Brian Mulroney’s death last year led to many reconsiderations of his record as Prime Minister, stressing accomplishments and positive contributions that had often been ignored or downplayed in the past. Despite flaws and shortcomings common to all political leaders, Mulroney had done some good things and established a credible record of leadership in some very turbulent times. As the encomiums flowed, it was easy to miss one rather large irony: this coincided with an orgy of reporting on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s spectacular decline in public esteem as if it were an unprecedented fall from grace for a leader who had entered office with a majority government a decade earlier. It was now easy to forget that Mulroney had sunk even lower in polls in his last year in office following two successive majority governments. It was even pointed out that in his final days as Prime Minister, Mulroney’s approval ratings had dipped below the proportion of people who believed that Elvis was still alive.

Like Trudeau later, Mulroney finally accepted reality and ducked out of the way just before voters demolished his Progressive Conservative Party in the 1993 election, leaving it with just two MPs. Trudeau handed his party over to a successor who has just led it to a fourth term.

It had become eminently fashionable in the media to heap scorn on Trudeau as PM – buoyed by Pierre Poilievre’s remorseless vilification campaign blaming everything that had gone wrong or was imagined to have gone wrong on the deliberate malice and/or incompetence of Justin Trudeau. This campaign was apparently rewarded by the precipitous rise of Poilievre’s obsessively anti-Trudeau Conservative Party to stratospheric heights in the polls – until its equally precipitous fall in 2025. The anti-Trudeau wave was also part of a postpandemic global tsunami of anti-incumbency rage threatening to overwhelm leaders and governments everywhere.

The rise and fall and rise again of Mulroney’s reputation offers a salutary caution to those ready to bury Trudeau as a historic failure. Different men, different parties, different times, of course. But there are reasonable grounds to believe that the long view of Trudeau as PM will be more nuanced and balanced than the indictment sheets delivered by many commentators in the months leading up to and following his resignation and departure. Here is some of the “case for.”

A left-centre government

The first consideration in any assessment is: what goals or objectives did Trudeau set for himself and his government? It was apparent from his successful 2015 campaign, which resulted in his one and only majority government, that Trudeau’s Liberal Party was not the Liberal Party led by his predecessors, despite his invocation on election night of Laurier’s “sunny ways.” The old Laurier–King–Saint-Laurent–Pearson–Pierre Trudeau–Chrétien Liberal Party was a classic centrist catch-all, big-tent, brokerage party, one that so adroitly shifted between centre-left and centre-right in response to the prevailing winds that it dominated federal politics from the late 19th to the early 21st century. Now the political centre had shrunk as polarization increased – not to the same precipitous degree as in the USA, but markedly in Canada as well, especially as Stephen Harper’s unified Conservatives shifted rightward.

In 2011, Harper achieved his only majority government, but it was matched in opposition for the first time by a surging NDP under Jack Layton that reduced the Liberals to third-party status. This seemed to presage a more programmatic and ideological right-left politics. If Layton had not succumbed to cancer, that scenario might well have played out in 2015. Instead, Layton was succeeded as NDP leader by Tom Mulcair, a former Quebec Liberal cabinet minister and a small-c conservative social democrat.

This presented Trudeau, as the newly installed Liberal leader, with a golden electoral opportunity, one that he did not fail to grasp. Mulcair, worried about scaring away cautious support from his “socialist” party, pledged that an NDP government would run balanced budgets and would not under any circumstances raise taxes, even on the wealthiest. Trudeau outflanked the NDP on the left by promising that he would run deficits if necessary to fund progressive programs and impose a surcharge on high income earners.

NDPers like to claim that Liberals habitually campaign from the left but govern from the right. Trudeau campaigned from the left but made it clear from the onset of his government that it would govern from the left, or at least the centre-left. That is the consistent thread that runs through his record in office, and judgements on his record reflect the ideological inclinations of observers, conservatives being particularly critical. “Canada is broken” is obviously an exaggeration, but it may be that Trudeau Liberal economic policies will in retrospect be found severely wanting. That said, it is also fair to examine the Liberal record in terms of what the Trudeau team set out to accomplish, not just in terms of the agendas of those opposed.

