BC Liberals surrender to far-right Conservatives

In the 2020 BC election the BC Conservatives got less than 2% of the vote. The last time a Conservative was elected to the BC legislature was in 1956. (Seven years before the current leader was born.) In the interviewing 68 years occasionally an unhappy Liberal or Social Credit MLA has left their party to join the Conservatives, but this has never led to electoral success. Five MLA’s have left the sinking ship of the BC United (formally Liberal) party to join the BC Conservatives. This includes their new leader John Rustad who was a Liberal cabinet minister in the last Liberal BC government. And yet recent polls have them tied in popularity with the governing NDP. The provincial election is on October 19.

The BC Liberal party has been the opposition party or the governing party in BC since 1991. They were in government from 2001 until 2017. In the last election, in 2020, they came in second with 34% of the vote. After that election they changed their name to BC United.

Liberal surrender
Yesterday, Kevin Falcon the leader of the BC United (formerly Liberal) party announced that he is withdrawing all of their candidates from the election, that he won’t run as a candidate in the election, and all their supporters should support the BC Conservative party. The two parties will supposedly run a slate of combined candidates from both parties. However with the complete surrender of BC United they have no bargaining power, especially since most ridings already have nominated a Conservative Candidate.

There is nothing to like about the BC United party. Falcon and many others (including Conservative leader Rustad) were MLAs and cabinet minsters in the BC Liberal governments from 2001 to 2017. They were responsible for drastic attacks on health and education and huge tax cuts for the 1%. However, the BC Conservatives are solidly a party of the convoy and the alt-right. Falcon’s surrender is a victory for the convoy alt-right in BC. It also shows how no one in either party has any principles.

No principles
BC Conservative leader John Rustad, was kicked out of the BC United party for being too much of a climate denier even for them. In a recent CBC interview he said, “Climate change is not an existential threat. We are not in a crisis.” Up until the day before the surrender Falcon repeatedly said that the Conservatives were a party of conspiracy theorists and that Rustad was unfit to be Premier. In June he described them as a “clown car of candidates.”

The 1% changed his mind. BC United has been polling low enough that early in August the election prediction site 338Canada.com predicted that BC United would win zero seats with a margin of error of plus or minus zero. At the same time the range of seats predicted for the BC NDP and the BC Conservatives overlap, with the NDP in the lead. Donors were refusing to donate to BC United unless they came to an arrangement with the Conservatives to avoid splitting the vote. That's why Kevin Falcon climbed into the clown car.

Convoy party
The Conservative party platform proudly attacks Indigenous rights, trans people, climate action, and public funding for heath and education.
Rustad has equated gender education in public schools with the residential school system and if elected will remove sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) from the school curriculum.

The Conservative platform promises to dramatically expand fracked gas extraction and to build more pipelines for fossil fuels. They also promise legal and financial penalties for activists organizing to oppose “resource development.” They promise to defund universities and colleges that do not “defend freedom of expression” on campus. No doubt this will be used to further crack down on opposition to the genocide in Palestine. Funding for public education will be “re-allocated” to “essential fields such as medicine, engineering, and skilled trades.” Which simply means more funding cuts.

Rustad will also attack our already failing healthcare system. Privatization and funding cuts will be introduced as “choice and competition.”
The opioid crisis will continue if Rustad wins. He also promises tougher judges, no more tent cities, more rigid drug prohibition, mandatory “drug rehabilitation” and more cops.

He also makes a point of defending statues in his platform. No more toppling of the statues of the racists who built this fine country.

NDP is no defense against Rustad
How did a fringe party that champions what used to be fringe ideas come to be a viable contender in the BC October election? Clearly they are riding on the coattails of the convoy movement and Poilievre’s federal Conservatives. But the NDP has also helped to make these ideas mainstream. They have done this by ruling in favour of profits over people on numerous occasions. Thus making our lives worse and helping to justify the messages of the far right.

Instead of championing a just transition where we wind down the oil and gas industry in the province while involving those workers in the process of creating better green jobs, the NDP has dramatically expanded fracked gas extraction. Fracked gas extraction has increased by nearly 50% since they took office to over 75 billion cubic metres of gas in 2023. When burned, that increase in natural gas production is the equivalent of adding 10 million cars to the roads. In BC there are less than 4 million gasoline and diesel road vehicles.

In order to defend this expansion of fossil fuel production the NDP government sent in the racist RCMP with machine guns and attack dogs to arrest land defenders in Wet’suwet’en. This justifies the jobs vs environment myths of the right and undermines Ingenious sovereignty.

At the same time as the NDP subsidizes the fossil fuel industry to record levels of production they are sticking with the Liberal carbon tax as a climate remedy. While wages fail to keep up with inflation and housing costs continue to spiral ever upwards, this is an easy target for the real climate deniers in the other parties to latch onto.

Housing costs have been out of control for years, and yet the NPD refuses to enact meaningful rent control. The limits on rent increases set by the government do not apply to new tenants. Which encourages landlords to kick people out so they can raise the rent. Average rent in Vancouver has nearly doubled since the NDP took power in 2017. This leads into right-wing “solutions” about reducing building regulations and making it easier for developers to profit. Especially when Premier Eby is quoted in government press releases making the same argument, “Anyone looking for a place to live in a community they love knows how hard it is – and outdated zoning rules are making that even harder.” Tough rent controls and billions for public housing will solve the housing crisis, but that threatens the profits of the housing industry.

Poison drugs kill seven people a day in BC. The NDP frequently and publicly opposes a safer supply. They have sent in the police to arrest members of the Drug User Liberation Front who were working with university labs to test drugs for safety before selling them on to their compassion club members.

“Non-prescription models for the delivery of pharmaceutical alternatives are not under consideration,” according to BC’s Minister of Mental Health and Addictions. Jennifer Whiteside. This is despite several reports from the BC Coroners Service and the Provincial Health Officer recommending a safer supply. They also backtracked on a limited program of decriminalization. All of which plays into right wing “solutions” that ramp up the war on drugs.

Profits vs people
The bind that the NDP finds itself in is that the only reasonable solutions to the multiple crises we face are radical solutions. We need a just transition that quickly starts winding down the fossil fuel industry while providing good union jobs for those workers. We need safer supply of opioids now. We need a massive expansion of the healthcare system and money to provide free public post-secondary education. All of this is nearly impossible under capitalism and so the NDP will always work against us in solving these problems. And in doing so build legitimacy for the policies of the right and the far right.

The NDP will not help in the fight against Rustad and the BC Conservatives. Their policies help legitimize his. As the election gets closer we can expect that the NDP will move to the right, just like they have done on drug policy already.

Beat Rustad in the street
We can beat back the Conservatives and push for real solutions only if we rely on our own power. In the lead up to the BC provincial election there will be migrant rights rallies across the country on September 14 and 15. (See migrantrights.ca for details.) The next climate strike is called for September 20. There is an international call for action against the genocide in Palestine on October 5. And no doubt there will be several times when we’ll need to rally to defend Drag Queen Story time and calls to defend LGBTQ+ rights. Making these actions as big and as bold as possible is the key to undermining the Conservatives. While the NDP capitulates to the 1% on the enviroment, taxes, and public spending, building mass movements will win people away from those arguments and undermine the overt bigotry of the Conservatives. Building now will also help build the movements we will need after the election no matter who wins.

At the same time we need to connect all these issues and point to capitalism as the underlying cause. Our system relies on profit and the lies and bigotry needed to defend it. Only the end of capitalism can bring true liberation and solidarity. Every battle against bigotry opens the door a little wider for socialism.