Conservatives in Alberta may have it easier than politicos in other provinces. The province consistently elects 90 percent conservative MPs even in challenging elections, and it has elected a provincial conservative party in every election except one in the last half-century.

However, in the last couple of decades, Alberta’s conservatives have become adept at shooting themselves in the foot. This has been evident for years, and if we want to trace the origins of these issues, we need to look no further than the ouster of “King Ralph” and the legacy this rash act left behind.

Ralph Klein’s leadership is a benchmark of conservative governance in Canada. As premier of Alberta from 1992 to 2006, Klein transformed the province with his tough, fiscally responsible policies. He inherited a province drowning in debt and, through decisive spending cuts and privatization, led Alberta to become the first debt-free province in Canada.

Ralph restored the “Alberta Advantage,” but he is remembered for his leadership style just as much as his policy successes. His no-nonsense approach to reducing government size and his commitment to the free market spurred economic growth, particularly in the oil and gas sector, making Alberta a powerhouse of the Canadian economy.

He was a man of the people, known for his plain talk and ability to connect with everyday Albertans, which solidified his popularity. Klein’s legacy is one of economic prudence, reduced government interference, and a belief in individual responsibility—values that still resonate deeply within the province.

His tenure is a reminder of what strong conservative leadership can achieve—but that tenure did not end the right way. How he was forced out of office has left a wake of dysfunction in this province for nearly two decades.

To put it bluntly, Klein was stabbed in the back by a minority of members in his own party. In his 2006 leadership review, he won the support of the majority of delegates, but the number was disappointing at 55.4 percent. This may have been a win, but it was hardly the overwhelming cascade of favour he had expected. Humbled, Klein announced he would step down.

Klein had entered his 2006 party leadership review expecting to receive a much stronger mandate of support. And for good reason. He had brought the PC Party back from the brink of defeat, turning it into one of the strongest provincial political parties in the country. He won four straight majority governments and simply wanted to see his last mandate through before leaving the party for a new leader thereafter. This mirrored the political paths of Peter Lougheed in the 1980s and Mike Harris in Ontario in 2000.

Party insiders, however, had a different idea.

The duplicity of the minority that brought Klein down was apparent throughout that consequential weekend. Take the night following the leadership review vote, when guest speaker Danny Williams, then-premier of Newfoundland, said that if he had accomplished a fraction of what Klein had, he would expect the support of his own party members. The room erupted into a standing ovation. It was clear that those in the room willing to stab Klein in the back didn’t have the fortitude to say it openly.

I was there that day, and I have to say it likely set the path for the next couple of decades for me. It was the first provincial AGM I had attended. I was proud to support Klein, someone I, like many Albertans, grew up admiring. But this was also an introduction to much of the nonsense that happens in politics. I was young and idealistic and I hated the duplicity and back-room shadow-dealing by people unwilling to publicly stand by their actions. I would spend much of the next decade fighting in a conservative civil war that developed in the province, trying to battle the culture I saw on display that day.

The end result of that leadership vote? Alberta’s greatest premier resigned early and called for a PC leadership race to elect a new premier.  These events have haunted Alberta’s conservatives ever since.

Both the PC Party and the Wildrose Party were engulfed in different phases of chaos in the decade that followed. Both parties became publicly defined by infighting, and by 2015, the unthinkable happened: Alberta elected an NDP government.

Thanks to the unifying work of Jason Kenney in bringing the Wildrose and PC Party together under the banner of the United Conservative Party (UCP), as well as the terrible policies of the NDP government that shot that party’s popularity down, Rachel Notley was a one-and-done premier, having been overwhelmingly defeated in 2019.

Kenney’s own ouster amidst COVID-era discontent has led to Danielle Smith’s tenure as premier, and she will also face yet another leadership review in the months ahead. This process Albertan premiers go through remains unique to political leaders in this country who win a majority government. While it has its merits and certainly keeps a leader focused on their party, the public desire to see the leader win not just a majority but a massive majority in these votes is out of touch with new realities and what is best for the conservative movement as a whole. More often than not, these are counterproductive exercises in score-settling, not genuine accountability.

This is particularly a problem given the existence of third-party groups that look to create dissent within conservative ranks, and who are not looking for a victory as much as looking to vote against the leader so that they get a less-than-ideal approval rating at the AGM and their leadership is handicapped as a result. This danger is especially fraught given the potential intervention from those on the political Left who are unlikely to ever support conservatives in a general election.

In 2011, Alberta saw so-called “two-minute Tories” help decide a leadership race. At the birth of the UCP, the Alberta Teachers Association and other NDP-friendly groups bought memberships to try to undermine the UCP and what party members would want.

To counteract this, one change would be to extend how long an individual must be a UCP member before they can vote in a leadership review. Currently, anyone can buy a membership and vote out the leader after just 21 days, even if they’ve never truly supported the UCP.

Only UCP members who joined the party prior to or during the previous election should be eligible to vote in a leadership review. This stipulation would only exist for leadership reviews, and not for nominations or party leadership races.

There are already allegations that third-party groups are trying to recruit and pay leftists to vote in the upcoming UCP leadership review in Red Deer to oust Smith. Whether this is true or not, it’s a very real possibility and goes against the spirit of the entire exercise. As the UCP moves forward as one of the country’s largest political parties, it would be wise to implement firmer rules on who can participate in these crucial decisions, rewarding dedicated members and protecting the integrity of the party.

Fundamentally, though, what Smith and future UCP leaders must do is stop letting losers win the day. If a majority of eligible, committed members call for a leadership review, there should be a leadership review. If they say it is unnecessary, then there shouldn’t be one.

