Western Standard - June 17, 2022


POLL Smith and Jean ahead in UCP leadership race to replace Kenney

Topics
United Conservative Party leadership race
Mentioned
Jason Kenney Danielle Smith Brian Jean Michelle Rempel-Garner Travis Taves Angus Reid Gene
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Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

147.49

Word count

505

Sentence count

25


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

After Jason Kenney stepped down as Alberta s premier in May, a new United Conservative Party (UCP) leadership candidate emerged to fill the void left by the departure of Premier Jason Kenny. The emerging roster of leadership candidates comprises some familiar faces who are already out ahead of their rivals.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 The Canadian non-profit Angus Reid Institute has found in a survey that Danielle Smith and Brian
00:00:05.540 Jean are neck and neck in the race for the UCP leadership spot. Smith and Jean currently have
00:00:11.320 the most appeal for Kenny's replacement, with a quarter of Albertans polling their preference,
00:00:16.600 with Smith coming in with 24% to Jean's 23%. Kenny's finance minister, Travis Taves,
00:00:24.340 with 13% is the only other candidate to be selected by more than 10% of Albertans who express their
00:00:31.080 view. The survey showed that half of Albertans were pleased to see Kenny step away from the
00:00:35.760 leadership role. Alberta's summer media soundtrack will be its conservative politicos and their
00:00:41.800 platform narratives as they charge head-to-head into the foray to reach the UCP's leadership spot
00:00:47.900 offered up by Kenny's resignation in May. The summer storyline began quickly as the United
00:00:54.620 Conservative Party leadership hopefuls jostle to capture the imaginations of Alberta's UCP
00:01:01.200 membership ranks, following a soon-to-be former Premier Jason Kenny moving aside after scraping
00:01:07.640 through on a confidence vote last month. Kenny joins the long list of Alberta Premiers who have
00:01:14.860 failed to complete a full term. One in six respondents say they're upset Kenny stepped down.
00:01:21.660 One third of those said they will still vote for the UCP in an upcoming provincial election.
00:01:27.840 That election is not scheduled to take place until May next year at the latest. Kenny will keep the
00:01:34.040 Premier role until the UCP elects a new leader on October 6th. The emerging roster of leadership
00:01:40.220 candidates comprises some familiar faces who are already out ahead of their rivals. Former Wild
00:01:46.440 Rose Party leader Gene, who finished second to Kenny in the inaugural UCP leadership race, and Smith,
00:01:52.940 also a former leader of the Wild Rose Party. Danielle Smith is familiar to most Albertans after having led
00:01:59.480 members in a controversial floor crossing over to the now extinct Progressive Conservative Party in 2015.
00:02:06.880 The event might have been the reason for the PC's defeat in that year's provincial election.
00:02:12.560 Conservative MP Michelle Rempel-Garner is waiting in the wings as she indicated she is considered
00:02:19.520 entering the campaign. Her formal announcement has yet to be made. The Angus Reid poll was conducted
00:02:26.000 before Rempel-Garner expressed her interest in running and consequently she was not included in the survey.
00:02:32.240 In the meantime, Albertans across the province are focused on the issue of inflation. Two-thirds of
00:02:38.080 respondents say it's a top-ranking provincial issue and 44% said the same of challenges facing the
00:02:44.320 province's health services. 71% of Albertans said the government has done poorly on both healthcare
00:02:51.040 and the rising cost of livings. Despite Albertans concerns about UCP's performance on these bread and
00:02:56.480 butter issues, support for both the NDP and UCP remained consistent. The two parties are statistically
00:03:03.040 tied for the second quarter in a row. The UCP has a marginal lead over the NDP with 42% in the polls,
00:03:09.920 followed closely by the NDP who garnered 40% support of those polls. Full survey results can be found at
00:03:16.880 angusreed.org.