BC Election – NDP keeps moving right and Greens move to the left

One of the most noticeable things about elections under capitalism is how little change they deliver in our day-to-day lives. We may elect a party to office but you can’t elect your boss, or the CEO of the company you work for. Students can’t elect the administration of their college or university, they don’t get to vote for the marking scheme in their classes. Workers can’t vote on the opening hours of their workplace and in many cases don’t even have a say in the clothes they wear.

 

Even within the government itself, we don’t elect police or police chiefs, army generals, judges, prison warders, city planners, the board of the bank of Canada board and so on. Vast swaths of government are unelected, and largely unaccountable. Even with the legislature, we don’t get to vote directly for our Prime Minister or Premiere, or vote for who holds cabinet positions like minister of education, or housing.

 

When we do get to vote, those we elect are uncountable until the next vote. Most modern democracies do not include any method of recall. If our elected government changes their policies or we change our minds, nothing can be done until the next election.

 

Putting the evil back in lesser evilism

 

This latest iteration of an NDP provincial government has always had plenty in common with their opposition party the Liberals. Now that the Liberals (re-branded as BC United) have abandoned the race, the NDP is moving closer to the right-wing convoy politics of the BC Conservatives.

 

Shortly after becoming government in 2017 they announced that they would continue the Site Chydroelectric project that the Liberals had started. This was despite the widespread opposition by Indigenous nations and organizations and many of their own MLAs who had campaigned on the promise to cancel the expensive, unnecessary and environmentally destructive project. Then they took up the Liberals’ plans for fracked gas export terminals. The Liberals had failed to get a single project moving, but the NDP brought this back to life by offering even greater tax cuts and subsidies to pad fossil fuel company profits. This of course led to them to send in the racist RCMP with attack dogs and machine guns to remove Wet’suwet’enland defenders from their own land.

 

The Liberal cuts to emergency services were partially restored only after more than 600 people died during the 2021 heat wave. And all of the NDP programs have been hampered by a refusal to reverse the Liberal tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy.

 

Conservative Policies

 

The BC NDP's determination to put profits before people and the planet left them with no way of responding to the opioid crisis, the housing crisis and the general affordability crisis. All of which helped bring the fringe alt-right BC Conservatives back from the dead.

 

In the last election the BC Conservatives got 2% of the vote. Now they are polling alongside the BC NDP. Some of their popularity comes from sharing the name with Poilievre’s federal Conservatives, but much of it comes from the combination of the dire state of housing, healthcare care and the affordability crisis combined with seven years of the NDP making right-wing policies and arguments respectable.

 

Premier Eby has announced he will cancel the carbon tax. It was always a right-wing policy designed to give the illusion of progress on the climate crisis while forcing the costs onto working people who can't afford it. It does very little to lower greenhouse gas emissions. But by cancelling it without introducing any sort of just transition it just plays into the arguements coming from the far-right.

 

Rather than admit that the housing crisis was created by profit driven housing and that the solution is massive public housing projects, the NDP promotes the myth that zoning and other regulations are to blame. They have also introduced various schemes to subsidize home prices which just make things worse. They have effectively abandoned the fight for affordable housing.

 

After consistently denying that providing a safer supply would save lives, the NDP then backed down on its partial attempt to decriminalize drugs. Instead they blame drug users for public drug use, not the lack of housing and treatment spaces. They then doubled down on the war on drugs by promising to put some drug users in involuntary care in prisons.

 

Convoy Conservatives

 

All of this has opened things up for John Rustad and the BC Conservatives. His party represents the mainstreaming of far right convoy politics. Rustad was a former BC Liberal cabinet minister. He was kicked out of the opposition Liberals for being too much of a climate denier even for them. He has publicly derided vaccines. He promises to shut down safe injection sites. His platform includes the far right’s attacks on trans people, promising to respect “parental rights” in schools. Most recently he pledged to undo the legislation that places the UN Declaration on the Rights Of Indigenous People into BC laws. As much as this legislation has been ignored by the NDP since passing the law, a repeal represents an attack on Indigenous rights which are being trampled to provide profits for resource companies. It also continues the general ratcheting up of the anti-Indigenous racism in this province.

