At least two candidates who had controversial comments surface on the campaign trail are now heading to the Alberta legislature.
A recording of Lacombe-Ponoka United Conservative Party MLA-elect Jennifer Johnson making transphobic comments had the NDP calling for her resignation.
During a forum last September about the public school system versus homeschooling, Johnson was recorded saying Alberta’s high test scores don’t matter because some high-ranking students are transgender.
“It does not matter that we’re in the top three per cent of the world. Who cares if they got 89 per cent in Chemistry 30? Who cares that they’re entering post-secondary — if they’re chemically castrated?” she said in the recording.
Political analyst Jason Ribiero, speaking on a Global News election night panel, condemned both Johnson and Danielle Smith.
“This came very close to when people started to vote,” Ribeiro said of the tape that was leaked only weeks before the election.
“Danielle Smith can put out all the statements that she wants — if she is not committing to never ceding that individual as UCP caucus member, that statement isn’t worth anything.
“What (Johnson) said was garbage, it shouldn’t be tolerated, it is not worthy of any office in this province or anywhere else. And the fact that this could be a potential person where the balance of power could depend upon, is going to be a very challenging sort of scenario for people in this province.”
Johnson was removed from the UCP caucus, but political analysts say it will be a “very quick return to the UCP caucus” with this win.
“If the results are close, that’s going to be a very quick return to the UCP caucus, but if they win with, let’s say, 50 seats, it may be a while,” said Mount Royal University political scientist Duane Bratt.
“If they lose, it will be a while,” he added.
“They have to sit as an independent and certainly work to earn their way back into the caucus,” said former UCP MLA Leela Aheer.
This isn’t the first time UCP candidates have been reprimanded for polarizing comments in the lead up to the election, said former NDP MLA Deron Bilous, who also sat on the panel.
“We’ve seen a number of UCP candidates that have had to apologize or retract or even get replaced in the lead-up to the election because of either homophobic or transphobic or racist comments that were made,” he said.
“I think how low she sits as an independent is going to depend on the outcome of the election,” he said, adding that regardless of what seat she holds, she is likely to vote alongside the UCP.
In southern Alberta, the riding of Livingstone-Macleod saw controversies from both leading parties.
Chelsae Petrovic, the current mayor of Claresholm and UCP candidate-elect for Livingstone-Macleod, made waves in April when comments she made about heart attack victims needing to take responsibility for their condition started circling the internet.
Petrovic said her comments, which were made during a February podcast interview, were taken out of context, as she was speaking to the greater health care problem in the province.
As a nurse, she said she has seen people suffer from heart attacks and not take responsibility for their health.
“This might be political suicide here, what I’m about to say,” she began. “We can look at this, and I see it in health care, I’m going to say it: maybe the reason you had a heart attack was because you haven’t taken care of yourself; you’re extremely overweight, you haven’t managed your congestive heart failure, you haven’t managed your diabetes and there’s no personal accountability.”
Video footage of Petrovic’s opponent, NDP candidate Kevin Van Tighem, saying the province’s energy sector is “resource exploiters” surfaced weeks before the election.
The UCP demanded an apology from Van Tighem for his 2021 comments that compared the resource sector to slavery and pipelines to addiction. These are all points he writes about in his book on Alberta’s energy sector.
Van Tighem was defeated by Petrovic by nearly 10,000 votes.