Full disclosure: This article is by a partisan. I have returned to British Columbia from Tanzania at my own expense this fall to volunteer full-time for John Rustad’s BC Conservative Party. I have been a party member since John first crossed the floor to the Tories and count among the party’s candidates and organizers many friends and comrades.
Any successful big tent party includes many people and constituencies who do not agree with the party on everything. That is, in fact, the hallmark of a broad coalition. So while I am passionate in support of the party and of John, I do not consider myself to be a conservative ideologically, nor do my many genuinely conservative friends and comrades consider me to be so.
Disclosures out of the way, I am not writing this piece as a BC Tory partisan but in my normal role as an analyst of major trends in the politics of the Global North. If you are a British Columbian, or, for some strange reason, educated in our parochial history, feel free to skip the next section.
BC Political History to 2020
For those not following the parochial politics of British Columbia, let me begin by filling you in on the specifics of our local politics. The first official political party to enter the BC legislature was, technically, the Socialist Party, which began winning the electoral district of Newcastle, then a string of company coal mining towns owned by the Dunsmuir family, on Vancouver Island in the 1890s.
Upon the election of Socialists, BC’s previously non-partisan legislature decided to adopt the Canadian national party system and its members joined either the Liberal or Conservative caucus. In 1903, the Tories were elected with a slim majority but fell into minority government the following year. To save their government, they made an agreement with the BC Socialist Party to enact the forty-hour work week and other reforms in exchange for propping up the government. These policies proved so popular that the Tories won a series of landslide victories in the following elections and governed the province until 1916.
From the 1890s through the 1920s, a handful of Socialist and Labour party members of the legislature were elected in mining towns at the province’s periphery. The parties were leaderless and centred on local labour councils. Although, in some elections, their combined vote share approached 20% of the provincewide vote, it seemed that their participation in government was something that could only take place at the pleasure of one of the two main parties.
But in the 1930s all that changed. A new party, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, a proto-social democratic producerist party, with bold plans to socialize medicine, natural resources, electricity and a host of other major parts of the economy ran a full slate of candidates led by labour leader Robert Connell and won 32% of the popular vote on their first try in 1933. Although the party’s vote share fell slightly in 1937, a resurgent Conservative Party meant that they still gained on the governing Liberals and, had they not been leaderless and disorganized, might have won a three-way race against the two mainline parties.
The 1937 election was followed by a palace coup within the BC Liberal Party and the merging of its caucus with that of the Conservatives in 1938 and the leadership of coup leader John Hart. And ever since 1938, no matter how much the CCF or its successor party, the New Democrats, have moderated their views and policies, the overarching logic of BC politics on right has been this: “socialists” must be kept out of office at all costs.
This resulted in the creation of three big tent political parties that have dominated BC politics until very recently: the Liberal-Conservative Coalition (1938-52), the Social Credit Party (1952-93) and the BC Liberal Party (1993-2020). While these parties have proclaimed the same basis of unity since the emergence of what we might call the Second BC Party System, the leading ideology of each of these coalitions and their protagonists has shifted on a number of occasions.
The Liberal-Conservative Coalition is best characterized as a “welfare capitalist” regime that enacted kind of neofeudalism, partnering with major logging, energy and mining companies to build sawmills, pulp mills, dams, roads, mines, smelters and communications and energy infrastructure. The government and its supporters in industry, being primarily governed by a fear of socialism, sought to create a harmonious social contract that would settle the young men working in the bush, at the mills and down the mines by replacing work camps with towns and villages.
The thinking was that because–this seems unimaginable today–young single men who worked with their hands formed the backbone of socialist politics, the sensible thing would be to slowly, incrementally improve their wages, working conditions and benefits and house them in places congenial to family life, where they might settle down with a young woman and raise kids. Once immersed in respectable liberal capitalist society, the thinking was that they would lose their taste for socialist radicalism.
But the Coalition did not slay the socialist dragon and, following a succession crisis in the early 1950s, one of its members, WAC Bennett, of the legislature crossed the floor and became leader of the Social Credit Party and promptly, if only by a hair’s breadth, won the 1952 election. BC’s distinctive brand of Social Credit never incorporated the crypto-currency schemes of the original social credit movement of Clifford Douglas. Instead, it was a producerist party that largely maintained the neufeudal Tree Farm License system devised under Hart, a system that, like original feudalism, tied tenure over alienated crown land to obligations to the local populace, primarily in the form of the creation and maintenance of local sawmills.
