Sunday September 1, 2024 | VICTORIA, BC [Updated September 3, 2024]
by Mary P Brooke | Island Social Trends
Now that some of the dust is settling for a brief moment in the world of BC politics there is plenty of punditry about the actions taken by BC United Party Leader Kevin Falcon.
Was it a selfish unthinking move on his part to secretly end the BC United Party campaign and abruptly end the campaigns of all his candidates (about 57 at time including his own)? Or was it smart politics to keep from splitting the right-leaning vote?
Perhaps the blame — if such is deserved — should be directed at Conservative Party of BC Leader John Rustad for creating a new right-leaning party which created the split-vote potential in the first place.
Or maybe (call this a conspiracy theory if you like), Rustad and Falcon had this strategy in mind all along. Afterall, a few months ago they were in talks about it that were quite public in the public realm through news media. Then the radar went silent. And now we know that Falcon and Rustad were since in further talks even as all BC United candidates were planning their time, careers and lives around their campaigns.
Call it an even darker thing to think that Falcon may have had it in for Shirley Bond and Todd Stone as part of the impending crash. While both those BC United (former BC Liberal) MLAs were hard-working and steadfast and carried some significant cabinet portfolios, they were beginning to resonate with the energy of yesterday instead of tomorrow. They went down hard with the sinking ship that Falcon struck in a deal with Rustad as announced on August 28.
That’s not to say that many of Rustad’s growing collected crew is the ‘tomorrow’ that BC wants to see; the Conservative Party of BC is now poaching candidates and muscling now-defunct BC United candidates as volunteers. Rustad has admitted to not having vetted some of his candidates very well; BC United did a far better job with that as has been widely reported.
If the BC Conservatives end up winning a majority of seats (47 or more) on October 19 this recent game-changer campaign shift will have been a brilliant move on Falcon’s part. He said last week that he pulled the plug on BC United for the overall benefit to BC, although feeling badly about the impact on individual candidates and their teams.
Views aren’t seamlessly shared:
Views on vaccination, women, 2SLGBTQIA+ and climate change are all now over the map in a BC Conservative Party that includes merged (former) BC United candidates and volunteers. It’s a strange map that would lead BC backwards instead of forward into the mid-21st century.
Now defunct BC United candidate Meagan Brame (she was running in Esquimalt-Colwood) says she can’t support the BC Conservative stance on “women, LGBT, climate change and vaccinations”. Now defunct BC United candidate Sean Flynn (who was running in Langford-Highlands) also articulates that the social policy of BC United had him stumped as he discovered when volunteering at a BC Conservative info booth this weekend at the Saanich Fair.
Nabbing BC United candidates and their teams to work on the fast-moving BC Conservative campaign is another naughty part of the pressures put on people who get politically involved. But people can only be pushed so far, and this pressure tactic may blow up more so in Rustad’s face as the leader of this newly hatched hybrid right-of-center political party.
Politics is not a parlour game:
Politics is a rough and tumble game. Professional politicians know this and expect it. Newbie candidates getting into the political business as first-time politicians in this election cycle have arrived at an unusual time.
Not that much is ‘usual’ in BC politics. But there are some unusual aspects to this 2024 election cycle. Most notably the sudden-death of the BC United Party, but also the robust rise of the BC Conservatives over the past year and the BC NDP having majority status but now seeing many of their long-time MLAs not seeking re-election due to retirement after many years in the game.
Candidates who are new to politics and citizens who don’t always follow BC politics up close are spewing out a range of critiques of Falcon over this leadership decision to quash the 2024 campaign and very nearly shut down the party itself.
Falcon’s political record is not one that can be admired by progressive voters. And his clearly articulated desire to push the NDP out of power at any cost is a razor’s edge to people who have worked decades to rebuild the NDP. For many of the BC United candidates their political hopes have been dashed not to mention their investments of time out door knocking and money for campaign resources.
The NDP goal for nearly 20 years (since John Horgan first won an MLA seat in the Sooke/Juan de Fuca region in 2005) has been to shift the province to a place where people have wanted to be. And they’ve done it! The population surge of the past few years is testament to the success of ‘putting people first’ in BC.
But frankly, Falcon’s forceful commitment to his principles is what a political leader should be like. Taking a bold step — a very big one in this case to cancel his entire party’s campaign and with that throwing all the candidates under the bus — is admirable for its sheer nerve.
