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.
