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“Sitting as an independent removes me from the current undemocratic atmosphere that is being fostered.”

‘I don’t have any malice’

UCP Leader Jason Kenney said Strankman’s decision was disappointing and thanked him for his work.

“We always knew that having open, democratic nominations would create some tensions within the party,” Kenney said in a statement Tuesday. “That is particularly true when an incumbent MLA is not selected by their local grassroots members.”

“I don’t have any malice to anybody,” Strankman said in an interview. “I just want to do the right thing here.”

Strankman said he hasn’t ruled out running in the 2019 election.

“Maybe I should just go and hang it up, but I have a deep reverence for where we live,” he said. “I’m a lifetime Albertan and I think we have to defend ourselves, both federally and provincially and democratically.”

Kenney said he looked up to Strankman for taking a principled stand against the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly.

Strankman was jailed in 2002 for transporting 756 bushels of his own wheat across the U.S. border. He was charged under the Customs Act for the protest. In 2012, he received a pardon from then-prime minister Stephen Harper. He had served one week of a 180-day sentence.

But the veteran farmer has also been the subject of political controversy.

In 2015, Strankman, who was running for the Wildrose, apologized and retracted a poster that encouraged constituents in Drumheller-Stettler to attend an “old fashioned pie auction” and “BYWP (Bring Your Wife’s Pie!!).” Critics slammed the poster and event as sexist.

He also took heat the following year for an article in a weekly rural newspaper that compared the NDP’s carbon tax to the Holodomor, the genocide of millions of Ukrainians in the 1930s. Strankman and the eight other MLAs who signed the letter apologized.

cclancy@postmedia.com