Last week’s bombshell announcement that BC United, the former provincial Liberal Party, was suspending its campaign for this fall’s election and throwing its support behind the Conservative Party of B.C. revealed just how dramatically the province’s political landscape has changed. In the fourth instalment of C2C’s series on British Columbia, Geoff Russ charts how John Rustad’s Conservative Party went in a breathtakingly short time from moribund to upstart to centre-stage and favoured to win, and lays out the issues that divide Canada’s third-biggest province and will dominate the coming campaign.

Barely a year ago the Conservative Party of B.C. was a two-seat rump in the B.C. legislature with an untested leader. Now it has moved ahead in the polls and is positioned to pull off a massive upset in October’s election. In the third instalment of our series on British Columbia, Geoff Russ charts the rise of the Conservatives on Canada’s West Coast, showing how the party’s brand of populism is part of a longstanding political tradition in B.C. going back to the days of W.A.C. Bennett and his Social Credit powerhouse. Russ explains how the upcoming election promises to be a showdown between debt-addicted “progressive” leftist politics and prudent, fiscally-responsible conservative populism.

To hear proponents tell it, proportional representation is the cure for all that ails Canadian democracy. It’s fairer, less divisive, more diverse, makes voters happier and is less prone to “strategic” voting. About the only thing it apparently can’t do is make childbirth painless. But could replacing our traditional first-past-the-post voting system really improve how Canada is governed – and how Canadians feel about their government? In his grand-prize-winning entry to the 1st Annual Patricia Trottier and Gwyn Morgan Student Essay Contest, Nolan Albert weighs the arguments for and against replacing first-past-the-post with proportional representation, and in doing so uncovers the real cause of voter dissatisfaction.

The knives are out for Pierre Poilievre. Virtually everything about him displeases not only the hard-left but soft conservatives and ostensibly well-meaning centrists who believe – or claim – that he is an ideologue (or opportunist) mesmerized by (or perhaps merely exploiting) populism, a word raised in their minds to the power of incantation signalling everything bad in the human soul. Samuel Routley conducts a detached and good-faith evaluation of Poilievre’s policies, style, messaging and background, setting the Conservative leadership candidate’s meteoric rise against the context of an increasingly disgruntled electorate with a potential “change” election on the horizon.

As the federal election campaign degenerates from vicious name-calling to literal sticks and stones, the idea of governing the country by balancing competing visions, policies, regions and demands seems quaint, if not antique. But perhaps this absence of equilibrium only serves to highlight its value. Preston Manning makes the case for bringing greater balance to a wide range of topics, including economic policies, Covid-19 restrictions, the environment, federal-provincial relations and even identity politics. What’s required to get there are political leaders committed to hearing both sides of the issues – and an electorate that demands it.

Political theory suggests that freedom and equity are opposing concepts. Allowing greater individual autonomy is assumed to curtail fairness for the less advantaged, and vice versa. Not so when it comes to the 2021 electoral debate over childcare – one of the few areas of sharp contrast between the two main parties. Peter Shawn Taylor takes a close look at the Liberals’ proposed national childcare system and the Conservatives’ refundable childcare tax credit and finds one option delivers not only greater choice for all parents, but superior support for low-income families as well as the promise of new spaces.

Threatening to take your ball and leave because you don’t like how the game is going is the sort of selfish behaviour we discourage in young children. So why do we celebrate it every four years when apparent adults do the same thing? With the U.S. presidential election only days away, American Democrats are once again vowing to move to Canada if Donald Trump wins. Don’t hold your breath. With bracing realism, Aaron Nava looks at how this electoral petulance always plays out, the hypocrisy it embodies and what it means for democracy in the U.S. and Canada.

Mark Milke had a ringside seat in the Alberta election as the lead architect of the United Conservative Party platform. What he saw was a startling disconnect between media coverage and the issues that mattered most to Albertans. The economic focus of UCP policy earned the party a million votes and a huge majority. Through bias, ignorance, or both, the media often missed the story.