Party, and in Alberta the Alberta Social Credit Party were completely annihilated by the more moderate Alberta Progressive Conservative Party, leaving both parties as marginal political forces. In the 1980 federal election, the Social Credit Party of Canada lost all of its remaining seats and was forced to disband in 1989. Most of its Western members moved onto the ideologically similar Reform Party of Canada, founded by Preston Manning, the son of Alberta's former Social Credit premier, Ernest Manning. The Reform Party grew out of the province of Alberta and was fed by dissatisfaction with the federal Progressive Conservative government of Brian Mulroney. Right-wing Westerners felt that Mulroney's liberal economic policies did not go nearly far enough, that his government was overly favourable toward the more populous provinces of Quebec and Ontario, that his policies on social issues such as abortion and the death penalty were too liberal, and that, like the Liberal Party of Canada, the Progressive Conservatives had allegedly come to not take Western Canada demands for provincial economic autonomy seriously enough. Though for most of the 1990s, the Tories enjoyed roughly the same electoral support as the Reform Party due to Canada's first-past-the-post system of elected representatives to the House of Commons, Reform dominated the position of Official Opposition. In 1999, the Reform Party was dissolved and joined by some right-wing members of the PC Party to create the Canadian Alliance, formally known as the Canadian Reform Conservative Alliance; however, this new enlarged party was unable to attract any real support east of Manitoba and was dissolved in 2003, merging with the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada to create the contemporary Conservative Party of Canada. This party, led by former Canadian Alliance leader Stephen Harper, won a minority government in the 2006 federal election, with 36% of the vote and 124 seats in the House of Commons out of 308. In Alberta, the Progressive Conservative dominated the government from 1971 to 2015, following slightly right-wing policies under premiers Peter Lougheed, Don Getty, Ralph Klein, Ed Stelmach and Alison Redford. Following the election of the Alberta New Democratic Party and Rachel Notley in 2015, efforts began to 'unite the right' with Jason Kenney elected as PC Leader. Kenney oversaw merger negotiations with Wildrose Party leader Brian Jean, culminating in ratification votes in July 2017 as the United Conservative Party, which elected Kenney leader in October 2017. In BC,