Geoff Russ: BC United refused to enter the culture war, so it lost

The news this afternoon that BC United (BCU), formerly the mighty BC Liberals, was terminating its campaign for the October provincial election marks the end of a certain type of centrism in Canada that endured for more than two decades. Yes, that mythical blend of fiscal conservatism and social liberalism has firmly and finally gone out of style.  

Barring a rebellion from remaining BCU MLAs and backers, BC Conservatives and their blend of social, cultural, and fiscal conservatism have unambiguously become the most powerful anti-NDP force in the province for this generation. The dominance of the Conservatives and their leader John Rustad among centre-right voters has been evident for months, a reality that BCU Leader Kevin Falcon has has finally come to terms with. In a statement Wednesday, Falcon encouraged his party’s supporters to back the Conservatives to “prevent another four years of disastrous NDP government,” and said that some BCU candidates will now run under the Conservative banner.

It is truly the end of an era, but it is about time BC politics moved on from the compromise politics of the 1990s.

Politics were different in 2001, when the BC Liberal dynasty first formed a government as a cross-partisan, “free enterprise” coalition of federal progressives and conservatives. 

“Blue” Liberals, led by Prime Ministers Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin, oversaw a fiscally cautious Liberal federal government. Before merging into the modern Conservative Party, Reform and the Progressive Conservatives spent much of their time in opposition arguing for even tighter spending. 

There was consensus not just in Canada, but across the Anglosphere, that economic liberalism was the right way to go, even if the parties disagreed on the nuances and policy specifics. In Britain, Tony Blair’s Labour government came to power in 1997, continuing to build upon the economically liberal era brought about by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. 

American President Bill Clinton governed as a third-way Democrat, presiding over budget surpluses and signing the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, which withheld federal recognition of same-sex marriage. 

The federal Liberals in Canada still had a socially conservative, largely Catholic wing that could temper the party’s progressive faction to a limited extent and find common ground with social conservatives on the other side of the aisle. 

Across the English-speaking world, there was a rough agreement on the primacy of markets, the importance of cautious spending, and that social progress ought to be measured and considerate. 

This was the environment in which the centrist BC Liberals succeeded in holding together a cross-party coalition of voters. 

Despite their reputation as a right-wing party in all but name, “Blue” Liberal is the accurate description for the Campbell and Clark governments that governed from 2001 to 2017.  

BC Liberal veterans have recounted that the “vast majority” of delegates at BC Liberal conventions were the same people who attended federal Liberal events elsewhere. British Columbians in the BC Liberal coalition who voted Conservative federally could always be kept in line as the party kept winning election after election. 

The BC Liberals were the right party for the right time in British Columbia, and they deserve their share of accolades for guiding the province through the start of the new millennium. 

Under premiers Gordon Campbell and Christy Clark, the BC Liberals modernized the provincial tax system, created Canada’s best-performing economy, and sparked BC’s growth as the gateway for Canadian LNG to the Asia-Pacific. Social and cultural issues were mostly swept under the rug to maintain unity in the “free enterprise” coalition. Campbell also introduced Canada’s first carbon tax, which later contributed to the breakup of the BC Liberal coalition, but at the time, it remained a popular policy.  

When Campbell participated in the opening of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, his personal popularity had plummeted due to his introduction of the harmonized sales tax, but it was a crowning moment for what had been a glorious 10 years.  

Under Campbell’s successor Christy Clark, the seeds of polarization truly began to sprout. It was not because of Clark in any way, but due to the dramatically shifting political mood surrounding B.C., which is still just a province of less than 6 million people.  

While the BC Liberals were barely ousted in 2017, they were decimated when NDP Premier John Horgan called a snap election in the middle of the pandemic in 2020. The weakness of the BC Liberals meant that right-leaning voters had little reason to still support them in the face of a distinctly conservative alternative. 

While in opposition, the BC Liberals made the fateful decision of refusing to allow activist and filmmaker Aaron Gunn to run in the party’s 2022 leadership race. An outspoken young conservative from Vancouver Island, Gunn’s exclusion alienated many fellow youthful conservatives, many of whom would go on to help revive the BC Conservative Party. 

While some had tried to revive the BC Conservatives in the past without success, the current attempt has succeeded, and like the BC Liberals in 2001, they are the right party at the right time. Battles in the culture war and questions of how to combat crime and addiction attract far more attention now than they did 20 years ago, and refusing to engage with them spells certain death for parties seeking to topple incumbents.  

The emergence of issues like the current fight over parental rights and the question of whether teachers or parents should have the final say over a child’s pronoun or name changes in schools have taken hold. Cultural socialism is running rampant, erasing any unifying, hopeful narratives of Canada and its history in order to recast it as an irredeemably evil regime that has no legitimacy.  

Once confined to safe injection sites, the growth of harm reduction policies spawned the far more contentious and consequential policy of “safe supply.” Even carbon taxes, the first of which was introduced by Gordon Campbell in 2009, have become a contentious, polarized issue. 

At the federal level, Justin Trudeau’s social democratic Liberals have embraced all of these changes, as well as the carbon tax, with full-throated enthusiasm, while Pierre Poilievre’s populist Conservatives have become the voice of skepticism and resistance to their excesses. While this gives Canadians a true choice in the federal election, it bodes poorly for a cross-partisan coalition in BC. 

The BC Conservative leader John Rustad, a former Liberal MLA himself, has espoused strongly conservative positions on issues like parental rights, crime, and spending, and is promising to roll back the NDP’s left-wing advances on them. 

The Conservatives haven’t abandoned economics though, taking the mantle as the party of free enterprise and pairing with a conservative cultural platform.

In 2023, the BC Liberals renamed themselves BC United, detaching a great deal of name-brand recognition from the party while trying to retain its reputation as a catch-all option that could campaign almost entirely on economic issues while mostly ignoring the raging culture war.  

Unsurprisingly, it did not work in this deeply polarized era. 

The BC Conservatives skyrocketed in the polls starting in 2023, and continuing into 2024. Several BCU MLAs crossed the floor starting last September, while their former party slumped to single digits.  

Even before BCU suspend its campaign Wednesday, the BC Conservatives were surpassing the NDP in the polls in an unhappy, increasingly unaffordable province where the appetite for change is enormous. 

Change will not come from the incumbent NDP government, and certainly not from a style of politics that worked when Blockbuster was still a profitable company. History will record the BC Liberal era as a successful one that nurtured prosperous times in British Columbia, but was ended by a refusal to evolve with the times.  

Nonetheless, Kevin Falcon’s honourable decision to fold the BCU campaign was met with magnanimity from BC Conservative supporters, especially his encouragement of the remaining BCU supporters and candidates to support the BC Conservatives against the NDP in October.   

Now that the civil war on the political right has ended with a BC Conservative victory, politics in Canada’s westernmost province are now thoroughly modernized. All eyes are now on the October election. 

National Post