October 12, 2024

In British Columbia, a Political Party's Collapse Echoes an Earlier Election

	By Ian Austen

To anyone following politics recently in British Columbia, it sounds familiar: An alliance of Liberals and Conservatives collapses, and then a botched attempt to thwart the left wing ends up elevating a moribund party.

W.A.C. Bennett stands speaking in a crowd of other people.

Under W.A.C. Bennett, the Social Credit Party came to dominate the province's politics. Bettmann

That was the 1952 election in the province, though it could just as easily describe next week's vote. And that earlier election, with all its twists and turns, reshaped British Columbia's politics for decades.

Connections between federal and provincial branches of political parties are often weak. The B.C. Liberals made this abundantly clear in 1987 when they formally cut ties to the federal party. At the time, they held no seats in the legislature.

But the provincial party benefited in 1991 when Bill Vander Zalm, then the premier, resigned because of a conflict-of-interest scandal over the sale of a Christian theme park he owned. His Social Credit Party collapsed. Liberal voters who couldn't bring themselves to vote for the New Democrats joined most of the province's conservatives in supporting and reviving the B.C. Liberal Party.

It became the official opposition that year and would go on to govern from 2001 to 2017. But by the time the party took power, its leaders "were not Liberals at all," David J. Mitchell, an author, historian, university administrator and former Liberal member of the B.C. legislature, told me.

When Kevin Falcon became the B.C. Liberals' leader in 2022, he renewed a long-simmering debate over changing the party's name. A year later, the party rebranded as B.C. United.

The name change should have shielded the party from growing disaffection with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the federal Liberal Party of Canada and perhaps given it an edge over the governing, left-of-center New Democrats. It didn't.

Instead, a growing number of voters told pollsters that they supported the Conservative Party of British Columbia, which had not elected anyone since 1986, while few of them backed B.C. United. The Conservative Party is led by John Rustad, who left the B.C. Liberals before the name change after refusing to take down a social media post suggesting that climate change is not real. More recently, a video surfaced in which Mr. Rustad said he regretted getting the "so-called vaccine" for Covid-19.

Other polls indicated a possible cause for B.C. United's collapse: Many voters didn't know about the name change and assumed that the Conservatives were the only option for those right of center. At the end of August, Mr. Falcon gave up and announced that B.C. United would not run candidates in the current election to avoid vote splitting on the right.

A week out from the vote, polls suggest the Conservatives — until recently a shell of a party — will emerge as the second-largest party, with the New Democrats under David Eby, the premier, again forming government.

David Eby, in casual clothing, stepping off a small plane onto a wet tarmac.

David Eby, the premier of British Columbia, campaigning last month. Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press, via Associated Press

In the 11 years leading up to the 1952 election, the Conservatives and Liberals had formed coalition governments in which members of the two parties worked together and held cabinet posts. It was ostensibly about showing unity during World War II. But Mr. Mitchell told me that it was mainly about keeping the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, the predecessor of the New Democratic Party, out of power by avoiding a fracturing of the right-of-center vote.

As that arrangement bitterly unraveled before the election, the coalition swiftly passed a law that Mr. Mitchell said was also intended to keep the C.C.F. on the sidelines: British Columbia moved to a ranked-choice voting system, which was unusual for Canada. Voters ranked candidates on their ballots for the election, and when the ballots were counted, the candidates with the fewest votes were eliminated first, and then voters' ballot preferences were transferred until one candidate emerged with a majority. The two parties assumed that Liberals would pick Conservatives as their second choice and vice versa, Mr. Mitchell said.

They were very wrong.

"There were lots of unanticipated consequences," Mr. Mitchell said. "One of them was that the Liberals and Conservatives really disliked each other intensely and did not give each other their second votes."

Instead, they picked Social Credit candidates. At that point the Socreds, as they were known, had not won even a single electoral poll in British Columbia, let alone a seat. The party was campaigning without a leader.

Similarly, many C.C.F. supporters made Socred candidates their second choice.

"It seemed to be harmless to have them as a second choice to them because they were a nonfactor in the province at this time," Mr. Mitchell said.

After six weeks of ballot counting, the Socreds emerged with the largest number of seats in the legislature, one more than the C.C.F. Starting with W.A.C. Bennett as leader, the party would govern British Columbia for all but three of the next 39 years. Mr. Bennett, a hardware store owner known as Wacky to both allies and enemies, led the province in its postwar economic transformation. He also ended the ranked ballot system after an election that gave the Socreds decisive hold on the legislature.

Mr. Mitchell, who wrote a biography of Mr. Bennett, said that he found Mr. Eby and Mr. Rustad "bland" compared with previous political leaders in British Columbia, like Mr. Bennett and Dave Barrett, the New Democrat who briefly broke the Socreds' hold on power.

"These were wild creatures who were expressions of the flamboyant nature of the province," he said. "Things have become quite subdued lately."

Trans Canada

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Ian Austen reports on Canada for The Times based in Ottawa. He covers politics, culture and the people of Canada and has reported on the country for two decades. He can be reached at austen@nytimes.com. More about Ian Austen

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