The Socreds, from 1952 to 1979, were ideologically promiscuous, socially conservative producerists who saw small businesses as their primary allies and profited from the local business communities that had coalesced in BC’s mill, smelter and mining towns. The party’s leadership was composed primarily of local businesspeople and did not see either their own bureaucracy or big business as entirely natural or trustworthy allies. It engaged in periodic culls of the provincial workforce and uncompensated expropriation, most notably of the private electric power producers and the creation of BC Hydro.
During their final eleven years in power, the Socreds transformed into a Thatcherite party that privatized pubic assets and enacted austerity programs. It was during this period that the relationship between big business and the senior members of the permanent bureaucracy began to improve, with public assets returning to the private sector and senior managers being granted new powers to enact austerity programs in their government departments.
In 1993, the BC Liberals became the big tent under the leadership of Gordon Campbell, a former mayor of Vancouver who had eight years to craft a new coalition before taking power in 2001. This coalition is best characterized as being “right-progressive,” favouring the kind of alliance with big business as a partner in shaping the province, like the Coalition of 1938-52. But this was paired with management-directed austerity and reorganization and the creation and multiplication of government “authorities,” a management-heavy regional reorganization of government services directed by expert senior bureaucrats and executed through partnerships with private companies and non-profit organizations.
Because it had been preceded by a Blairite NDP government in the 1990s, it had a civil service that was already, to a significant extent, already conversant with and supportive Third Way austerity practices and largely endorsed them, especially as many of the partners in these new service delivery schemes were non-profit organizations, the majority of whose employees and decision-makers were socially liberal, university-educated progressives.
This new configuration of BC’s big tent “free enterprise” coalition as a partnership between business and the progressive courtier class did not just increase the legitimacy of austerity, contracting-out and other aspects of neoliberalism in BC’s managerial class and caring professions; it also produced the first and only progressive free enterprise coalition in BC history, a government not just known for privatization and austerity but for the most comprehensive Genderwang school curriculum of any Canadian province and a carbon tax designed to fight climate change.
The Rise and Fall of Right-Progressivism
It would be unfair to call the governments of Gordon Campbell and Christy Clark anachronistic, exactly. But the shape of political coalitions in the Global North began changing in the 1990s and that process has largely completed. In the twentieth century, politics largely ran along a left-right axis: parties of the left favoured largely regulatory and distributive projects conducted by the state and parties of the right favoured small government and less redistribution.
Both kinds of parties had a mix of two forces known as populism and progressivism. Like populism, progressivism traditionally existed on both the left and right of the political spectrum. The governments of Clark and Campbell were typical of right-wing progressivism as follows:
- the close involvement of and deference to experts not just in enacting but in shaping government policy and the substitution of elected officials with appointed experts in existing policy-making processes,
- the adoption and promotion of novel and fashionable views about race, identity, family structure, human sexuality, etiquette, etc.,
- the “voluntarily compliance” principle whereby the regulatory burden for environmental and other public safety and health rules is shifted from government officials to in-house experts and compliance officers within the private sector,
- the preference for non-binding, structured forms of public consultation facilitated by technocrats over binding, democratic political processes, and
- the promotion of incentive-based eugenics to encourage sterilization, abortion and other restrictions on reproduction of low-status and undesirable persons,
to name just a few. Such policies were promoted by right-wing progressives for much of the twentieth century and are associated with figures like Teddy Roosevelt and Prescott Bush, scion of the Bush political dynasty and treasurer of Planned Parenthood, which has returned to its roots in promoting incentive-based eugenics campaigns.
But, first in North America in the 1990s, and then spreading through the Global North in the 2010s and 20s, the right-left dynamic changed. As parties of the left adopted their own set neoliberal austerity, contracting out and privatization policies, policies I characterize as Blairite austerity politics ceased to substantially pertain to questions of distribution and ownership and became more focused on social issues and questions of expertise, social control and what is pejoratively characterized as “the culture war.”. This happened first in Canadian national politics in the 1993 federal election, in which the Progressive Conservative Party, a classic right-progressive party was annihilated in English Canada by the Reform Party, a populist party that had little time for experts and technocratic governance.