Liberal finance ministers in the past tended to represent Bay Street perspectives on economic policy. Bill Morneau, successful Bay Street executive and Trudeau’s first finance minister, was cut from this cloth. Eventually forced out, Morneau published a memoir, significantly entitled Where to from Here: A Path to Canadian Prosperity, in which he wrote of his incomprehension that when he confronted the PM with his contrary vision of economic policy, Trudeau appeared indifferent. In the past when business spoke, prime ministers, Liberal or Conservative, had listened. Morneau’s departure signalled the virtual demise of the once-powerful Bay Street wing of the Liberal Party (at least until Mark Carney the central banker and Goldman-Sachs alumnus took over, although the jury will be out on Carney for a while yet). Trudeau’s Liberal government did not just drift to the left of centre from time to time with the prevailing winds: it was stationed on the left-centre.

As a left-centre government, the Liberals had some significant achievements. Foremost is their 2016 revamping of the child tax benefit they had inherited from previous governments. The new Liberal Canada Child Benefit (CCB) was a tax-free payment targeting low- and middle-income families, providing between $6,000 and $7,000 per year for children under six and between $5,000 and $6,000 for those aged six to 17. This is a social program that has really worked. The CCB lifted about 300,000 children out of poverty and helped reduce child poverty by 40 per cent between 2013 and 2017. So successful was the CCB that it became the rare example of a Canadian policy copied by the Americans when the Obama administration introduced a version as a pilot project; it appeared to be working well until Republicans in Congress scrapped it.

Liberal social reform credentials under minority governments after 2019 were cemented under the supply and confidence agreement with the NDP. Under this arrangement, the Liberals brought in universal $10-a-day daycare (borrowed from Quebec), dental care for those not covered by private plans and a (partial) national pharmacare program. On daycare, it should be noted that upon assuming office in 2006, Stephen Harper’s Conservatives had scrapped a national daycare program that the previous Liberal government had negotiated with the unanimous approval of the provinces: the contrast between Liberal and Conservative governments on daycare was stark.

The Liberal-NDP supply and confidence agreement was, until the NDP pulled the plug, a kind of paradigm of where Trudeau Liberalism had arrived on the ideological spectrum. On political values, social issues and policy preferences, Liberal supporters were and remain almost indistinguishable from the moderate centre-left views of NDP and Green supporters, as well as Bloc supporters in Quebec on most issues save federalism and the Constitution. The political problem for the centre-left is that this relatively large section of the electorate is split two, three and even four ways in partisan terms, while the relatively smaller centre-right grouping represents a rock-solid Conservative base.

Trudeau in effect managed to create a de facto united centre-left under his Liberal banner in 2015, but this temporary realignment did not last as the NDP recovered enough of its traditional strength so that, along with the BQ in Quebec, it prevented Trudeau from obtaining majorities in 2019 and 2021. The supply and confidence agreement with the NDP was a transitory but productive recreation of a broad centre-left. It appears to have had little political payoff: the NDP failed to get much credit from its core electorate while the Trudeau Liberals plunged in the polls. The 2025 post-Trudeau election, however, showed another de facto united centre-left as the Carney Liberals swept NDP and BQ seats into their camp.

Energy and climate change: Failures of execution

A further complication in left-right politics: the Conservative base, although stable and enduring, is less efficient in translating votes into seats than the Liberal Party because it is disproportionately concentrated in Alberta and Saskatchewan, where many Conservative votes are wasted (one reason why Harper, in five elections as Conservative leader, achieved a majority only once, in 2011). This electoral asymmetry imparts a regionalist dimension to the left-right partisan alignment, as evident in assertions of “western” alienation and even threats of “western” separation from a more left-centrist and Liberal Canada. Not surprisingly, the wave of anti-Trudeau sentiment was always strongest on the Prairies, although certainly present in parts of British Columbia and Ontario as well.

