Could B.C. get a conservative government?

Jordan: If you are under the age of, I don’t know, 60, this is a headline about British Columbia politics that would have you wondering what exactly you’d misheard. The Conservatives in BC tied with the NDP? BC barely has a conservative party, right? What the hell happened here? With a little over four months to go until the provincial election, a newly resurgent conservative party is threatening to take control of the legislature for the first time in several generations. Is this a mirage? Is it a sudden shift in the BC political spectrum? Is there an issue we can point to? Or is it simply much like what we’re seeing federally, an angry response to a governing party that has presided over some pretty awful times for the average person? What would it mean? What would it take to see BC go blue? I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Andrew MacLeod is the Tyee’s Legislative Bureau chief based in Victoria and the author of Altogether Healthy. Hey Andrew.

Andrew MacLeod: Hi Jordan.

Jordan: Thanks for joining us.

Andrew MacLeod: Yeah, thank you for having me on.

Jordan: Well, this is fascinating and I think maybe I need you to begin for listeners like myself, not NBC, with maybe an overview of BC’s governments going back decades. How have BC’s governments traditionally been composed and where have the Conservatives fit in?

Andrew MacLeod: Yeah, I think for our purposes today, the thing to know is that the Conservatives have been basically nowhere in BC for 70 years or so. The party goes back to 1903 and for the first half of the 20th century, they in the Liberals sort of traded back and forth power government. The Conservatives formed government I think once or twice and participated in coalition governments in that time as well. But they haven’t really been a factor for, well, as I said, 70 years. They haven’t run a full slate since the 1960 election. They last elected in MLA in 78.

Jordan: Wow.

Andrew MacLeod: They’ve had MLA sit with them, who’ve crossed the floor, but they’ve not really been a factor in BC politics. And again, I should just say it’s partly the name. We’ve had conservative parties, with a small C, for decades, what would be the federal conservative and federal liberal vote coalesced in the Socred party. And then more recently the BC Liberals have been a party, has been sort of a big tent that’s included federal Conservatives.

Jordan: And as we speak now with an election looming this fall, what’s the current makeup of the legislature?

Andrew MacLeod: So going back to the 2020 election, which was held during the pandemic, it’s been an NDP majority government. There are currently 55 NDP MLAs, 26 BC United. So BC United used to be the BC Liberals, but they changed their name, oh I dunno, a year and a half, two years ago, something like that. There are two green party MLAs who were elected in 2020, and then there are two sitting as Conservatives who both crossed the floor from BC United, one who was booted out to BC United and one who chose to go. And then there are two independents at this point as well.

Jordan: So with a few months now before that October election, the polls are in flux, to put it mildly. What do they look like right now?

Andrew MacLeod: Yeah, there’s been sort of a pretty clear trend over the last year or so. So as I said, Conservatives were nowhere, so they’ve tended to pull traditionally two, 3%. They were sort of a rump. After they gained official party status, they started seeing a bit of a bump. Maybe six months to a year ago they were starting to pull evenly with BC United. And then over the last month or two, there’ve been a succession of polls that have shown the Conservatives gaining on the NDP and leaving United behind. And I would take it all with some skepticism. A lot of these polls are, there’s surveys where they talk to maybe 600 people and they have a margin of error of plus or minus 3%, 19 times out of 20. So take it all with a grain of salt. But there’s been a pattern of growing support for the Conservatives that seems to be hard to ignore.

Jordan: I know that, as you mentioned, the party names in BC can sometimes be a little bit misleading, such as how the BC Liberals were a Big 10 that included a lot of Conservatives. Who are the BC Conservatives we’re talking about now? Are they different? And if so, how? From the type of politics we might associate with the federal Conservatives or other conservative provincial governments?

Andrew MacLeod: Yeah, it’s hard to say. They might be on sort of the right wing of the conservative movement, a little more socially conservative. So the BC Liberals as a big tent tended to be socially progressive for the most part. And fiscally conservative, the leader of the BC Conservatives now was first elected as a BC liberal MLA. He was a cabinet minister in a couple different governments. And the other person sitting with him, Bruce Banman was also a BC liberal. So they come out of that tent in the legislature. The two Conservatives have been raising issues. I think the first question they asked after becoming an official party was about the province’s sexual orientation and gender identity policy in the schools, it’s basically an anti-bullying thing that’s very lgbtqia plus positive. But then they’ve also been sort of attacking on the carbon tax. They’ve been attacking on affordability issues. They want lower taxes. Smaller government I think goes with that. And the last question they asked in the house before the legislature was to do with some hotel sales that the public sector bought in Prince George over the last year or two where it appeared they paid more money. So in some ways it’s like bread and butter conservative issues. There’s a little more of that social conservative flavor to it. Certainly their opponents will paint them as socially conservative. There was a Mother’s Day statement from one of the MLAs, Bruce Banman, where he mentioned motherhood starting from the point of conception.

