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Alberta’s Progressive Conservatives have laid out the rules for their leadership race, including retroactive finance disclosure and a rule forbidding candidates from doing harm to the party or its brand.

The only declared candidate, Conservative MP Jason Kenney, is running on a platform to merge the PCs with the Wildrose party to create a new right-centre party to challenge the NDP government.

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Party president Katherine O’Neill declined to say Sunday if Kenney’s merger plan would violate that rule.

“I’m not going to go into hypotheticals until we have officially nominated candidates,” she said. “But those are rules that we’ve had in place for many years going into leadership races, and we expect every single candidate to respect and abide by them.”

Kenney’s campaign team said they were reviewing the rules and would comment as early as Monday.

Political scientist Duane Bratt, with Mount Royal University in Calgary, said the rule against doing harm is sure to reignite the battle within the party between pro- and anti-merger factions.