2 weeks Ago By Adam Pankratz
The B.C. election results are finally in after recounts and mail-in ballots finally concluded Monday.
The BC NDP have won a bare majority of 47 seats to hold on to power by a paper-thin margin: the seat that flipped to the NDP after mail-ins were counted was won by only 27 votes. Your vote matters, never forget it. For Premier David Eby and the NDP, this is a massive relief.
They have won and no one who should be taken seriously would say otherwise. Their victory, however, was far smaller than many imagined it could ever be and, in many ways, should ever have been. The BC Conservative surge engineered by John Rustad and campaign manager Angelo Isidorou will go down in B.
C. political lore as one of the most incredible accomplishments ever seen. And yet they remain in opposition.
This election has the odd characteristic of allowing both parties to feel simultaneously great and depressed about themselves and their performance. The NDP supporters now looking to lord it over the second-place BC Conservatives, who won 44 seats, should take a moment of self-reflection. For all their success, the BC Conservatives were a highly unsophisticated political machine.
True, the central campaign team the Conservatives had were pros and performed exceptionally well, but the party as a whole cannot be described that way. It was put together on the fly after the implosion of BC United and scrambled its way to the finish line while integrating BCU candidates, ejecting unelectable weirdos and being seriously underfunded. Indeed, if the BC NDP could have created the ideal opponent at the beginning of the campaign to thrash in an election, that party might well have looked like the BC Conservatives.
And yet, they managed only the smallest of majorities. The Conservatives, for their part, should likewise look in the mirror despite their excellent campaign. They had exceptionally good macro-political factors working for them.
Inflation and affordability have done little but intensify under Eby, and that was not enough to push Rustad to victory. Eby and the NDP also remained almost unfathomably aloof and out of touch with the concerns of British Columbians. Still, the Conservatives couldn’t quite make it.
Exactly why will always be a matter of speculation, but the Conservatives frequently did themselves no favours by running candidates who gave the NDP ample ammunition to characterize Conservatives as a bunch of racist wackos. They aren’t, but the lack of vetting of many candidates speaks to the lack of professionalism outside the central campaign office. In the end, enough real — though past — racially charged outbursts and quacky theories gave any voter who wanted to doubt the Conservatives enough reason to do so.
Each party now has a key question to ask itself. For the NDP and David Eby, the question is “Have you, as you said on election night, truly heard the concerns of British Columbians and learned from their message?” Or, will Eby continue to ram activist, woke politics down the throats of the province? For, if Eby is to be taken at his word, we must also take him at his word that Conservatives and their supporters are hateful racist lunatics. If that is what the premier believes about half the province’s population, one has to wonder how much respect he actually has for their point of view.
For the Conservatives, the question is as straightforward as it is bedevilling: “Can you shed your insurgent coat and become a professional mainstay of B.C. politics?” This transition is far more difficult than it may appear.
In the business world, this is akin to a start-up becoming a stable enterprise, and is the phase in which many, if not most, start-ups fail. Conservative MLAs need to recognize they are no longer outsiders to whom voters might give a pass for questionable acts. They are in.
Now it’s time to show they are better and more professional than the incumbent NDP. The next four years are set for a continuation of NDP rule in B.C.
How the parties respond to their new challenges will set the stage for the real fight in 2028. National Post.
