Alberta Party candidate for Grande Prairie Grant Berg (Left) and GP-Wapiti candidate Jason Jones (Right). Photo/ Courtney Almeida

By Courtney Almeida

Alberta Election

Local Alberta Party candidates reflect on election results

Apr 17, 2019 | 2:17 PM

Alberta Party candidates are feeling mixed emptions after Tuesday’s provincial election. Both Grant Berg in Grande Prairie and Jason Jones in GP-Wapiti finished third.

Party leader Stephen Mandel failed to capture his seat in Edmonton and the Alberta Party closed out the night without even a single seat in the legislature. The Alberta Party held three seats at dissolution.

“It is a surprise. When we were out door knocking, we had warm receptions at every home, so from that standpoint we were optimistic, and we felt good. At the end of this we still feel very good. We ran a very positive campaign. We brought a lot of good awareness to the city, some issues that hadn’t been brought up, so at the end of this we still accomplished a lot,” says Berg.

Berg says he and fellow Alberta Party candidate Jason Jones, “didn’t have the budgets of the machine. Both party machines for that matter, but what we did have, we used well. We did everything that we could with the volunteers that we had and the money that we had.

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The results of yesterday’s election will provide several questions for the future of the Alberta Party. “It would have been a much better position if we had 8 or 12 seats in the legislature, it’s a much better launching point and in all honesty, that was kind of what I was hoping for,” said Berg.

“I don’t want people to be defeated if they had a dream or a vision in supporting Alberta Party or just supporting forward growth. Don’t give up on it. Just because the election didn’t go the way we wanted it to, doesn’t change how we can interact as a community,” added Jones.

While it wasn’t the outcome that he had hoped for, Jones says, “I appreciate each and every vote that made a stand and said, ‘we want something different’.”

Berg admits that in the past he was a long-time supporter of conservative parties, saying “I had voted PC every election in my life so I can understand why a lot of these people voted that way because that’s the trend for Alberta. I just wanted something new and something fresh. Something that I firmly believed in and that’s why I moved over to the Alberta Party.”

While Berg understands that Albertans are set in their historically conservative voting ways, he says he doesn’t stand with Jason Kenney and that is part of why he decided to run in this campaign.

“Historically, within the Progressive Conservative Party, it would make shifts to the right and the center based on the leaders. In this case, I see Jason Kenney as far right, which is just a little further right than what I am.”

Berg explains that while he is not personally a Jason Kenney fan, “there are some scandals that need to be resolved.”

Both Berg and Jones describe the 2019 election as “extremely polarizing”. “In the last few days, we saw a lot of our support slipping as that polarization set in,” said Berg.

“If there wasn’t so much noise people would hear that we were really focusing on forestry, building up technology, building growth, building opportunity for our children, not just opportunity for tomorrow,” said Jones. Jones is hopeful that in four years from now, “people will grab onto the necessity of a forward plan.”

“I was born and raised in Alberta and I have lived through every up and every down over 50 years. There’s been times when we’ve been extremely successful but there have been times when I was younger that we starved. We didn’t have a heck of a lot of food because my dad was either in the oil patch or directly affected by it with his business. As much as I value it and I see that it is a key part of our economy, as is agriculture and as is forestry, we absolutely have to diversify so that when we do hit the oil roller coaster, we’re buffered by it,” says Berg.

When it comes to the current state of the oil and gas industry, Berg says, “we need to get some added value to our oil and gas industry, rather than relying solely on a pipeline. We’ve got one customer and that customer is now our biggest competitor.”

Jones says he is concerned with what the next four years will mean for the Peace Country directly.

“I grew up here. I grew up under a conservative government. I’ve been here and they haven’t invested in this community.” He believes that Grande Prairie is not a priority to the UCP and that, “Grande Prairie has been an economic driver, most of the time, for the entire province.”

When it comes to their own political futures, both Berg and Jones say they wouldn’t rule out another run four years from now.