EDMONTON — The deputy leader of the Opposition Alberta Liberals says the focus of her campaign for the party’s top job will be urban renewal.
“I want to reposition Alberta as a modern urban province,” Laurie Blakeman said Thursday after becoming the first declared candidate to replace outgoing leader David Swann.
“Most of us live in urban areas. We should have public policy and resourcing that reflects that.”
Blakeman said that doesn’t mean ignoring more rural issues such as food security, preservation of agricultural land and land-use management.
“But most of us live in urban areas,” she said. “I’m tired of seeing wheat fields and mountains in our logo. That’s not where we live.
“I want to move us forward into the 21st century and not try constantly to reinvent the 1950s.”
Swann announced last month he will step down after the spring session. He said party finances have stabilized under his watch and it’s time for a new generation to lead.
Swann struggled with a number of challenges that will be Blakeman’s to inherit should she win. The Liberal caucus was cut almost in half after the 2008 provincial election and now sits third in popular opinion polls behind the governing Progressive Conservatives and growing Wildrose Alliance.
Calgary Liberal Dave Taylor left the caucus last year to sit as an Independent and last month announced he had joined the upstart Alberta Party as its first legislature member. Another member, Kent Hehr, considered jumping ship by making a concerted run for the Calgary mayor’s chair, but stayed in the fold.
The Liberals now have eight members in the 83-seat legislature. At least three of them — former leader Kevin Taft, Harry Chase and Swann — don’t plan to run in the next election.
The Alberta Party is seeking to supplant the Liberals on the left-centre spot of the political spectrum with a platform of sustainable economic growth, grassroots decision-making and more freedom for legislature members to speak their minds.
Blakeman said one of the reasons she announced her plans Thursday was to clear the air before the spring session begins next week and to put to rest speculation she might join the Alberta Party.
She said friends had urged her to check the party out, but while she found similar goals there, she doesn’t believe it’s ready for the kind of collaboration needed to capture broad support.
“I wanted to know if this other group was giving a home to different voices, to doing things differently. And the answer is: not really.
“They’ve got a strategy and I think they’re going to stick to it, but there’s a lot of other things they haven’t thought about and decisions they haven’t made, and for me and my team and where I wanted to go, that wasn’t well-developed enough.”
Blakeman’s roots are in arts, social activism and women’s issues. She trained as an actor in the late 1970s at the University of Alberta and also graduated with a certificate in public administration. She has run art-house theatres and is the former executive director of the province’s advisory council on women’s issues.
She was first elected to the legislature in 1997 to represent Edmonton Centre, a riding of office towers, well-to-do-families and the grinding poverty of the inner city.
She is married to Ben Henderson, an Edmonton city councillor, and while she had been hemming and hawing over whether to run, he kept pushing.
“I’m really lucky to have a fan in my husband. He was actually the one who urged me to do this long before it ever crossed my mind. He really believed.”
The rules, dates and timeline of the leadership campaign won’t be set until Swann delivers his resignation letter. Blakeman said she’ll use social media extensively to get her message out and will publicly disclose all campaign donations and donors.