Infamous political strategist plots Alberta Liberal Party takeover to oppose UCP referendum questions

CALGARY — Political strategist Stephen Carter is planning to take over and use the Alberta Liberal Party as a vehicle to fight all of the upcoming UCP referendum questions in October.Speaking on an April 13 episode of The Strategists podcast with Zain Velji and former Alberta NDP Minister of Environment and Parks Shannon Phillips, Carter said his goal is to turn the dormant party into a major force to fight the UCP and its policies by recruiting members and winning the Liberals’ May 2 annual general meeting (AGM) board election.Upon capturing the party’s board and leadership, the strategy centres on transforming the party into a campaign vehicle focused on organizing a province-wide “No” effort against the UCP’s referendum agenda.Velji asked Carter if he had anything to do with an April 12 post by Nate Pike of The Breakdown on X, which Pike shared from his direct messages, showing the sender said the person was working with a “province-wide team of concerned Albertans” to defeat the referendum questions and would be using the “Alberta Liberal Party as a vehicle to support our organizational and fundraising efforts.”.“Looks like the Liberal Party is the target of a hostile takeover,” Pike said.Carter confirmed he had been the one who had sent Pike that message, adding that it was “not a hostile takeover” and he had been attending board meetings with Liberal Party leader John Roggeveen.The strategist — who has helped run campaigns for Naheed Nenshi and Alison Redford, as well as later serving as chief of staff to Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gondek — argued that operating through a registered political party offers greater freedom to organize and run full-scale campaigns than third party advertisers (TPAs).Carter said the decision was driven not just by fundraising advantages, but by the legal and structural limits placed on TPAs.Unlike political parties, TPAs cannot function as integrated campaign machines like a party that can coordinate across candidates and ridings.He pitched the idea that the referendum questions were “incredibly important” to executives at the Liberal Party and that they “needed a vehicle to stop Danielle Smith [and] her macro-separation ideas.”“We decided that we can proceed together and there’ll be a slate of people we’re trying to elect as board members [at the upcoming AGM],” he said, adding they will have a “brand-new executive dedicated to fighting this referendum.”.Calgary Liberal MP hires Stephen Carter to work as senior communications advisor .Carter emphasized that his approach is not an attempt to bypass any rules, but to operate within them by identifying what he described as an “opportunity” in the existing framework.Central to the plan is what Carter described as a “constellation” of smaller, aligned “No” campaigns against the referendum — multiple groups and individuals running parallel efforts aimed at their own audiences (whether they be UCP, NDP, or Liberal), but connected through a shared direction.“I want as many little campaigns as humanly possible popping up so that people are talking to their own social networks in their own language,” he said, adding that funding is a “giant hurdle.”“I think that we can't take anything for granted with the funding. We're not going into this saying we're gonna fund a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign. We're gonna find small organizations to partner with and try and find ways of maximizing and leveraging dollars because the dollars are always the hardest thing to come by."At the same time, questions remain about how the effort will ultimately be structured and if it will work in conjunction with the NDP and its “For Alberta, For Canada” campaign.Carter described the NDP’s plan as a grassroots ground campaign, while his would be “much more focused on an air war and people talking to one another.”“I think that the two will actually complement each other very, very well,” he said.He did, however, acknowledge the initiative is still in its early phases, with key decisions — including branding, messaging, and whether to use a single spokesperson or multiple voices — yet to be finalized.“The first phase is to get the financial vehicle set. The second phase is to start figuring out some of those answers to [those] questions,” Carter said..The strategist concluded that broader political frustration across Alberta is driving the initiative, and pointed to a recent Leger poll that had the NDP trailing significantly behind the UCP, arguing that the opposition parties have struggled to make a breakthrough with voters.“I get so angry because this is the worst government we could possibly imagine, and people are lining up to support them,” he stated.“This is too important to allow to fail.”

Infamous political strategist plots Alberta Liberal Party takeover to oppose UCP referendum questions

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