing concern, and on Saturday, they’ll vote on a suggestion that the government “acknowledge that there are only two biological sexes and accordingly provide male or female as the exclusive options on all official government documents.”

There will also be a vote to suggest lawmakers “protect exclusively female spaces and categories (such as washrooms, change rooms, shelters, dormitories, sports, awards, etc.) for biological females who were female at conception and their young children.”

And following Thursday’s polarizing bill magnifying gender-affirming care, party faithful will decide Saturday whether it thinks the province should “ensure that all medications, treatments and surgeries attributable to health services for sex alteration practices are classified as elective cosmetic procedures costed solely to the requesting patient.”

Zooming out, there will also be a policy vote on net-zero emissions targets.

In what is sure to be one of the weekend’s more highly publicized and highly analyzed moments, members will vote to “recognize the importance of CO2 to life and Alberta's prosperity by” abandoning those targets and “removing the designation of CO2 as a pollutant.”

All the policies are non-binding, which means member approval doesn't guarantee the ideas will become law.

But since taking the party reigns, Smith has made some party policies government priorities — including Thursday’s legislation.

The premier has said the health policies are meant to protect children from “life-altering decisions.”