Today, a Calgary Grit exclusive, sure to be on the front pages of every Alberta daily tomorrow.<\/p>\n
My sources have learned that Edward Johnson, a long-time PC member, will be announcing his defection to the Wildrose Alliance this weekend. Johnson was the Bonnyville-Cold Lake riding association policy chair from 1996 to 1998, and was a poll captain during the most recent election (he won the poll, I might add).<\/p>\n
His defection is just yet another in long line of high profile PCs who have jumped ship to the Alliance in recent months. The fact that he shares a first name with Ed Stelmach only makes this defection more significant. We can certainly consider Bonnyville-Cold Lake in play now, since Johnson will only need to convince 2,043 of his friends to join him for the Alliance to take the riding.<\/p>\n
OK. Deep breath everyone.<\/p>\n
The above was satirical, but it\u2019s not far off from what we\u2019ve seen of late as the Danielle Smith love-train continues to ride through Alberta (fun fact: The Vatican is considering waiving their waiting period to speed through her canonization<\/em>). Don\u2019t get me wrong \u2013 the PCs are in trouble and I\u2019ve been saying so for a long time<\/a>. MLA and large-scale membership defections are a big deal.<\/p>\n But is it really worth writing a whole column on how Ed Stelmach\u2019s brother-in-law is planning to vote<\/a>? Can we really call Rob Anders \u201cConservative talent<\/a>\u201d? Do we really need to go apeshit every time anyone who has ever held any sort of position in the PCs defects?<\/p>\n I mean, last election we had stories of Preston Manning\u2019s old press secretary voting Liberal and Ralph Klein\u2019s dad going Alliance. And, despite this, Steady Eddie didn\u2019t do too shabby.<\/p>\n Despite these defections, the PCs are still miles ahead of the Alliance organizationally. Hell, the Alberta Liberals are miles ahead of the Alliance organizationally. I don\u2019t doubt the Wildrosers are closing this gap, but let\u2019s not let a good media narrative cloud reality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Today, a Calgary Grit exclusive, sure to be on the front pages of every Alberta daily tomorrow. My sources have learned that Edward Johnson, a long-time PC member, will be announcing his defection to the Wildrose Alliance this weekend. Johnson was the Bonnyville-Cold Lake riding association policy chair from 1996 to 1998, and was a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2614"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2614"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2614\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}