But now there is fallout:
For a brief moment the many people who helped build the NDP over the decades in BC and helped John Horgan become BC NDP leader (2014) and then Premier (2017) probably celebrated over what seemed like the end of the BC Liberals on August 28. It was likely a brief moment of gratification that a philosophically-borne dream can come true.
That was a pithy and gut-level goal for Horgan to see the BC Liberals (then BC United) not be in power to run the province. And on August 28 he may well have popped a bottle of champagne upon hearing that the BC United would not be on the ballot on October 19, 2024.
However, now there is a strange fallout. The two right-leaning parties — together being called ‘centre-right’ by Falcon– are together stronger than ever. They’ve created a ‘Frankenstein’, a campaign entity that will clamor its way through to election day as a newly created political beast that has ‘legs’ (momentum) but a strange sort of composition (weird policy parts that don’t align).
As the Conservative Party of BC is now being rebuilt with injected parts (former BC United candidates and others brought in at the last minute to appease Falcon and appeal to Rustad), it’s an election-focused political machine built with only one purpose — to win, and to see the NDP booted out of running the government.
The merging of policy themes from BC United and BC Conservative may yet produce a successful but complicated mix for the campaign that officially starts when the writ drops on September 21.
But that mix already does not appeal to many of the former BC United candidates; those folks generally saw themselves as center or center-right but the BC Conservatives are far more to the right especially on social policy issues (e.g. gender, Indigenous rights and aspects of the health file).
Name change was folly:
The act of renaming the BC Liberals as BC United was to be putting a coat of paint on the same old party of Gordon Campbell and Christy Clark — a party that during 2001 to 2017 did the following:
- gouged low- and middle-income people for MSP premiums at the same dollar level as financially comfortable people (and sent bill collectors after them if they didn’t pay on time);
- kept increasing ICBC rates while at the same time using the insurance crown corporation as a cash cow;
- turned a blind eye to money laundering in casinos;
- put the screws to teachers’ contracts for years and closed school libraries;
- left it to parent advisory committees to fundraise for books and playgrounds;
- delivered an overall lower standard of education (no fault of the teachers);
- fired lower-wage hospital workers and put them on contract without benefits;
- built almost no affordable housing or on-campus student housing;
- didn’t plan for the obvious upcoming retirement of many family doctors and failed to deliver on their “GP for me” promise, thus reating the family doctor shortage;
- fell behind on suitable improvements and upgrades to many highways;
- didn’t build enough schools or hospitals; and
- tipped the economy in favour of those could easily excel while most others fell behind and began living in the ‘affordability crisis’ economy….
…. all these things will never be forgotten by those who lived through those circumstances. There were impacts on businesses, families and people’s well-being.
Many irrevocable things happened to people during the 2001-2017 Campbell and Clark years, of which Falcon was central on many of the major files.
Reminding the electorate:
It would be surprising if any of the folks affected by BC Liberal policies in those years have forgotten. But will they make the connection on voting day?
It’s up to the NDP to methodically remind people of their own successes of the past seven years, in all the areas where improvement, remediation and fresh starts were required (education, health-care, housing… it’s actually a very long list).
For some reason the NDP has historically been somewhat effective at ‘reasonable boasting’. Presenting their record of positive achievements is the necessary name of the game for election 2024 and making coming clean with admitting some of their errors (before the opposition does it for them).
Same cloth:
Both Falcon and Rustad are former BC Liberal MLAs, cut from the same right-leaning cloth though with different temperaments, manner of delivery, and extremes to which they will go.
In fact, they were both BC Liberal cabinet ministers. But their range on certain issues varies in ways that matter — a difference that is not lost on disgruntled former BC United candidates and supporters.
Rustad was a school trustee (2002-2005 in SD57 Prince George) before being first elected as a BC Liberal MLA in 2005 (re-elected in 2009, 2013, 2107 and 2020 in the northern interior riding of Nechako Lakes). As a cabinet minister he held some key portfolios including Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations as well as Aboriginal Relations and Reconciliation.
Falcon was first elected as a BC Liberal MLA in 2001 (re-elected in 2004, 2009). He served in top portfolios including health and finance, which made him more of a household name than Rustad ever was (for many regular folks this year it’s been ‘Rustad who?’). Falcon did not seek re-election in 2013 (Christy Clark’s last term as it so happened) but returned in a by-election 2022.
