Soon, we will be ‘celebrating’ Dr. David Swann’s seventh month as Liberal leader. As surprised as I was that he could win the race, and as dissapointed as I was that Dave Taylor wasn’t elected, I did hope for, if not expect, good things for the party under the new leader.
I haven’t seen to much of them.
As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t really stick myself at the same point on the political spectrum as Dr. Swann. I consider myself a centre right pragmatist, which, to me, stands somewhat opposed to the direction that the party is taking stagnant position the party is stuck in. Part of my objection is based on winnability, and how best to achieve that goal.
It should come from building a party that is able to engage with the people of Alberta. As said by the hilarious Prime Minister Hacker, you can only lead where the people want to go. For those so dissafected with the political process that they just couldn’t be bothered to vote (I’m looking at you, most of you), there was no political party that effectively reached out to them enough to get them to care enough.
So, how are we going about building this party? Well, the answer de jour seems to be that fantastic buzzword, Renewal. Now, I was under the impression that the renewal report was supposed to be out around a month and a half ago. I’m still wondering where it is.
I hope that the assessment of the ALP that TinyPerfect articulated,
A large number of the old guard (i.e. Taft loyalists) tried to change into a different party, but that effort largely failed and fizzled out. Their approach, which can be summed up as ‘run away from the debt and the name, but otherwise keep doing what we are doing’ didn’t catch on.
The Dave Taylor/Corey Hogan ‘change’ movement takes the opposite approach. They can be summed up as ‘keep the name and the party but start acting like professionals and try to build an electoral machine.’
Ironically, what the Liberals have settled on is something like ‘keep the name, and debt, and the old way of doing everything. Keep it all, status quo, we’re doing grand.’
is incorrect, but I don’t see much evidence of it. It really is insane. Aside from waiting for this report to come out, there really hasn’t been much development or party building in the province at all over the past seven months.
I think the Alberta Liberals are the best possible option for the province in theory, but if they can’t get it together long enough to release a report within two months of the expected release date, I can imagine the ALP government to be almost as bad at organizing and managing the ministries as Special Ed.
Let’s see this report, Mr. Swann. What’s the plan?
The report of the renewal committee is finished and a sneak preview of some of its contents was offered to the Leader about 10 days ago. The actual report will be shared with the Alberta Liberal Party Executive on Monday so they can chart the course ahead.
Our deadline for when the renewal committee was to wrap up its work was self imposed to start with. We admittedly took a bit longer than anticipated but it was necessary to capture and reflect the wide array of opinions and insight contained in people’s submissions. We didn’t want to rush and produce something that wasn’t useful. Some committee members have even volunteered to go through the information with an even finer comb over the summer.
Now for some who enjoy criticizing the ALP, they can say we’re forever naval gazing. I call it research and as far as anyone can tell me, this marks the first time the ALP had asked its members, and Albertans at large, what they felt, and it’s a dialogue we plan to continue.
Mo