OCTOBER 29, 2024

A couple takes in the view from the seawall in Vancouver on March 29, 2023. 

The Canadian Press/Darryl Dyck

Tight BC Election Race Signals a Changing Political Climate

By Conrad Black

The extremely closely contested provincial election in British Columbia illustrates both the rise of conservatism and the peculiar tenacity of the leftist New Democratic Party in B.C.

The trend to the responsible right is general in the Western world and is the appropriate response to the wokeness, fiscal irresponsibility, muddled view of the collective, and individual national interest of the Western nations. It denotes an entirely understandable rising boredom with the platitudes of supposedly post-national human brotherhood, as well as the exaggerated claims and extremist techniques of environmental extremism.

But B.C.’s imperishable susceptibility to the call of a leftist party has a source that is a little harder to identify. Because it is such a beautiful place, and Vancouver and some other cities are wedged picturesquely between the ocean and the mountains—a majestic situation reminiscent of Naples, Sydney, San Francisco, Rio de Janeiro, and other magnificent port cities—there is perhaps a larger than-is-justified weakness for taking seriously overzealous claims about what it takes to protect the province’s natural beauty. It may have something to do with the fact that the post-Cold War militancy of the environmental movement is traceable to its effective takeover from authentic conservationists by the militant international left, defeated in the Cold War but tactically regrouped with great skill of improvisation to attack capitalism from the new angle of ecology in the name of defending the planet.

Because British Columbia is also primarily an economy of resource extraction, chiefly base metals and forest products, the labour movement is, by Canadian standards, unusually strong, and has no trouble making common cause with the academic and theoretical preoccupation with the environment—as long as the unionized mining and forestry industry workers can translate their environmental concern into more pay for less work. In this conception, less work is less spoliation of the environment, and B.C. makes a unique laboratory for the competition between enlightened capitalism and the unstable alliance between militant environmentalism and a labour movement claiming a right to be paid more while helping to preserve the environment by doing less.

Historically, the third party in Canada, originally the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, which became the New Democratic Party in 1961, was an alliance between Prairie agricultural dissent from the governing Canadian economic system and Eastern labour dissent from the managerial capitalism of Ontario and Quebec. These forces were represented by the first leaders of the NDP: Tommy Douglas, the moderate premier of Saskatchewan, and David Lewis, the moderate Toronto labour lawyer. Initially, B.C.’s environmentalists gradually became an exotic addition to this core of Canada‘s overtly socialist party, but they have since become a full-fledged member of a triad of support and have substantially replaced the old Prairie agricultural populism, which has become more conservative with increasing prosperity.

The Oct. 20 election in B.C. is apt to remain of uncertain outcome for up to two weeks. At least, as is usual in Canada, there is no suggestion of election irregularities or illicit activities. It is an authentically very close contest. This indicates the war for the hearts and minds of British Columbians, which for a long time depended on the Bennetts’ Social Credit Party, which was essentially a Liberal-Conservative coalition, forcing the NDP to split the vote with an underfed provincial Liberal Party. W.A.C. Bennett was premier from 1952 to 1972, and his son, Bill Bennett, was premier from 1975 to 1986. When Social Credit expired as the anachronism it was (no one, including the Bennetts, paid any attention to the founding doctrine of Major Douglas about spreading money around amongst disadvantaged people), the provincial Liberal Party became effectively a Conservative-Liberal coalition, which is what the provincial Conservative party is now.

What is mystifying is that British Columbians would seriously consider re-electing political parties so self-punitively to the left as the incumbents. This government surreptitiously attempted to hand over co-ownership of over 90 percent of the province’s territory to a comparative handful of indigenous people, and to disguise this fact from the public. It was an astounding combination of confiscatory legislation with official deviousness and pusillanimity in disguising the extent of the proposed deception.

The combination of finding every conceivable environmental reason for delaying the extraction and export of B.C.’s resources and frustrating the whole province in guilt-ridden deference to the indigenous peoples, and thus obstructing almost every development project based on more sophisticated land use, has consistently retarded the economic progress of the province. That and other policy nostrums have made B.C. a notorious and failed laboratory for woke and politically correct behaviour. The experiment with unfettered marijuana distribution has been a disaster. The attempt to treat hard drug addicts by a system of voluntary gradualism has also been a disaster. Only the fact that it is such a naturally splendid place could possibly explain the extent of public indulgence in stupid and destructive policies.

From the perspective of the federal Conservative Party, however this provincial election turns out, the news is relatively good: it means that the Conservatives should be well ahead of the Liberals in federal MPs from B.C. in the next election, and whatever the NDP can preserve in that election should accelerate the Conservatives on their way to being the governing party in the succeeding Parliament.

Additionally, whether the NDP ends up having won this election or not, with or without the collaboration of the two Green MP’s who have been elected, the party has suffered a serious setback from its previous position, and the emerging trend incites and justifies some optimism that British Columbia is at least proceeding towards a return to its political senses.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

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