It is against this background that Trudeau’s record on the crucial issues of energy resource development and climate change must be assessed. His National Climate Plan was the most comprehensive attempt at countering climate change yet mounted in this country. At its heart was carbon pricing, largely copied from what had initially appeared as a successful and path-breaking initiative by the BC Liberal government of Gordon Campbell. This was a policy that should have appealed to both environmentalists and free market enthusiasts, resetting the market to reflect the negative externality effects of carbon emissions while at the same time compensating individuals for their additional fuel costs.

As everyone knows, the carbon tax is now dead, both in Canada and in BC, but make no mistake: its ultimate rendering as politically toxic is an appalling example of good evidence-based public policy being destroyed by a deplorable demagogic campaign of misinformation and misrepresentation. Pierre Poilievre may have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in the 2025 election, but his Orwellian “Axe the Tax” agitation succeeded in twisting public perception of carbon pricing into a grotesque caricature.

Sadly, the Trudeau government signally failed to explain its policy or even to properly identify the rebate monies deposited in people’s accounts as direct compensation for higher prices at the pump. Then it gutted credibility from the tax by offering a special carve-out for Atlantic Canadians’ heating oil costs in response to panicky Liberal MPs from the Maritimes. The ignominious defeat of the carbon tax was self-inflicted as well as partisan-inflicted.

Carbon pricing was at the heart of the Trudeau climate plan, but there were more policy instruments in the toolbox, many of which remain in place. It is significant that the Alberta and Saskatchewan governments, echoed by the federal Conservatives, continue to demand the retraction of virtually all the other tools, such as emission caps. The alternative to Trudeau’s National Climate Plan was never a different plan, certainly not a better one; it was always no plan at all. Trudeau should be credited with taking the risky initiative and tying his government to achieving the plan’s objectives. Failure was not the result of a poor plan but of implementation and execution in the face of implacable, and often unscrupulous, opposition from climate change solution deniers. What remains to be seen is what elements will survive into the Carney government, but what does will constitute Trudeau’s climate legacy.

The other side of the environment-energy imbroglio is Trudeau’s decision to take federal ownership of the Trans Mountain Pipeline, expanded to triple its capacity to carry Alberta oilsands bitumen to the BC coast and on to Asian export markets. Originally part of a deal Trudeau made with then–Alberta NDP Premier Rachel Notley in exchange for her government’s support for the National Climate Plan, this proved a political loser.

On one side it mobilized environmentalists and climate activists into opposition. On the other it bought absolutely no political credit – not even a glimmer of gratitude – from Alberta for the Trudeau Liberals, or for Canadian taxpayers who were made to assume the $34-billion-plus liability on behalf of getting Alberta’s oil to foreign markets, not to speak of supporting the huge carbon footprint of the oilsands production. Perversely, it even seemed somehow to deepen Alberta enmity to all things Liberal, although the previous Conservative government, led by Calgary’s Stephen Harper, had despite its pro-development rhetoric managed to build not a single pipeline.

Indigenous relations: Reframing the discourse

Another focus of attention in the Trudeau years was Indigenous relations. If America is fixated on race relations given its long violent history of slavery and segregation, Canada’s terrible treatment of Native peoples looms as large here. Trudeau’s government did begin to go down the path of reconciliation with First Nations in a more serious way than any of its predecessors. Critics are quick to point out that rhetoric has exceeded reality in Trudeau’s reconciliation actions. Substantial amounts of money were directed to First Nations and priorities drawn. Unfortunately, Trudeau tended to make promises that in their full scope went unrealized.

The promise to end all water advisories on reserves was dramatic, but by the time of Trudeau’s resignation some three dozen advisories remained. Yet well over a hundred had indeed been ended, with lives on those reserves made easier. The intent was admirable but the devil was, as so often, in the details; problems remained intractable despite good will. Still, the reframing of the discourse at the governance level is itself of historic significance, something that many First Nations leaders readily acknowledge – especially when government language and actions are seen in conjunction with court decisions that in recent decades have become more supportive of Indigenous claims. There is a paradigm shift at work here and the Trudeau government at least made itself more of the solution than the problem.

