Canada needs to pay close attention to what has just happened in British Columbia.
A conservative party running a hastily assembled slate full of freedom convoy cheerleaders, die-hard Trump supporters, and outright bigots—led by a guy with some buggy ideas including that climate action is a plot to depopulate the Earth—has come within a centimetre of forming government in Canada’s third-most populous province.
With judicial recounts of close races still pending, the BC NDP has the lead with 47 seats. The Conservatives have 44 seats, after literally starting from zero representation in the legislature when the NDP’s David Eby became Premier less than two years ago. The BC Greens have two seats.
Unless the recounts result in changes, it appears the NDP will be able to form a government with the narrowest possible majority. In the swing riding of Surrey-Guildford, the NDP lead by a mere 18 votes with 43 absentee ballots still to be counted. There will also be a judicial recount.
B.C. has narrowly avoided a political disaster unimaginable even a few months ago.
Assuming the NDP’s razor-thin majority holds, they will likely try to entice a member of the other parties to take the Speaker’s chair to stabilize their ability to pass legislation. They could also look to cooperate with the two Greens who initially looked as though they might hold the balance of power.
With Pierre Poilievre riding high in the polls federally, everyone should look closely at how it happened.
Rustad’s rise, Eby’s retreat
This right-wing electoral insurgency was run by zealous young organizers aligned with Poilievre and the federal Conservatives, even though the B.C. party is not formally affiliated.
The rise of the BC Conservatives began with two departures from the BC Liberals, who governed the province from 2001 to 2017. First, in 2021, the Liberals refused to allow Aaron Gunn, the former spokesperson for B.C. Proud, to contest the party leadership eventually won by Kevin Falcon. Then, in August 2022, Falcon expelled John Rustad from caucus for posting content questioning climate science and denying or downplaying the climate crisis.
Rustad was at loose ends, approaching 60 years of age. He thought about quitting politics, but after participating in a number of Freedom Convoy related events, he found his mojo and took up the offer from Gunn’s young colleagues to lead their efforts to revive the BC Conservative Party and supplant the BC Liberals as the province’s corporate-backed political vehicle to defeat the NDP.
Rustad and his millennial organizers took the formerly dormant provincial party from two per cent of votes in the last election to 43 per cent and within a whisker of being able to form government. They convinced Falcon to throw in the towel less than two months before the election. In a humiliating spectacle, Falcon withdrew support for his own BC United (formerly BC Liberal) candidates and urged voters to put in power the guy he had expelled in 2022.
B.C. leaders at the election debate. (Photo: CTV)
Even before he was faced with a right-wing insurgency, BC NDP Premier David Eby had reversed progressive positions he and his party had previously held. Eby, originally from Ontario, made a name for himself in B.C. as a young lawyer working as an advocate for harm reduction and housing in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and then as Executive Director of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association.
After succeeding John Horgan as premier in November 2022, he announced $230 million in new police spending. He later reversed course on partial efforts to decriminalize drugs, and refused to heed advocates and former colleagues who demanded a safe supply to reduce deaths from the poisoned drug supply.
Just five weeks before the election, Eby surprised nearly everyone by ditching his once-feverishly held commitment to consumer carbon pricing, without offering any tangible new policies to tax pollution.
None of these retreats by David Eby slowed the rise of the BC Conservatives. And they contributed to a low-energy campaign for the BC NDP, lacking in ambitious progressive policy proposals and focusing daily messaging largely on the sheer unfitness for office of the Conservatives’ far-right candidates.
Little attention at all was paid to the Greens, who were all alone in holding the line on carbon pricing and safe supply, and whose platform outlined an eco-social democratic vision that included new taxes on corporate profits and the wealthy, a near-doubling of social assistance and disability rates, and a proposal for rolling out a four-day work week.
These sorts of tangible and positive reforms were lost amidst an air war of negativity led by the Conservatives’ relentless fearmongering targeting drug users, the unhoused, and sexual education in schools.
The billionaire and his big sign
Things were bleak; the province seemed to be lurching dramatically to the right.
Enter billionaire Chip Wilson as deus ex machina.
The notorious Lululemon founder, real estate mogul, and donor to right-wing politicians, took it upon himself to erect a big sign outside his $80 million megamansion on Vancouver’s exclusive Point Grey Road. It read, “David Eby will tell you the Conservatives are ‘far right’ but neglects saying that the NDP are ‘communist.’”
The obnoxious sign went viral. Rather than rallying the masses against their Soviet rulers, however, the sign ended up being an alley-oop pass that Eby happily slammed home.
“My message to billionaires who don’t want to chip in their fair share is: I’m not your guy,” Eby wrote in an op-ed responding to Wilson, after the billionaire foolishly doubled down on his attacks with a bizarre screed in the Vancouver Sun calling voters “lazy” and accusing immigrants of squandering the fruits of their grandparents’ hard work.
The 8th richest person in Canada put this sign in front of his $80 million mansion complaining he lives under communism. You’ve all been fucking had. #bcpoli pic.twitter.com/NAR5qyBMo4
— SEAN ORR (@seanorr) October 3, 2024
Chip Wilson had provided Eby with a perfect closing message, and the NDP ended up routing the Conservatives in Vancouver, winning 11 of 12 ridings in the city.
Having narrowly escaped defeat, what will a new government with a bare majority choose to do?
One option available to them is to legislate policies that would really upset Chip Wilson and his billionaire brethren.
There is nothing stopping a new government from implementing policies to reduce inequality, safeguard the environment, and provide real assistance to those most in need. The NDP could even make a formal agreement with the Greens to ensure a more stable majority. Maybe call it a Green New Deal for B.C.
