It’s a bit ironic that Brian Jean, the former leader of the populist Wildrose party, has spent the first week-and-a-half of the United Conservative leadership campaign busing around the province outlining the detailed policies he would bring in if he wins. Meanwhile, Jason Kenney, the former leader of the top-down Tories, has committed to announcing no platform before the Oct. 28 leadership vote, after which he will let members draft the party’s platform.

Um, don’t you two have that backwards? Shouldn’t Kenney be the one with pages of point-by-point policies developed by a small circle of advisers? And shouldn’t Jean be the one proposing that members decide what the UCP does and does not stand for?

During negotiations over the merger of the Wildrose and PC parties this spring, it was Kenney’s people who proposed holding the UCP’s founding policy conference BEFORE the leadership election, but Jean’s people who held out for leadership first, then policy.

Again, that’s the reverse of what might be expected.

So far, Albertans know that Brian Jean is in favour of repealing the carbon tax, repealing the cap on oilsands’ emissions (which is really just an indirect cap on future development of the ’sands themselves), cutting business taxes and “slashing red tape that stifles investment in our energy sector.”

Jean wants to “build a new Alberta Advantage,” by cutting a typical family’s tax burden by $3,000 a year and by lowering small business taxes by 50 per cent.

He wants to cut government spending by $2.6 billion immediately and balance the budget within three years, mostly by reducing the number of managers in government and at Alberta Health Services. The remaining cuts, Jean says, can be achieved by not hiring replacements for civil servants who quit or retire.

Jean also promised at a campaign stop in Grande Prairie on Thursday that he would impose tougher penalties on murderers, rapists and armed robbers, fund more resources for sexual assault victims and try new approaches to handling the opioid overdose crisis.

Jean’s policy announcements contain so much minutia that he even proposes a law preventing sex offenders and other violent criminals from legally changing their names to make it harder for police or probation officers to track them down.

Kenney on the other hand has only made broad promises about restoring fiscal sanity and creating policies that attract more investment in the private sector. (For instance, of the 48,000 jobs the NDP boast have been created in Alberta since the beginning of the year, over 40,000 are in the public sector. That’s unsustainable and that’s something Kenney has pledged to fix.)

But other than that, all Kenney has offered is a “grassroots policy guarantee.” If elected, he pledges to let the policies of the UCP be “developed democratically by its grassroots members, not imposed by its leadership.”

I suppose this is a smart move on Kenney’s part if he thinks the former Wildrosers who have joined the UCP worry he is too elitist.

But frankly, not releasing a definitive policy statement, when everyone clearly knows Kenney has strong positions on most issues, opens him up to charges that he has a “hidden agenda;” that he is keeping his true intentions secret until he is safely elected.

This is especially true on social policy – issues such as gay-straight alliances in high schools.

Given that Kenney comes to the UCP leadership from Ottawa, where he developed a reputation as a social conservative on issues such as same-sex marriage, the longer he refrains from issuing policy positions, the louder will be the hidden-agenda accusations.

Since it is only a little more than two months until the UCP leadership vote, Kenney’s let-the-members-decide approach might work. Or not.