Calm leadership in times of crisis

Governments rarely get to choose their agendas according to their own preferences, but more often have agendas thrust upon them. As Harold Macmillan famously put it, what really directs governments is “events, dear boy, events.” Justin Trudeau as Prime Minister faced some grave unanticipated crises and, it has to be said, performed well under stress.

The most serious one was the COVID-19 pandemic, which of course was a global crisis challenging governments everywhere. In this context, under Trudeau’s cool and calm leadership, Canada’s record stands up well against background conditions of scientific uncertainty, unprecedented economic lockdown and millions of deaths worldwide, not to speak of erratic behaviour from some provinces. The Globe and Mail grumpily awarded the Liberal government the Olympic Gold Medal for its acquisition and rollout of vaccines. In that chaotic time, mistakes were made of course. But overall, and especially in relation to the two countries closest to Canada, the U.S. and the U.K., the Liberal record of coping with a formidable shape-shifting threat was not bad, all things considered. The Canadian per capita death rate from COVID-19 was two and a half times less than the rate in the United States.

Another crisis thrust upon the country was Donald Trump’s first-term effort to upend NAFTA at the expense of Canada and Mexico. Trudeau’s negotiators under Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland were able to secure a revised deal that minimized damage to Canada. Trudeau did not carry out the negotiations – credit for that has to go to Freeland. But he did preside over a successful negotiation and, it should be noted, made sure that the negotiating team did not just include big business interests but also representatives of labour and other stakeholders. The irony, of course, is that Canada was indeed so successful that a vengeful Trump in his second term has set out to wreck everything secured by Canada during his first term as contrary to his America First mantra.

The final crisis arose out of the pandemic crisis, as a kind of perverse offshoot or collateral damage from the pandemic. The “Freedom Convoys” that blockaded Canada-U.S. borders and occupied downtown Ottawa in 2022 began as an ostensible protest against vaccine mandates but quickly escalated into a Canadian version of the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol (funded from many of the same sources) – a far-right challenge to the very legitimacy of the Trudeau Liberal government.

When the unwillingness or inability of the municipal and provincial policing and political authorities to put an end to the Ottawa occupation became all too apparent, Trudeau controversially invoked a “public order emergency” under the never before used Emergencies Act. The strict legality of that invocation is still being adjudicated in the courts, but as public policy it was a brilliant success: under federal direction, the occupation was dispersed without injury on either side and emergency powers were revoked after a handful of days. The government was unusually transparent in making unredacted cabinet deliberations and secret communications available publicly to a commission of inquiry, and Trudeau acquitted himself admirably in lengthy bravura public testimony before the commission, coolly and patiently explaining the rationale for and necessity of emergency powers.

These qualities – not always on display over his decade in office – were once more on public view in his last days as leader, now facing the existential threat that Trump has posed to annex Canada into his emergent American fascist autocracy. Previously publicly insulted by the rogue President – joining a hall of honour including Ukrainian president and war hero Volodymyr Zelensky – Trudeau rose to the occasion in a moving account of Canada’s historical record of standing beside America in war and peace and of the sacrifices Canadians would make to preserve their sovereign nation. As if in late recognition, Trudeau’s last approval rating began rising once again.

Trudeau’s record is marred by many failures, of which ample evidence has been offered by others. It is far too early to authoritatively place him in relation to other prime ministers of the past, including his own father. But it is well to remember that historical ledgers usually have two sides: liabilities but also assets.

Image: BC Premier David Eby

Geoff Meggs provides a detailed, and very accurate, description, of the British Columbia provincial election that saw the NDP come within a hair’s breadth of turning a strong majority government into a loss to a party that had scarcely existed until Premier David Eby called the election. Election night in BC was a shocker, and Meggs explores the impact of the shock waves on BC politics.

