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editorial

So, the Progressive Conservative and Wildrose parties are officially merging, and forming a new United Conservative Party. In the always surprising world of Alberta politics, this move at least had long been expected. In fact, given that vote-splitting is what put the New Democratic Party in government, a uniting of the right had long seemed inevitable.

But beyond the electoral logic for the merger, everything else about the new party is profoundly uncertain. What does it stand for? Who will lead it? And most importantly: Who will follow it?

On paper, the new UCP looks like an unstoppable train that is going to roll from unity today to victory in the provincial election less than two years hence. After all, the parties agreed to come together after an overwhelming vote, in which 95 per cent of voting members from each side cast ballots in favour of the merger. At first blush, not much dissension there.

Related: Alberta's Wildrose, Conservatives to merge, will hold leadership convention

And given that conventional wisdom says Alberta is a congenitally conservative place, that surely dooms Premier Rachel Notley's New Democratic government to one term. Surely. Right?

But if there's anything anyone should have learned from the last few years in Alberta politics, it's that the unexpected is always on the menu. Time and again, the best laid plans of the powerful have gone awry, certainty has been stood on its head, and the inevitable has turned out to be entirely evitable.

This is not the first time that Wildrose and the PCs have tried to become one. A mere two and a half years ago, when the PCs were still the permanent leadership of an erstwhile one-party state, then-premier Jim Prentice persuaded nine Wildrose MLAs, including leader Danielle Smith, to cross the floor.

It looked like a stroke of genius. The schism on the right was apparently over. And the PCs, having devoured their rivals, were confidently cruising to victory in the election scheduled for a few months later.

But in that 2015 election, the late Mr. Prentice's PC party, in power since the late Paleozoic era, was overwhelmingly rejected by voters. They ended up in third place. And Wildrose, though stripped of its leadership, retained the followership of its voters. It ended up winning more seats than the PCs, and forming the official opposition. The NDP, their rivals having split the vote, ended up sailing right up the middle.

PC and Wildrose members understand the electoral math. All else equal, unity is better than division. That's a big part of the reason why they voted so strongly in favour of the UCP.

But overwhelming support among card-carrying members isn't necessarily the same thing as overwhelming voter support.

Across the two parties, roughly 50,000 votes were cast in favour of the merger – in a province with more than four million people. What's more, because it was possible to join both parties, and cast a ballot in each, many voters may have voted twice. In other words, somewhere in the neighbourhood of one per cent of the electorate approved the merger. The challenge now is convincing a majority of the other 99 per cent of Albertans to back it.

And that is not necessarily inevitable. The impetus for this marriage has been to unite the right, but the truth is that the Progressive Conservatives were never entirely a right-wing party. That's partly why the divisions arose, and why Wildrose split from them. Instead, the PCs were a big tent, occupying what was at the time the centre of Alberta's political spectrum. They covered a very wide patch of political turf.

And there are some who still want the "progressive" in Progressive Conservative. On Monday, PC MLA Richard Starke said that he would not be joining the UCP caucus, for this very reason.

"I promised the constituents of Vermilion-Lloydminster," he wrote on Facebook, "that I would hold to values and principles consistent with Progressive Conservatism – the values espoused by Peter Lougheed." However, "my experience, and that of many like-minded party members who have left or been driven from the party, is that our views are not welcome, and that the values and principles we believe in will not be part of the new party."

Mr. Starke is in the the minority – but exactly how large is that minority? Will voters of a like mind stick with the UCP? Or will they split, as Wildrosers once did? Could they vote NDP? Could they go elsewhere? Are there enough of them to matter? Alberta politics spent four decades looking like a one-party game, but beneath the surface, a thousand flowers bloomed. As recently as 2008, the Liberal Party took a quarter of the vote.

For the political math of the merger to work, and for one plus one to equal two, either voters of the same mind as Mr. Starke must turn out to be a rarity, or else the future leader of the UCP – to be elected on October 28 – is going to have to do more than just attack the NDP. He or she is going to have to woo both sides of an ongoing divide.

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