 

BC Liberal surrender

 

In August Kevin Falcon, leader of the former BC Liberals, announced that his party was giving up and would not contest any seats in the election. 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.compredicted 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.

 

The 1% clearly see this as a battle between their Conservatives and the NDP.

 

What about the Greens?

 

Historically the BC Greens have been the "change the light bulbs" sort of environmentalists with little to challenge the supremacy of capital or any recognition of the class divide in society or the role of protests and strikes to make things better. After the 2017 election they spent two weeks trying to make up their minds whether to keep the party of the bosses, the Liberals, in power or to side with the NDP. It was only street protests by their members and supporters that pushed them to side with the NDP.

 

Their demands for supporting the NDP had nothing to do with the environment, they were instead official party status (and hence party leader salary for the leader Weaver) and a referendum on proportional representation. They lost the referendum and their former leader endorsed the NPD in the 2020 election and the Conservatives in this election. While propping up the NDP in the legislature they did nothing to stop Site C or the expansion of fracked gas and LNG terminals.

 

However, if you watched the leaders’ debate, you saw Rustad clearly put forward a right-wing conservative position, Eby was solidly in the traditional small-l liberal camp and what one would expect to be NDP positions were ably presented and defended by Furstenau, the leader of the BC Greens. She defended safe supply and advocated treating addictions and mental health issues as health issues. She pointed out the climate denial of both the NDP and Conservatives with their dedication to expanding fossil fuel extraction. The Green platform proposes raising income assistance and disability assistance rates to a tiny bit above the poverty line. Which in today’s politics puts them on the left. Their housing policies do not depend on subsiding rents for landlords or housing prices for speculators like the NDP and the Conservatives do. Instead they plan on building social housing and implementing effective rent control. Their plan to pay for all this is to raise property taxes on homes valued above $3 million, $4 million and $7 million. They will also implement a new tax on business profits above $1 billion a year.

 

They however cling to the idea that we’re all in this together, there is no left and right, and that they can work with either party. 

 

Vote left

 

The IS calls for a vote for the NDP, not based on their platform, which is always disappointing, but based on the fact that the party still has organic connections to the trade unions—or at least the trade union bureaucracy and many union activists tend to support and be involved in the NDP.

 

And, as we saw with the forced surrender of the BC Liberals to the Conservatives, the NDP is still seen as a party hostile to the rightwing parties that exist only to support the 1%. So a vote for the NDP is a class conscious vote, as opposed to voting Liberal or Conservative.

 

That support for union activists and other progressives is still there, unions are working to get their members to canvass for the NDP and to vote NDP.

 

If the Greens and the NDP were to make it into government with the conservatives dead last, people would think that politics had moved to the left providing confidence to movements to call for rent control, non-market housing, safe supply and so on. The ruling class would abandon the Conservatives for something else.

 

If, as is more likely, the Conservative have a minority or just manage a majority of a few seats, every bigot in the province will be emboldened, thinking that the rise of the Conservatives means their views are now the majority. In this case, the NDP strategists will conclude (as they do after nearly every election) that they didn’t move far enough to the right.

 

Voting NDP will not beat back the Conservatives, since the NDP will continue to legitimize Conservative policies with their own softer versions of them. We can’t even rely on an NDP victory to keep Conservatives out of government. In 1991 Gordon Wilson was leader of the BC Liberals and lost to the NDP. In 1999 the NDP invited him in to join their cabinet. There is no guarantee that if the NPD are behind by a seat or two of the Conservatives that they won’t offer some of them cabinet positions to switch parties. Unfortunately, if the NDP and Conservatives both have a minority of seats, there is no guarantee Greens will side with the NDP and not the Conservatives

 

Don’t mourn, organize

 

After the election, BC will either have a convoy premier or a convoy leader of the opposition. In either case only a determined fight back can protect us. The protests and rallies to defend trans rights, to defend Indigenous Sovereignty and defeat planet killing resource projects, to demand rent control and public housing must start immediately after the election. Even small actions can spark bigger movements and along the way they can win people away from the politics of despair that both Eby and Rustad are peddling.