It is tempting to see BC as an idiosyncratic, one-of-a-kind political scene. We certainly do things out here on the Pacific coast that are seen nowhere else. Take the sudden decision by BC United leader Kevin Falcon, without a moment’s advance warning, to scrap his party’s campaign and surrender to a Conservative rival whom he had kicked out of his own BCU caucus and denounced nonstop as an extremist, tinfoil-hat-wearing loony. The veteran TV reporter Keith Baldrey remarked that while he had often witnessed BC parties tossing their leaders off the roof, never until now had he witnessed a leader tossing his party off the roof!

Despite BC exceptionalism, I think Meggs’s analysis would benefit from a wider lens situating the turmoil in BC politics in a global frame. Looking outward, the defeat or near-defeat of a previously powerful incumbent government by previously weak but newly insurgent opposition forces is not shocking but rather the current global norm. Incumbency in democratic political systems was once thought to bestow an advantage; oppositions, it was often remarked, had to wait for governments to defeat themselves. Now incumbency is more of a curse than an advantage. In an atmosphere of highly charged negativity against “politics” of any kind, incumbent governments are rarely given credit for any policy successes but are relentlessly blamed for mistakes both real and imagined.

Consider recent election results in the Western world. Most shocking is the triumph of Donald Trump, sweeping out a Democratic administration that had made the American economy what The Economist called the “envy of the world” amid widespread misperception of dire economic failure. United Kingdom voters just administered to the Tory party the worst defeat in its long history. France and Germany are both in the throes of anti-incumbent rage. In Canada, a Liberal government in Ottawa, in power for the past decade, has sunk to abysmal levels in the polls. When another election is finally called, it almost certainly faces near-destruction at the hands of unforgiving voters.

Nor is anti-incumbent rage confined to Western democracies. Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, widely expected to consolidate quasi-authoritarian dominance for his Hindu nationalist party, unexpectedly lost his majority and had to scramble to find coalition partners. Similarly, the once electorally unchallenged African National Congress lost its majority in a South African election and has had to enter coalition arrangements to stay in office. In Asia, incumbents have been swept out of office in South Korea and Taiwan. In Japan, the Liberal Democrats, in office for all but a handful of years in the postwar era, just lost their majority.

Anti-incumbent rage arises from a multiplicity of factors, some of which no doubt remain submerged from view for now. Obvious drivers are postpandemic inflation, the affordability/availability crisis in housing, the apparent breakdown of public health systems, and the general hollowing-out of state services after years of neoliberal depredation of the public sector in favour of private enrichment. Climate change has fostered deep anxiety about the future while at the same time setting off hostile public reactions to remediation measures such as carbon taxes and mandated changes in energy-use behaviour.

Looming behind all of these is the contradiction between rising expectations for postpandemic collective action and disillusion with how far governments fall short of meeting these expectations. Any political party unlucky enough to be caught holding the baggage when voters return to the polls can expect to be the target of frustration. Some will survive, barely; some will suffer reverses that fall short of massive defeat but cloud their future; some will simply perish.

One doubtful explanation sometimes offered for anti-incumbent voting is that there is a rising wave of right-wing populist nationalism (à la Trump and Poilievre) that is threatening centre-left or liberal governments everywhere. Many media commentators in BC were quick to suggest the election results were a rebuke to what some called a radical left-wing NDP agenda and a massive provincial shift toward the same populist conservatism that Poilievre was driving at the federal level.

Before jumping to that conclusion, and setting aside for the moment the questionable idea that the BC NDP ever had a “radical left-wing” agenda, one could note that two days after the BC vote, New Brunswick voters provided a landslide victory to a reformist-minded Liberal (!) Party and a brutal defeat for Conservative incumbents who had veered far to the right, even tossing Premier Blaine Higgs from his own riding where he had previously been unassailable. Within a week, voters in Saskatchewan reelected an incumbent right-wing government, but with a sharply reduced majority and a return of the NDP opposition to genuine competitiveness. Anti-incumbency has no inbuilt ideological direction.

