B.C. Election: Conservatives Regroup, New Democrats Rebound

With its backdrop of nearby mountains, gorgeous harbor, multicultural population, sophistication, and temperate climate, Vancouver usually ranks near the top when magazines rate the world’s most livable cities. A Canadian magazine once dubbed British Columbia “lotus land,” its people “surrounded entirely by envy.”

But you must first afford to live there, and confront the social stresses of a great port city and a resource-based provincial economy.  Seeking a full term as B.C.’s premier, a post he assumed two years ago, David Eby acknowledges: “Families are under a lot of pressure right now . . . I believe that people need support right now.”

Eby, 48, leads the left-of-center New Democratic Party (NDP) into an October 19 provincial election. The contest is closely fought and mirrors surprises and twists seen in the US. The province’s political fissures run deep as do divisions between urban and coastal areas and a more conservative B.C. interior.

The New Democrats, a labor-backed party with socialist roots, is facing off against a reborn B.C. Conservative Party, which recently gained strength with the speed of Hurricane Milton. A Tory win would mean a sharp right turn for “Beautiful British Columbia.” 

“When the Queen calls you, she gives you the whole bag,” in words of the late B.C. Premier Dave Barrett. Under the parliamentary system, the party winning the most seats in the Legislative Assembly is called to form the government. Its leader becomes premier in a way that unites executive and legislative branches of government. There are 93 ridings (electoral districts) in a province that is geographically larger than Texas.

A former director of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, Eby was picked to lead the NDP  when predecessor John Horgan resigned amidst a recurrence of cancer. Eby is a native of Ontario and a symbol of a party transformed.

The New Democrats used to elect legislators from pulp mill towns, leather-lunged guys who would protest giveaways of public resources to logging and mining companies by shouting: “The hogs are at the trough.” These days, the NDP, like Democrats in the U.S., is now a home to educated urbanites. It is an uneasy coalition of environmentalists, blue-collar unions, emigrees, and Aboriginal First Nations. Eby represents the riding of Vancouver-Point Grey, upscale urban turf that includes the University of British Columbia.

An election in the Great White North revolves around issues familiar south of the 49th parallel.  A shortage of housing and inflation top the list, followed by crime and addiction. The fentanyl epidemic has hit hard, killing more than 2,500 people in B.C. last year. The COVID-19 pandemic brought furious debate over shutdowns and government vaccination mandates.

“Lotus land” has felt calamities of climate change. The June, 2021, heat wave brought Canada’s all-time record temperature, 121 degrees Fahrenheit in the hamlet of Lytton in the Fraser Canyon. A fire burned much of the town and killed two people. Months later, a late fall storm flooded the Fraser Valley and temporarily cut off land travel from B.C.’s populous Lower Mainland and the rest of Canada.

The province has been swept by wildfires and smothered with fire smoke. One conflagration in northeast B.C. consumed an area larger than the province of Prince Edward Island. Another burned part of West Kelowna and jumped Lake Okanagan. Not even the temperate rain forest of the Stikine River in northeast B.C. was immune from climate conditions that Horgan described as the “new normal.”

The province’s political drama began with a name change. The long-ruling B.C. Liberal Party — pro-business and right-of-center despite its name — sought to recast itself after losing two consecutive elections to the New Democrats. As official opposition in the Legislature, it became the B.C. United Party and addressed the severity of climate change.

John Runstad, a lawmaker from a rural northern riding, spurned the new script, saying we should “celebrate CO2” (carbon dioxide) in the atmosphere, and debunked climate science, He said, “The case for CO2 being the control knob of global temperature gets weaker every day. . . It is not a pollutant and that sort of information out there is just ridiculous.”

Runstad was promptly expelled from the B.C. United legislative caucus. He set about to rebuild the moribund provincial Conservative Party with a kind of MAGA-of-the-north agenda. Runstad became an outspoken critic of vaccine mandates, as well as decriminalization of drug use.

The Conservatives began to unite the right, as other defections followed. Voters and legislators began to abandon B.C. United. In August, B.C. United leader Kevin Falcon announced that the party was suspending its campaign and withdrawing its candidates. Several more legislators jumped to the Conservatives. The insurgent party surged ahead in a September poll. 

It didn’t last long. The Conservatives have not shone under the spotlight. It turns out that Runstad is an anti-vaxxer, declaring at one point: “I do regret getting the COVID-19 vaccines.” He appeared to agree with a social media post advocating “Nuremburg 2.0,” a criminal prosecution of those responsible for Canada’s vaccine mandates.

Runstad backpedaled, saying he “misunderstood the question” and intended no comparison of provincial health officers to Nazi war criminals. “I apologize for that,” he said. “I know that has offended some people and that certainly was not my intent with regards to that issue.”

Other Conservative candidates have offended other constituencies, notably with homophobic remarks. Brent Chapman, the Conservatives’ candidate in Surrey South, used Facebook to describe Palestinians as “little inbred, walking, talking breathing time bombs.” 

“Those words have emboldened racists to bully vulnerable people in B.C.,” Eby said in response. He accused Runstad of “looking the other way and siding with hate.” (Two other contested ridings have sizeable Muslim populations.)

The gaffe-of-gaffes has belonged to Runstad. During a party leaders’ televised debate, he claimed to have watched an addict die “of an overdose” at the corner of Robson and Hornby Streets in Vancouver while in route to the studio. The B.C. Coroners Service and B.C. Emergency Health Services, which would have been summoned to the scene, both say they have no record of a death that night at that intersection.

Runstad has since changed his story, saying he witnessed an overdose. He’s switched its location to the intersection of Burrard and Helmcken Streets. “From a distance, I saw someone who was unresponsive being resuscitated by medical professionals on the way to the debate,” the Conservative leader said in a statement.

Election momentum has shifted back to the New Democrats. A Leger poll, run in the Vancouver Sun, shows the NDP with support from 47 percent of decided voters, with the Conservatives falling to 42 percent. Women have shifted toward the New Democrats, as have voters under the age of 35. But the election remains close. The New Democrats are in a one-on-one battle rather than facing a divided opposition. 

The Green Party has captured Vancouver Island ridings in the 2017 and 2020 provincial elections, and propped up the New Democrats in a closely divided Legislature following the 2017 vote. In today’s polarized province, however, the party will be lucky to hold the seat of party leader Sonia Furstenau.

The British Columbia election next week may yield an electoral map that resembles what’s expected in the United States. The New Democrats will win Vancouver, its suburbs, Vancouver Island, and the coast. The Conservatives will sweep interior and rural British Columbia.

The temperatures will continue to warm across Lotus Land. Forests and rangelands will continue to burn with lots of smoke in the air. The political climate, too, will remain hot. Whoever wins on Oct. 19th, the B.C. Legislature will not be a forum for the fainthearted.