Falcon said last week that he didn’t run in 2013 was because his wife was pregnant with their second child at the time; he wanted to be involved with family life closer to home (something he didn’t reveal at the time when not seeking re-election in 2013).
Of the two men, Rustad resonates as a ‘regular’ guy. And while Falcon comes across as more slick, in some ways he seems out of touch with today’s modern momentum in people’s everyday lives.
Perhaps that’s why Falcon seems to be unaware of the degree to which the farther-right social policy of the BC Conservatives is irking his BC United base. We hear that some candidates now don’t sleep well at night over this. They may not stick out the course to volunteer for the BC Conservatives instead of running their own campaigns. Hoodwinked or shotgun marriage, call it what you will.
Perhaps Rustad and Falcon as two political wranglers operating clandestinely together is the perfect pair-bond toward their shared goal of winning a majority government in October. But it feels strained and somehow not right.
Here’s how the NDP puts it:
In social media, the BC NDP say that “John Rustad’s BC Conservatives are a risk you can’t afford”.
“Rustad has a 20-year history of cutting services, doubling medical fees, hiking car insurance rates, and making housing costs double – closing the door for many families,” says the BC NDP.
Earlier this year, Premier David Eby said he was dismayed that the first question Rustad put forward in the Legislative Assembly was about SOGI in schools, that he was picking on vulnerable kids. Even many of the now-defunct BC United candidates are uncomfortable with the BC Conservative positions on women’s reproductive health, proposed revisions to SOGI in schools, how the province has been handling Indigenous relations, and so on.
Last week Falcon said he didn’t want the BC NDP to be in government ‘for any longer than they need to be’; he dropped eye contact from the cameras when he said that. It’s a regular fact that any current government needs to continue doing the work of government right up to the next election date, as Eby pointed out this summer and as Falcon well knows.
The work of politics does matter:
If you’ve read this far, it’s because you know that politics matters. Policy made by 93 people in the next BC Legislative Assembly will impact the lives of people and the manner of economic direction for years if not decades. Every person in this province is affected by decisions made by the MLAs that are elected in a general election.
Some legislation brought in by the BC NDP government since 2017 already has shifted the province in new directions. That includes in education (e.g. child care now brought into the K-12 education ministry), many climate change initiatives, improvements to supporting seniors and people with disabilities, an expanded family benefit support system, diversity and inclusion themes in schools and workplaces, and most especially housing where a suite of legislation is aimed at increasing the supply of homes.
More women are in MLA seats than ever before and this does make a difference — various areas of policy are informed by life experience of which gender is a significant aspect.
How you vote:
Whatever party you support on October 19 is a choice to be carefully made.
Yes, on the actual ballot you are voting for a candidate who you hope will represent the interests of your riding. But unless your candidate is officially ‘independent’ (doesn’t happen very often), your vote in this election will be either returning a majority BC NDP government, or turning that upside down and electing a BC Conservative government with some very unhappy former BC United folks in the mix.
Thinking long-term about the impact of your voting choice is probably very wise in 2024.
===== RELATED:
- Vote for the candidate or the party? (September 1, 2024)
- BC Conservatives are ‘untested’ says former BC United candidate Meagan Brame (September 1, 2024)
- BC Conservatives claim center-right lane in fall election race (August 28, 2024)
- BC United Party collapse expected following BC Conservative leader announcement by John Rustad Aug 28 (August 28, 2024)
- Government’s job to keep running the province (June 18, 2024)
- NEWS SECTIONS: BC ELECTION 2024 | POLITICS | VANCOUVER ISLAND
===== ABOUT THE WRITER:
Island Social Trends Editor Mary P Brooke has been covering news of the Vancouver Island region and BC through a socioeconomic lens since 2008. In 2020 she reported daily on the COVID pandemic and since then has covered provincial news alongside the BC Legislative Press Gallery.
Ms Brooke is a journalist, editor and publishing entrepreneur. Her publication series is part of the permanent collections at the Sooke Region Museum: MapleLine Magazine (2008-2010), Sooke Voice News (2011-2013), West Shore Voice News (2014-2020), and Island Social Trends (2020 to present).
Mary Brooke wrote the 36-week curriculum for the Writing for Business and Journalism program at the Western Academy of Photography in Victoria. Some of those graduates have since worked in BC government communications.