Skip the Party, Take Over a Governing One: Alberta's Separatist Turn
Jared Wesley, a professor of political science at the University of Alberta, has been talking about the Alberta independence referendum being held on Oct. 19, and about his work in community town halls across the province, on The Conversation Weekly podcast.
Similar parties have been tried in Western Canada, and they failed to win seats. As Wesley describes it, organisers looked at far-right populist movements in the United States and the United Kingdom and started saying they did not need to start their own political party to make this work. The move instead was to infiltrate mainstream parties, governing ones in particular.
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The switch is about arithmetic. Western Canadian parties of the same kind failed to win seats; working from inside mainstream parties, especially governing ones, skips that queue altogether.
Worth remembering where the tactic was read from: far-right populist movements in the United States and the United Kingdom. A method can travel; whether the movement travels with it is another matter.