The BC election was a test of whether a relatively unified centre-left could successfully withstand a united right. So 2024 was really a two-party contest in which the centre-left party was the incumbent, burdened with responsibility for all its policies and actions that had accumulated grievances over the past seven years. On the other side, the right was unified under a brand new tabula rasa party that could rage-farm by focusing on every negative on the other side, while having no record of its own to impair its image as a fill-in-the-blanks alternative, which every angry voter could invest with their hopes and wishes.

Meanwhile, the NDP tried to point out to an often inattentive or uninterested public that John Rustad’s Conservatives were right-wing nutbars; climate change deniers in a province that has suffered heat domes, atmospheric rivers, floods and forest fires on a scale never seen before; anti-vax conspiracy theory crazies (COVID vaccines will magnetize you); and bigots and racists eager to rouse hatred against ethnic and religious minorities, Indigenous people and trans kids.

But this was the same tool that BC United had tried to weaponize against the Conservatives, and it had proved self-destructive. As the failed Kamala Harris Democratic campaign has proved, even demonstrating that your opponent is a mentally unhinged narcissistic egomaniacal con man, serial liar, fascist, rapist and convicted felon generates little if any mileage in the coarsened political world of 2024. Conservative candidates who had been publicly revealed as conspiracy-addled extremists were not removed by Rustad and some won their seats.

In other words, Eby and the NDP were up against difficult odds. Yet they scored an impressive 45 per cent of the vote, down just under 3 per cent from the 2020 election in which the NDP, then led by John Horgan, coasted to a huge majority of seats. In that election, before inflation had reared its ugly head and before the unaffordable housing spectre had fully appeared, the NDP basked in public approval of its effective handling of the pandemic. The party’s 2024 vote was almost 5 per cent higher than its 2017 vote that first brought it to office. Never before in its history has the BC NDP gained a third successive mandate, even though this time its opposition was not fractured as it was under previous NDP governments in the 1970s and 1990s. This is no small achievement.

Another near-universal phenomenon of Western democracies over the past few years has been the radicalization of once-mainstream centre-right conservative parties. In many countries mainstream conservative parties have been surpassed or even displaced by the rise of far-right, in some cases neofascist, populist parties. In Italy, Austria and the Netherlands these parties have either gained power or come first in the vote; in France and Germany they have attained a position where they seriously threaten victory; in the U.K. they have lethally eroded the Tory party. In the United States, the takeover and total absorption of the Republican Party by Trump and the far right displays a more direct route to the radicalization of conservatism: pre-empting more extreme parties by outdoing them. Canada’s federal Conservatives, after dumping their former centrist leader in favour of Poilievre, have adopted much the same strategy. They have smartly seen off the sole right-wing challenger, Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party, by leaving it little or no space on the far right.

Kevin Falcon’s bizarre midelection surrender to John Rustad signalled a rapid compression of the radicalization of the right in BC. Instead of a steady erosion of the centre in the mainstream conservative party, we witnessed its instantaneous collapse, a sudden disappearance into a black hole. Falcon had, until the last moment, been pursuing a relatively centrist direction for his party. Kicking Rustad out of the caucus was in keeping with pursuing this image: there was no place in the party for climate-change-denying kooks. But once the election was on, the rapid rise of the Conservatives alongside the equally rapid decline of BC United, and the strident demands of at least the harder-edged elements of BC business, as described by Meggs, were enough to push the idea of a viable centre-right party over the brink into merger and oblivion.

In the United States, there was no shortage of commentators in 2016 vainly trying to normalize Trump as just another Republican politician. Similarly in BC, there was no shortage of people quick to claim that the Conservatives were just the latest embodiment of the old Liberal-Conservative centre-right coalition that, under various names such as Social Credit and BC Liberals, had governed the province most of the time from the 1940s to 2017. But just as Trump is anything but normal, Rustad’s party is most emphatically not a continuation of the long centre-right coalition tradition. It is instead a self-conscious break with that tradition, ushering in a new era of heightened polarization in BC politics.

