A party by any other name

How would you ideologically classify a political party that ran on a platform of tax cuts and balanced budgets? You’d probably say you need a bit more information, given cutting taxes and balancing budgets are hardly distinctive ideas. In Canada’s 2011 election, for instance, Jack Layton’s NDP, Michael Ignatieff’s Liberals and Stephen Harper’s Conservatives all ran promising to pursue this agenda, as have a rainbow of parties at the provincial level.

If I added that this theoretical party supports a carbon tax, “safe injection sites” for heroin addicts, and legalized marijuana, but opposes a major pipeline, you might think we’re in comfortably left-wing territory.

Well, you’d be wrong, at least according to the Canadian news media, who have decided the ruling Liberal Party of British Columbia — currently fighting for its fifth term in office — is actually a party of the right. Read any mainstream coverage or analysis of B.C. politics and you’ll come across references to the “centre right,” “rightof-centre,” or “right-leaning” Liberals. No less an authority than The New York Times spoke of Premier Christy Clark’s “conservative British Columbia Liberal Party.” The Vancouver Sun has started using Tory blue for the Liberals in polling graphics, while a premier-ranking study from Vancouver think tank Aha! grouped B.C.’s Liberal premiers in with other provinces’ Tory leaders on the grounds they were “small cconservative.”

It’s forgivable on some level. The press needs a firm party of the right fighting a firm party of the left to create compelling political drama. If you’re a partisan of the NDP — B.C.’s provincial opposition — it’s similarly in your interests to portray Liberals and Conservatives as interchangeable oppressors of the proletariat, as NDPers have been doing since Tommy Douglas first yarned about mice voting for cats.

Yet to call the B.C. Liberals “conservatives” because they’ve experienced occasional bouts of fiscal responsibility, appeased business interests, or annoyed unions — the sole evidence proponents of this theory point to — requires broadening the philosophy of “conservatism” to the point of uselessness. The Saskatchewan NDP closed schools and hospitals across the province during the 1990s. Were they right-wing? The Alberta Conservatives ran six deficit budgets in a row. Was that centre-left? Is Dalton McGuinty “a small-c conservative” because a teachers’ strike occurred during his reign?

As Stephen Harper himself put it in a 2003 speech on ideology — “if conservatives accept all legislated social liberalism with balanced budgets and corporate grants … then there really are no differences between a conservative and a Paul Martin.”

The B.C. Liberals, for their part, have never fully played along with the right-wing role they’ve been assigned. When I interviewed Christy Clark back in 2004 she called herself “a middle-of-theroad Liberal,” emphasizing she’d been a provincial Liberal “when we used to get 5 per cent of the vote” (there’s a popular urban legend that the B.C. Liberals are a “new” party or even the “renamed” B.C. Social Credit Party — in reality, they’ve been contesting elections since the 19th century).

That said, Clark’s Liberals are savvy enough to grasp a good thing when they see it. In their propaganda, they refer to themselves as a “free market coalition” welcoming anyone anti-NDP. The party uses the four colours of the B.C. flag — red, white, blue and yellow — in its branding, rather than one traditionally partisan colour, to push the notion that they transcend classification.

And it works, in the sense surveys generally show the party’s base is roughly split between federal Conservative and Liberal voters, who tend to see in the party whatever they want. A recent Insights West poll had 49 per cent of federal Conservative voters describing the B.C. Libs as a “right” or “centre-right” party, while 37 per cent of federal Liberals called it left-wing or centrist. A narrow majority of British Columbians see them as either left-wing, centrist, or can’t answer the question. Over 20 per cent of NDP voters, meanwhile, call it “farright.”

Someone has to be wrong here. The B.C. Liberals can be called “right wing” by the press and even other conservatives, but if they reach this conclusion without using a strict, objective standard, the label simply makes British Columbia’s political debate lazy and incoherent.

Sloppiness with the rightwing label can also be rather unfair to the B.C. NDP, it must be said, since it defines their own leftism in such a crude and caricatured way. The B.C. NDP does not hate low taxes or love the idea of being fiscally irresponsible — indeed, the party actually opposed the two most significant tax increases of the Liberal reign — Premier Campbell’s 2008 carbon tax and his government’s subsequent harmonized sales tax (overturned by referendum in 2011). The Liberals’ often creatively-calculated balanced budgets, meanwhile, mask a reliance on debt, unsurprising, given their election platforms — including the current one — tend to be brimming with conventionally big-L Liberal promises to spend more doing everything.

B.C.’s former opposition leader, Adrian Dix, once complained that the partisan split in B.C. was like “comparing Coke to Pepsi.” If the B.C. NDP finds its way back to power next month, the outcome may prove far more meaningful for the party than the province.

THE B.C. NDP DOES NOT HATE LOW TAXES. — J.J. McCULLOUGH CLARK’S LIBERALS ARE SAVVY ENOUGH TO GRASP A GOOD THING.