Jordan: Oh boy.

Andrew MacLeod: And this led to several days of press releases about how they were anti-choice, that this was obviously an anti-abortion stance or a dog whistle to people who believe that. I don’t personally think Banman meant that, but that was how it got portrayed. They’ve had a few candidates have to step down already too. I think as a new-ish party, I think John Rustad who’s the leader would say that they didn’t really have the vetting in place that they should have. So they had someone who was sort of clearly anti-vaccine who was running for them, who had made public statements about how it could contribute to people being magnetic and that kind of thing. And there was another who was out over similar issues, and then I think they lost one who had sort of a long record of making homophobic comments on social media, that sort of thing. Kevin Falcon from BC United, the things he always says is, oh, they’re going to have a whole bunch of bozo moments between now and the October election, and people will take a close look and see. And they’ve had a bit of that, but I don’t think it’s to the level yet where it’s eroding support for them.

Jordan: This is a question I clearly recall asking about federal politics last year, and it’s do we know where the conservative surge is coming from and what’s driving it? And by that I mean, I guess is it policy proposals and what Rustad is doing with his party? Or is it that people are sick of the governing party and are showing their anger in response to these polls?

Andrew MacLeod: Yeah, so I would always just start by saying I’m cautious about generalizing about the behaviors of a whole lot of people. There are 5 million British Colombians and 3 million of them will vote. I mean, I think yes, there is some dissatisfaction with the government, but the NDP is still polling at 42%, which is pretty high for them. This has always been a province that was divided, like the ceiling for the NDP is somewhere around 40%. And then as long as the parties on the right side of the spectrum, the only ones that characterize themselves as free enterprise who were in one tent, they tended to win elections and they won a lot of them from the 1950s on most of them. So I think what we’re seeing is just a division of who does the vote that’s not for the government, the current government, go to. I think there are various factors. One is people point to name confusion when people are answering a survey question and they hear, do you support BC United? Do you support the BC Conservatives? A lot of people think, who the heck is BC United, despite the money spent on advertising and trying to get the information out there that the BC Liberals have changed their name to BC United. I think there’s a lot of people who still don’t know federally see the conservative party gaining support. And I think there’s a feeling that a certain amount of the support for the BC Conservatives is sort of one pollster called it a halo effect. It’s a little bit pleading from that. There’s a suspicion that a lot of it is sort of social conservatism, people who are opposed to the soji policies or who have misgivings about abortion being available, supporting them. But I don’t think that when they’re pulling 30% or more in the polls, I think that exceeds the people who have that perspective. There was one poll I saw that suggested that the top issue for Conservatives was affordability, cost of living, which makes some sense. I think inflation’s been up towards 8% over the last few years here as it has been elsewhere. And the government say would say, oh, that’s global inflation. But I think it’s definitely clear. A lot of people are feeling like they’re having a hard time affording things they used to be able to afford. And I think opposition parties benefit from that or can take advantage of it.

Jordan: Speaking of opposition parties, where does this conservative surge leave BC United, the former liberal party and I guess a pretty big party for a number of years in BC politics.

Andrew MacLeod: And just to be clear, I mean the BC Liberals formed government in 2001 and they stayed there. They won four elections to 2016. It was a bit of a dynasty through a couple of different premiers. I think the current dynamic puts Kevin Falcon and BC United, which is what the BC Liberals are called now in a tough spot. They usually would’ve, if the NDP is governing United would run sort of a centrist campaign and pick up the center and everything to the right of that. With the BC Conservatives rising, they can’t really do that. So they have on the other flank, they have to protect themselves and they end up leaving the center clear, I should say too, BC politics, there will be 93 constituencies in the next election. Typically when the NDP wins, they win the cities and the suburbs, and when the Liberals were winning elections, they would win the north and the rural ridings and the suburbs. So a lot depends what happens in the suburbs. I think it’s pretty clear that most of the support for the Conservatives will be in the north and the rural ridings, the NDP will probably keep the cities and the suburbs. It’s tough to say maybe some of those will go united. I think a lot of them will stay in NDP. So I think what you’re most likely to see is BC United losing support in the north and rural areas and NDP still forming government perhaps with less than the suburbs. But we’ll see.

Jordan: And there is, I guess, or is probably a better way to put it, talk of another path that could have been taken of a merger or another sort of deal between BC United and the Conservatives. What happened there? I’ve just seen a headline or two.