It is true that, at the rhetorical level, BC politics had – unusually by Canadian standards – been polarized along left-right lines. Social Credit framed every election and every issue as a contest of “free enterprise vs. socialism.” In reality, Social Credit could be pragmatic “socialists” when it suited them: W.A.C. Bennett nationalized private power companies and private ferries into crown corporations. Gordon Campbell’s BC Liberals kept up the free enterprise rhetoric but initiated a revenue-neutral carbon tax, the first of its kind in North America and a remarkable environmental policy innovation, later copied at the federal level. It’s now being abandoned left and right in the face of demagogic “Axe the tax” campaigns, but that’s another story.

Rustad’s radicalized conservatism falls short on that kind of pragmatism. On two of the biggest issues that in the 21st century define the policy divide between “right” and “left” – Indigenous sovereignty and rights and action to protect the planet from climate change – Rustad and his party stand as out-and-out reactionaries. BC First Nations recognized the Conservatives as full-throated opponents of reconciliation. And the Conservative leader openly rejects the idea that human action has any impact on climate change. It is against that background of uncompromising radicalized far-right opposition that the reelected Eby government will have to proceed, and with a paper-thin majority of one seat. Not an enviable agenda.

Which brings me back to Meggs’s description of the lurid picture of the BC NDP painted by the Chip Wilsons of the BC business world. “Communist” is, by any reasonable standards, an ideologically illiterate caricature. But what can we make of the less hysterical charge that the Eby government has a hard leftist agenda? The media love the alleged objectivity of the equivalency argument: if Trump has pulled the Republicans far to the right, the Democrats must have gone as far to the left; if the BC Conservatives have a radicalized rightist agenda, it must mirror a radical socialist agenda on the part of the NDP.

Sorry, media folks, forget your alleged “fairness equals equivalency” argument. In neither case is there any equivalency – certainly not between the BC NDP and the BC Conservatives on ideological extremism. The Greens and the extraparliamentary environmental movements in BC argue strenuously that the NDP has fallen far short of a radical green agenda, especially with regard to LNG and old-growth logging; lengthy and bitter protests at Fairy Creek and the Coastal Gas Link pipeline have pitted the environmental left against the NDP government.

When I view the BC NDP’s record over the past seven years what I see is not consistent ideological politics of a socialist variety. Instead I see a government broadly committed to evidence-based public policy, with a social conscience. That is certainly true of its efforts with regard to the big issues of housing and the drug crisis. In both cases, clear past policy failures in which all parties share demand innovative policies, not ideology or moralizing slogans.

The range of policies brought forward by the BC NDP to cope with the housing availability/affordability crisis has made BC the leader in Canada. Some initiatives work better than others, but the government has proceeded on the assumption that success will not come from timidity and caution but from boldness and trying all avenues. Encouraging numbers are already in: not enough yet, surely, to appease the justly angry locked out of the purchase market and battered by the brutally expensive rental market, but a start.

On the drug crisis, the legalization initiative that has drawn such condemnation was no more than a three-year experimental pilot project. Clearly a mistake was made when the government failed to exclude all public spaces as well as schools and playgrounds from open consumption, but once that became apparent it responded by rolling back the initiative to accommodate reasonable community criticism. Even the reduced program may be scrapped altogether at the end of three years, if the evidence points to such an outcome.

In both these policy areas, rather than putting forward an ideological agenda, the government has shown a willingness to innovate and improvise in the face of serious problems.

In 1932, on the eve of a presidential election in the shadow of the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt declared, “The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.” Roosevelt won that election, and the New Deal followed.

The problems facing governments today are at least as challenging as those posed by the Great Depression. The BC NDP, with its perhaps quixotic belief in evidence-based public policy and willingness to admit mistakes and try again, has barely survived the anti-incumbent, antigovernment wave. How it can cope with a world in which the radicalized, sloganeering, ideological conservatism of Trump’s Republicans and, soon, Poilievre’s Conservatives dominate the North American political landscape remains to be seen.