A UCP candidate in the Livingstone-Macleod riding has jumped ship.

Kevin Todd is now running for the Alberta Party.

The Nanton Councillor, who's on a leave of absence as Councillor so he can run, says it came down to not feeling completely onboard with the current UCP direction,

"Conservative values were true to me, I grew up with them. At 16 I identified with the conservative values, and I found that maybe I wasn't aligned as close as I was through a 16-year-olds Social Studies class that maybe the party's evolved and maybe I've evolved and anyways I found the Alberta Party."

Todd also says that during his campaigning up and down the riding over the last number of weeks he's found he wasn't as strongly aligned with the UCP as he thought.

"As I went up and down the road, I realized you know what I wasn't beating the drum as loud as I could and when I was talking to folks it seems like there was divisive conversations, either people weren't voting against something, they weren't voting for anything."

Todd is the only candidate running for the Alberta Party in the riding.

Christina Lee has also dropped out of the race for the UCP nomination so it's now down to four UCP candidates running in the Livingstone-Macleod riding.

The nominations opened up once current MLA for the riding, Roger Reid, decided to not run in the next upcoming election.