The next year, Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America swept the Republican Party back into a congressional majority but, more importantly, radically disempowered the right-progressives in the party’s senate and house caucuses, placing a new politics of populist belligerence at the centre of US politics.
By the twenty-first century, the right-progressives began abandoning their former parties and found themselves welcomed into parties of the left, often into leadership positions, now exerting more influence over policy than they did in their former parties of the right, as exemplified in the careers of Canadian MP Garth Turner and US Senator Arlen Specter. By 2015, the last three Canadian Progressive Conservative prime ministers, Joe Clark, Kim Campbell and Brian Mulroney were endorsing Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party over Stephen Harper’s Tories.
And as the 2010s rolled on and the progressive and conservative worldviews began to diverge both more widely and more rapidly, this realignment also began spreading first to the rest of the Anglosphere and then elsewhere in the Global North. Policies on climate, gender identity and Covid were important sites of this rapid and growing divergence precisely because they were tied so intimately to high-stakes confrontations between popular classes and experts.
From London to Victoria
The last section might just as easily be fitted not into an article about the collapse of the BC United Party but about the massive migration of votes from the UK Conservative Party to Reform UK earlier this summer, as the British Tories, another progressive conservative party that backs climate science and vaccine mandates and that took too long to turn against the Genderwang policies it itself introduced in 2010s. Or even the steady bleed of votes from the right-progressive German Christian Democrats to the populist Alliance for Germany.
But what makes the party that governed BC from 2001-16 such a fascinating case study is the compression, the rapidity of the realignment that took place. Despite its poor showing in the 2020 election, British Columbia’s BC Liberal Party (as it was known then), Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition in Victoria was, like the British Tories, the striking exception to a large scale realignment of politics in the Global North. Like the Boris Johnson’s Tories, it had successfully defended its right flank and no candidate to its political right was elected, just as in the five previous elections held in the twenty-first century.
But the signs were there to see. While there was no credible party of the new populist right contesting the election, small parties, fielding no more than a dozen candidates, that had perennially scored in the low single-digits, at best, when it came to percentage vote share, got surprising results around the province. For the first time, a Libertarian Party candidate received more than 10% of the vote, ditto the Christian Heritage Party’s slate, as did the brand new Rural BC Party. Meanwhile the tiny Conservative slate won over 30% of the vote in their stronghold in the Peace River country.
But rather than recognizing, as Pierre Poilievre, the federal Conservative leader has, that his party must embrace and include a resurgent constituency of anti-authoritarian, populist climate skeptics, Kevin Falcon responded to this new kind of conservatism by attempting to purge it from his party. By symbolically expelling his former cabinet colleague John Rustad on his birthday for retweeting a climate skeptic tweet, Falcon signalled that his party was an old school right-progressive party like Rishi Sunak’s Tories or Armin Laschet’s Christian Democrats. He underlined that point when whipping his caucus to cast a symbolic vote condemning the Freedom Convoy. And unlike Sunak’s Tories, Falcon’s party did not make any meaningful concessions to anti-authoritarian populists, unlike the 180 degree turn on Genderwang led by Kemi Badenoch.
But such high-risk, boneheaded moves might have been survivable had he not chosen to pair them with a move that dramatically undercut his strategy: he renamed his BC Liberal Party “BC United,” recalling the previous big-tent right-wing coalitions that had governed the province. If Falcon were really trying to make the party a bigger, more inclusive tent that recalled the Coalition and the Socreds at their height, how could he exclude social conservatives, populists and other key constituencies that have formed a crucial part of the base of successful right-wing parties in BC?
The BC Liberal Party was a dead party walking when Falcon took it over, a kind of party that is now obsolete, based on a coalition of groups and ideologies that no longer see themselves as natural allies or even politically compatible. You can’t both administer a carbon tax and retain the support of the industrial working class; you can’t both enact Genderwang and retain the support of most people active in faith communities; and nobody wants to hear about how you’ll better administer a society based on its liberal social consensus because there is no longer any such consensus.
But Falcon’s shambles of a rebanding process compressed this death march, which could have occupied much of the 2020s and more than one electoral cycle, into just two years. Of course, that is only half the story. The other half of the story, that of how Rustad and his Young Turks pulled off one of the most rapid political ascents Canada has ever seen, is one in which I am a minor character and which you’ll have to wait a while to read about.
