Alberta Party
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Alberta Party
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|---|---|
| Active provincial party | |
 |
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| Leader | Greg Clark |
| President | Pat Cochrane |
| Founded | September 24, 1985 |
| Headquarters | Edmonton, Alberta |
| Ideology |
Grassroots democracy Social liberalism Fiscal conservatism Centrism |
| Political position | Centre |
| Colours | Blue, green, and gold |
| Seats in Legislature |
1 / 87
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| Website | |
| www |
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The Alberta Party, formally known as the Alberta Party Political Association, is a political party in the province of Alberta, Canada. The party describes itself as a centrist and pragmatic party that is not dogmatically ideological in its approach to politics.
For most of its history the Alberta Party was a right-wing organization, until the rise of the Wildrose Alliance as Alberta's main conservative alternative to the governing Progressive Conservatives attracted away the Alberta Party's more conservative members. This left a small rump of more left-wing members in control of the Alberta Party. In 2010 the Alberta Party board voted to merge with Renew Alberta, a progressive group that had been organizing to form a new political party in Alberta. The Alberta Party thus shed its conservative past for a more centre-right political outlook. The party has been cited in The Globe and Mail and The Economist as part of the break in one-party politics in Alberta.
The Alberta Party began in the early 1980s as an alliance of small separatist political parties. The right side of Alberta's political spectrum was fragmented by parties spawned in the wake of the National Energy Program and feelings that Premier Peter Lougheed had done little to prevent the economic collapse it allegedly had caused. Some of these parties had already achieved some small success in attaining seats in the Legislative Assembly of Alberta, though in the 1982 general election Social Credit, the Alberta Reform Movement and the Western Canada Concept lost their representation in the Legislature. The Heritage Party of Alberta, Representative Party of Alberta and the Confederation of Regions had been founded in the preceding years, which made for a total of five parties to the right of the Progressive Conservatives in 1985.
On October 30, 1990 this alliance of parties gave way to the creation of a new political party, the Alliance Party of Alberta. This change marked a transition away from trying to build a coalition of parties to full participation in electoral politics. The party participated in two by-elections, and fielded a handful of candidates in the 1993 general election but received only a small percentage of the popular vote in each case. The party did not contest the 1997 provincial election.
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Wikipedia