Even more importantly, we should get over the idealistic sense that the leader must have an overwhelming amount of support like they did at conventions past. That idea remains too idealistic for the coalitional UCP and today’s more fractured movement.

Alberta’s conservatives must decide if we want to let the minority agitators and their unpopular agendas continue to dictate to the majority within our party.

We did not benefit from 55 percent being too low of a bar for Klein to continue on. He should have been allowed to go out on his own terms. Instead, he stepped aside. Setting the expectation as such has only hurt conservatives and their subsequent leaders since. It is the only bad legacy he left.

Unless UCP members vote to change the need for a leadership review altogether, which itself would require a 75 percent majority in order to effect such a constitutional change, provincial conservatives will continue to see incessant leadership reviews. But until that happens, as a party we should lose the expectation that a leader must receive an overwhelming majority in such a vote in order to continue on.

Fifty percent-plus-one is the only number that should really matter. A win is a win. We must stop rewarding those on the losing side of these votes. We must stop handicapping our own success, and we must allow our leaders to get on with delivering real results.

The videos were hard to miss and, until you figured out what was happening, shocking. Surveillance cameras captured scenes of seemingly ordinary people going about their day, shopping, walking on the street, when suddenly there’s a sharp puff of smoke and chaos as people scatter and one young man—it’s invariably a young man—is left writhing on the ground in pain.

These are the fuzzy images of one of the most sophisticated military operations ever carried out. Details are still sketchy, but what we know is that somehow Israeli intelligence was able to booby-trap more than a thousand pagers used by Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon and detonate them at the same time in a coordinated attack. Early reports say that about a dozen terrorists have been killed and more than two thousand injured.

And apparently they weren’t done there. The day after the initial operation, there were reports of walkie-talkies and other electronic devices in the care of Hezbollah operatives similarly exploding, causing more targeted casualties and more mass confusion.

The degree of planning required to carry out this operation is impressive enough, but that is not what makes it so sophisticated. It is sophisticated because Israel found a way to conduct pinpoint targeting of terrorists embedded in a civilian population with precious few collateral injuries or deaths to non-combatants. That challenge is the holy grail of modern asymmetrical warfare, and at least in this operation, Israel cracked it.

It is hard to imagine a more targeted attack than one in which the targets identify themselves by carrying a device that marks them out as members of a listed terrorist organisation (which Hezbollah is here in Canada and in most Western countries). There would have been no reason for anyone to be carrying a low-tech device issued by Hezbollah central command to keep in touch with them unless they were part of the terrorist network.

The effects of the plan will be felt by Hezbollah and the rest of the constellation of Iranian-proxy terror organisations for years to come. Following the unprecedented infiltration of one of the most secure residences in Tehran, where Ismail Haniyeh was killed by a planted explosive device earlier this year, all enemies of Israel must now wonder how else their environment has been compromised. They will think twice before turning on the lights.

Of course, neither the care and sophistication of the targeting nor the immediate reduction of Hezbollah’s murderous capacity is enough to satisfy Israel’s inveterate critics. Heidi Matthews, a professor at Osgoode Hall Law School, whose X feed since October 7th displays an unhealthy obsession with the world’s only Jewish state, tweeted that “Each explosion constitutes an indiscriminate attack. Under these circumstances this is an act of terror.”

It didn’t help her case that the video she linked to showed a pager detonation in a busy supermarket in which only the man carrying the pager was injured. Evidently whoever planned the attacks and designed the explosives was careful to put in just enough to hurt the carrier while avoiding or minimising injury to people standing just a couple of feet away. It is hard to think of a less indiscriminate and more proportionate way of targeting the enemy.

And make no mistake, Hezbollah is the enemy. The men in those videos are part of a fighting force much larger than the Hamas militia that invaded Israel on October 7th, many of them battle-hardened from the Syrian civil war, who control ten times more rockets than Hamas ever had in Gaza. They may dress in civilian clothes and walk among the general population, but that just makes them more dangerous and, until this week, almost impossible to target without a ground invasion or a missile strike that risks far more civilian casualties.

On October 8th, before the Israel army entered Gaza in force, Hezbollah joined Hamas’ attack by firing rockets into northern Israel. Since then, they have kept up a daily barrage of rockets and armed drones, forcing the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of Israelis who still cannot return to their homes. One such attack killed 12 Druze children playing soccer earlier this summer. That this has all been coordinated with Iran (and through them, Hamas) was made clear when Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon was revealed to be a victim of the pager attacks.

October 8th was also the day that Professor Matthews wrote that, in light of the outpouring of anger against Hamas’s pogrom, there is “[a] lot of obfuscation going on about what the right of resistance looks like in brutally asymmetrical contexts.” Her disgusting statement was at least right about one thing: asymmetrical warfare poses unique challenges. For the army facing asymmetrical terrorism, the challenge of fighting an army that melts seamlessly into a crowd poses an endless moral quandary.

The laws of war anticipate this quandary and provide some guidance, but every operation must still be carefully weighed to ensure that the imperfect calculus of proportionality is met. (For those interested, I wrote about what that means for Israel’s war against Hamas last October.) But you don’t need to be a professor of law (indeed, it might help not to be) to know intuitively that what we saw this week is a textbook case of a proportional response.

Even Israel’s harshest critics usually pay lip service to the fact that, of course, under the laws of war Israel has the right to defend itself against terrorist threats. This week’s precisely targeted operation is what that self-defence looks like in practice. From their reactions, we can now tell who is serious about the laws of war, and who really just wants Israel to lose.