The government could bring in specific reforms to save lives and improve the material well-being of those most in need. The BC Greens’ platform included several policies worth highlighting—all things the large majority of the NDP base supports.
Tax fairness reforms. The Greens proposed to make the corporate tax rate progressive, with an 18 per cent tax on profits of over $1 billion, as well as a new tax tier for personal incomes over $350,000.
Significant increases to social assistance and disability rates. The Greens proposed a near-doubling of rates, which is urgently necessary in part because it’s so overdue.
Scale up investment in public and non-market housing. The Greens promised to provide $1.5 billion annually to construct 26,000 new units of non-market housing each year.
A moratorium on fracking and an end to fossil fuel subsidies. Once upon a time, the NDP criticized and even mocked the BC Liberals’ focus on expanding the province’s fracking and LNG export business. Once in office, they offered even bigger tax credits and other incentives to secure mega-projects like LNG Canada. Unlike the Conservatives’ framing that it is merely an elite concern for which working people pay, climate change threatens our material interests, and our lives, directly.
In 2021 B.C. experienced a devastating Heat Dome—the worst weather-related disaster in Canadian history, with over 600 dead. On election day itself, October 19, extreme rainfall caused flooding and landslides around Metro Vancouver and southwest B.C., destroying a number of homes and killing several people. By signalling an end to the reckless expansion of fossil fuel industries, the B.C. government could free up billions to, for starters, develop the province’s enormous renewable energy potential as well as build out public transit in cities and restore intercity transportation options like the passenger rail service from Vancouver to Prince George that existed half a century ago.
Expand harm reduction and safe supply to end the toxic drug crisis. The clearest example of how the failure of half-measures to solve a crisis can be relentlessly exploited, the Conservatives were truly shameless in spreading disinformation on this file. To take just one example, they repeatedly vowed to close “drug dens” in Richmond even though no standalone safe consumption sites whatsoever exist in that municipality.
Regardless whether one believes Eby’s decisions to cede ground and adopt reactionary framing were reluctant and tactical moves forced by the opposition, or vicious betrayals, or proof of the bankruptcy of centrist politics, the current situation presents an opportunity to reverse course and improve lives.
Centrism can’t stop the far right
B.C.’s election results, and the past two years of rightward drift, remind us that centrism isn’t the way to defeat the far-right’s fake populism.
The trouble with standing in the middle of the road is you can get hit by traffic going both ways. Eby sought to beat an insurgent right by adapting to, or outright adopting, their framing on issue after issue. None of his retreats slowed the right-wing’s relentless use of negative campaigning and even outright disinformation.
Triangulation won’t stop the rise of this new right-wing and their expert gaming of widespread anomie and anger. They have to be defeated by directly confronting and debunking their ideas and by exposing their false populism by implementing concrete policies that improve material conditions, safeguarding the ecological foundations on which both our lives and our economies depend, and by fixing and expanding public services and social infrastructure.
Despite what appears to be a majority government, the situation is volatile and will be determined by the balance of political forces both inside and outside the provincial legislature.
A government that actually takes measures to reduce inequality while protecting the environment would clearly represent popular aspirations–and majority sentiment.
Referring to the combined NDP and Green vote share of 53 per cent, David Eby said in his election night speech,
There was a clear majority for progressive values.
This was, in a sense, a rhetorical sleight of hand–since Eby spent the campaign tempering or even disavowing progressive values including the ones he once made his name defending. But it does point to a longer-term trend lost in all the attention paid to the rise of the Conservatives and the last-minute shotgun unity of the corporate-backed parties: the majority of the B.C. electorate has been voting for social democratic and environmentally-minded politicians for a generation now.
Since the B.C. Liberals’ emerged as the governing brand of the province’s elite in a 2001 landslide, the NDP and Greens have earned more than 50 per cent of the vote in five of six elections. This will be the third consecutive NDP-led government–a first in B.C. history.
While the threat posed by the insurgent right embodied by the BC Conservatives is real, this generational realignment suggests a political path forward that would lock the right-wing out of power.
While film and fiction critics typically deride an unlikely occurrence that resolves the plot, in the case of this B.C. election we should celebrate the billionaire’s dramatic but blundering intervention. Of course, this isn’t an Avengers movie. We had a self-discrediting villain who chipped in to avert a truly tragic ending, but no superhero or alternate timeline can reverse the past two years or the past decades in which neoliberalism has consolidated its hold on our political class. David Eby can’t reverse his reversals as easily as he made them, even if he were so inclined.
The politics that can stop the far-right merchants of disinformation and misdirected anger in their tracks will be driven by the kind of groups and causes Eby once championed. Grassroots organizing by tenants, collective demands from drug users, creative actions by climate activists—all this and a renewal of political courage will be key to building power to win the affordable housing, safe supply, and environmental protections we desperately need.
In this interregnum, however, while we await the judicial recounts and the make-up of B.C.’s next government comes clearer, we can at least imagine a government that moves in the direction of popular social and ecological values.
The silver linings can be seen if we look closely enough. There has been an historic realignment in which a majority of voters choose the Greens and NDP over whatever brand the corporate right-wing is wearing; the policies that could bring concrete improvement to people’s lives are undeniably popular among the parties’ overlapping bases of support.
A green new B.C. is possible. Conservatives can be defeated. And the rising right-wing tide can be stemmed.
Derrick O’Keefe is a board member of Ricochet and a long-time social justice advocate based in Vancouver. He is also a former NDP member and current member of the BC Greens and the Democratic Socialists of Vancouver.