CALGARY — Alberta’s justice minister is stepping down from her cabinet post so she can join the race to replace Premier Ed Stelmach.
Alison Redford, who is 45, has announced on Twitter that she is running for the leadership of the Progressive Conservative party.
Redford, who represents Calgary-Elbow, was named justice minister and attorney general in March 2008.
“We have to change the way we talk about setting the direction for this province,” she said Wednesday. “The perspective that I’ve had in my life has always been that we’ve got to sit down with people and communities and ... decide together what the long-term direction should be.”
Redford, a lawyer specializing in human rights, has been active on the provincial and federal political scene since the 1980s. She served as senior policy adviser to Joe Clark when he was external affairs minister in the Brian Mulroney government and worked in the office of the prime minister from 1988 to 1990.
She was appointed by the secretary general of the United Nations to help administer Afghanistan’s first parliamentary election in 2005 and her advisory work has included assignments around the world.
Redford becomes the fourth candidate in the race to replace Stelmach, who announced last month that he will step down later this year. A leadership vote is expected in the fall after a summer-long campaign.
Others vying for Stelmach’s job are former finance minister Ted Morton, Doug Horner, who was the deputy premier and advanced education minister, and MLA Doug Griffiths, who announced his candidacy Tuesday.
Redford said in her tweet that she already has plenty of support from within the Tory caucus, but she got some extra encouragement from one of her biggest boosters.
“Last Sunday night I was talking to my dad,” she said. “And he talked about how a lot of the work I’ve done in my life has been around public service, either here or overseas. And he said, ’Boy, if you ever think you’d have an opportunity to do something like this, then it’s probably time to just seize it and take it.”’
Energy appears to be one of the areas she wants to focus on.
“Alberta needs to be a global energy centre,” she said. “We have to be excellent at everything that’s involved with the development of natural resources — both alternative sources of energy and conventional sources of energy.”