LAKELAND - Even though a five-year RCMP investigation into the 2017 Alberta UCP leadership race — a contest he lost to eventual Alberta Premier Jason Kenney — didn’t result in criminal charges, Fort McMurray-Lac La Biche MLA Brian Jean says the whole issue has strengthened the party.
When Alberta RCMP recently announced the conclusion of an intensive investigation that began two years after Jean’s failed attempt to lead Alberta’s newly formed United Conservative Party, Lakeland This Week contacted the local MLA who is also the current Alberta Minister of Energy and Minerals.
Although he was a central figure in the 2017 leadership race and has previously expressed support for the investigation into voter fraud against candidates who ran against him, Jean’s recent response did not include any personal feelings about the file.
“For the sake of Albertans, (I’m) glad there is closure on this file which has been sitting out there for many years,” he told Lakeland This Week in a response that didn’t include his personal feelings about the result.
The area MLA said the real “victim” at the time was the newly-formed United Conservative Party.
“The victim in this matter was our party which was put together by so many people of good will who sacrificed lots to bring together two parties and two organizations into one,” he said.
Two years after Jean lost the 2017 leadership race to Kenney, an investigation was requested by the Alberta Elections Commissioner following anonymous complaints. One of the complainants has since been identified as a one-time Calgary-area MLA. Other complainants have not been identified.
Better now
While the police investigation turned up no solid evidence from the past, Jean says it did help the future of the party. He saw first-hand the improvements in the process during his next attempt to run for the UCP leadership against Danielle Smith in 2022. Although that campaign — which he eventually lost to Smith — involved heated attacks between candidates over hot-button issues, the voting process itself was not an issue.
“Prior to the 2022 leadership race, our party tightened safeguards to protect the rights of our members and ensure fairness and transparency,” he said. “Integrity in political processes matter, which is why I am proud of how our party ran the last leadership race.”
The investigation
Information in the recently released RCMP report from the investigation included a 10-page bar-graph timetable of the investigation and a long list of statistics from the file. The statistics showed the five-year investigation cost taxpayers $460,877 in overtime and travel payments for a team of 65 investigators who engaged in more than 1,700 interviews, viewed more than 25,000 emails and examined a voter database containing 60,000 names. The investigation needed translation services for Arabic, South Asian and Chinese languages, and complied 69,000 document pages.
Although there were no criminal charges stemming from the investigation, the RCMP report does say there were some potential instances of voter irregularities found in their investigation — but too few to have affected the eventual outcome of the 2017 race that saw Kenney win with 61 per cent of the votes compared to runner-up Jean’s 31 per cent and third place Doug Sweitzer’s seven per cent of the 60,000 votes cast.
Jean was asked by the Lac La Biche newsroom for his personal feelings on the investigation’s outcome, but he did not respond to that question.