Andrew MacLeod: Yeah, there’s been talk of that for a while. I think, keep in mind that John Rustad was kicked out of the BC liberal party. Kevin Falcon kicked him out of the party. It was to do with some things he posted.

Jordan: Oh so there’s a history here?

Andrew MacLeod: Oh, yeah, yeah. And I mean they sat in cabinet together, right? Rustad was first elected in 2005. They overlapped in cabinets when Gordon Campbell was premier in the BC liberal government. And about, oh, probably two years ago or so now Falcon kicked Rustad out over some tweets that sort of questioned the relationship between carbon emissions and global warming, things he’d reposted. And then there was sort of a broader discussion around party discipline. You can think what you think, but you can’t be out there freelancing on things that reflect on the party. And Rustad wasn’t prepared to sort of row with the team. So Falcon kicked him out. He sat as an independent for not long couple months or something, and then he agreed to be a conservative MLA, and then the leadership came open and he took over the leadership of the party. And then Bruce Bandman, MLA for Abbotsford South joined him who was also former BC liberal. So just to be clear, there’s personal history there, right? So that makes it hard to cooperate. I think when the Conservatives first started gaining ground, according to Rustad, there were overtures made to the BC United crowd about doing some kind of cooperation. And the response he says, was F off in so many words. Then as the Conservatives gained support through the spring, I think BC United sort of rethought, and there were folks in the business community who don’t really want to see that side of the political spectrum divided. They don’t want to see the NDP having an easy path back. So there was pressure on them to figure it out. So there were meetings at the start of May and the end of May, I think there were two meetings with representatives of both sides. BC United had a guy named Hamish Marshall. He ran Andrew Scheer’s leadership campaign federally. He’s a well connected federal conservative. So Kevin Falcon has said that the BC United presented a proposal not for how to merge, but how to cooperate ahead of the election so they would not run against each other’s incumbents and each party would run well, the Conservatives would run 47 candidates and the United folks would run 46 assuming they beat the NDP, whoever got more seats would be the premier sort of a path towards basically a non-compete agreement and Rustad rejected it. And I think that made sense. I mean, it wasn’t clear to me what Rustad and the Conservatives had to gain from it. I asked Kevin Falcon that, and he said, funding organization, basically professionalism. But even already at that point, he’d been on record criticizing a lot of the BC conservative candidates and saying he didn’t want to be associated with them. There was a lot of water under the bridge at that point that it was going to be tough to find common ground over. They probably agree policy-wise on 90% of things. But there’s just the personal side of it. And in the background too, there’s a guy named Aaron Gunn who started a thing called Common Sense BC. Anyway, he, he’s seeking a federal conservative nomination. He previously had sought to be the leader of the BC Liberals back when they were still the Liberals, and he was disqualified from the race. Basically, he was told now your values aren’t the same as ours. So he and a bunch of supporters moved over to the conservative party. So the conservative party has these young activists, conservative types who were frozen out of the BC Liberals working for them as well. So that’s sort of happening in the background as well.

Jordan: What will you be watching for over the next few months to determine if there’s a real serious possibility of BC being led by the Conservatives? Will it be policies, will it be polls? I just try to get a sense for people of what they should be focusing on as this goes forward.

Andrew MacLeod: As I said before, I’m very skeptical of polling. We’ve had elections here in BC in particular before where the polls said one thing and then the results of the election said something else. So it’s always hard to know how well what people tell a surveyor are going to translate to actual votes. And then again, you have the question of geography and where those votes are, whether they’re in the right places to elect a majority or not, in terms of the rise of the Conservatives, things I’m watching are like, can they raise money? BC United is polling way behind them, but they’re raising four times as much money as the BC Conservatives. So can the Conservatives get their donations lined up? They mentioned that they’ve lost three of their candidates already. So can they improve their vetting? Can they stay disciplined? Do they have a response when the parties that are running against them call them extremist? Do they have something that they can say to show that that’s not who they are? Can they be organized? Can they be professional? And yeah, and it all comes down to election day. It’ll be very interesting to see whether it all is real or whether it evaporates.

Jordan: It would certainly be a fascinating and historic shift in BC politics. Andrew, thank you so much for explaining this to us.

Andrew MacLeod: Yeah, thanks for having me on. Jordan,

Jordan: Andrew MacLeod, legislative Bureau chief for The Tyee. That was The Big Story. For more, you can head to TheBigStorypodcast.ca. You can also offer us some feedback by emailing us at hello@TheBigStorypodcast.ca, or by just giving us a call 416-935-5935 and leaving us a voicemail. You can get The Big Story wherever you want to get it on the web, on the web, on your favorite podcast platform, and on your smart speaker, just ask it to play The Big Story podcast. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.