Photo courtesy of CBC
It doesn’t happen very often. A candidate or — even more rarely, a party — steps aside from an election to avoid vote-splitting and a win for their polar opposites. But it seems to be trending. People are forgoing the luxury of having their own little party, and cooperating with others of a like mind to counter the rise of the real opposition. A plague of creeping American polarization.
It happened in France last month, where the Left and Centre coalitions basically split the ridings between themselves to counter a surge by the Far-Right. In that case, the formerly powerful Centrists lost ground to the Left. Lesser of two evils, I suppose.
Now Kevin Falcon has taken it one step further. He has single-handedly pulled his whole BC United Party out of the upcoming provincial election on the promise of as-yet-to-be-determined nominations for some of his supporters. It will be interesting to see how that turns out; simple arithmetic indicates some already-nominated Conservative candidates will have to step aside. Still, all credit to Falcon for doing what he thought was the right thing.
Note that John Rustad had the opportunity to do the same a few months ago, when his Conservatives were just starting to try their wings. But he never blinked. His bluff paid off.
Full disclosure: I know John personally. His mother-in-law is a dear friend of mine. He’s a genuinely nice person and a really good listener. Too good, actually, playing his own cards very close to his chest. In all the pre-politics years I knew him, I never got a decent idea of what his views were.
So, I was interested but not surprised to find that he holds some of the wingnut ideals of the Far Right. I will not be surprised if he soft-pedals them in the coming campaign. It’s a little hard to tell people whose homes just burned down that climate change is not an emergency. I wish him all the best in his career, but I hope he doesn’t win the election.
B. C. Liberals: Based on a Lie
The recently renamed “BC United” party started out with a falsehood and has been slowly crumbling ever since. In the late 1980’s the old right-wing Social Credit party imploded due Bill Vander Zalm’s inability to patch up the usual split between the radical social conservatives and the more centrist economic veriety. This latter group deserted en masse to the Provincial Liberal party and promptly took over the province under the sheep’s clothing of being Liberals. They milked this perceptual gap for several elections, but the NDP’s power was growing.
NDP Rise
When the NDP were in perpetual Opposition, they could afford their radical socialist theories. In order to win elections, they needed a more moderate brand of socialism to appeal to the urban areas, with their more educated, forward-looking electorate. Thus the Provincial NDP nowadays looks much more like leftist Liberals, running a modified version of fiscal responsibility. It seems to reflect the developing texture of the province’s social fabric.
The Bottom Line
As a general policy, it’s a bad idea to have one party in power for too long. David Eby hasn’t led long enough for the electorate to get bored with him, but perhaps it’s time for the NDP to have a wakeup call. We can only hope that the new voters who are better educated and less selfish will resist the pie-in-the-sky, trickle-down economics of the Right.
For the good of the province, the best outcome of the coming election will be another close win for the NDP, giving Rustad a session in opposition to prove himself. The election after that will be the interesting one.
The right wing’s unhealthy combination of willful ignorance heavily salted with self-interest has finally sewered the vestiges of the old Social Credit Party. May they sink without a trace.