B.C. right on the cusp of a better kind of ‘different’
British Columbians are fond of bragging to foreigners that B.C. is different. Foreigners being, of course, anyone from across the mountains. They have a point, but not perhaps in the way they mean.
B.C. is the only province to have sanctioned the state-sponsored murder of a trade union leader, Ginger Goodwin.
The only place in Canada to have had a coal strike turn into a bloody conflict in which dozens of miners died at the hands of American rent-a-cops.
The only province to have had a cabinet minister continue to serve from his prison cell after a bribery conviction.
More recently, it was home to one of the most lurid political money-laundering scandals in Canada. To his descendants, it was humiliating that it took place in my late MP grandfather’s own riding association, albeit long after his death.
Labour and political violence was not uncommon in B.C. until the 1980s. When the province had a liberal party, its candidates’ offices were firebombed by Social Credit goons.
Sign wars that involved crowbar smashing and spray painting billboards were a partisan jape I participated in as a dumb teen. The “war in the woods” between loggers and environmentalists was violent for nearly a decade until the early 1990s.
Race, class and identity divides run deep in Canada’s most beautiful province. The B.C. NDP has often found itself on the losing side of them politically and suffered the electoral consequences.
Its own, often self-destructive, tribal rituals have also made it hard for voters less invested in the province’s tough and sometimes brutal social history to see them as a dependable party of government. It has governed in only 13 years of the past century as a result. Each of those terms in government ended unhappily, although the most recent, Glen Clark’s, collapsed after a stitch-up by his political opponents and their friends in the media.
B.C. also invented the Canadian antisocialist coalition, 72 years ago (!). It’s a supple conservative survival strategy that has been exported to Saskatchewan and now Alberta. The idea that everyone from the hard-right tinfoil hats to blue-haired Victoria conservationists should share the same political tent has been an enormously resilient strategy against the CCF/NDP.
From its inception in 1945 as an election deal between local Liberals and Conservatives, to its morph into decades of Social Credit hegemony, to its current form — a political coalition that receives the support of Justin Trudeau and Jason Kenney — it has survived crises of leadership, scandal and economic hard times, brilliantly.
David Barrett, the first social democratic premier of B.C., used to stun international political allies observing that B.C. was the only multi-party democracy where the left could win 49 per cent of the vote and lose.
The B.C. NDP has been less successful than other provincial parties — most notably Manitoba and Saskatchewan — in holding together a progressive coalition on the other side. It has bled forestry and building trade workers to the right, environmentalists to the left and new Canadians to both sides, since the 1970s. The deep fissures of the province’s politics, reflected in its feuding clans, make these tough political divides for any B.C. NDP leader to bridge.
But bridge and build John Horgan must now do. If he is determined to seize the opportunity that B.C. voters delivered last week — a deeply wounded party and premier — he will.
He needs to persuade the oleaginous Andrew Weaver that his political bread is not buttered red and B.C. voters that the time for a real change has really come. If he shows he has the skills to deliver that vision, B.C. will have a short fractious second-term Christy Clark government followed by their burial in a re-run.
If Horgan allows his caucus and party to revert to partisan form, lashing out to left and right against Greens and Liberals — and non-believers inside and out — his will be a short fractious second term as leader.
There is much to play for. Decisions made in the next two to three years will impact a generation of British Columbians. The wrong ones will underline how sadly “different” B.C.’s very provincial political culture remains.
A demonstration of progressive coalition building leadership by the almost-B. C. premier could deliver him the job. It could also help deliver the province a united and world-leading government: environmentally courageous, happily socially inclusive, securely grounded in a technology-centred, post “rocks and logs” economy.
The NDP’s own, often self-destructive, tribal rituals have also made it hard for voters to see them as a dependable party of government