In October, British Columbians will head to the polls and determine whether to deliver the province’s NDP government a third term or take a chance on John Rustad’s Conservative Party of B.C. Having pushed the centrist BC United to the sidelines, the B.C. Conservatives are the standard-bearers for a real change in the politics of Canada’s westernmost province. They’re not just any opposition party on the make; they are the province’s first populist conservative challenger in decades.
British Columbia is suffering from crisis upon crisis stacked atop one another, whether it be suffocatingly high prices in housing and basic necessities, a bleak economy or a widespread addictions crisis. Neither the NDP nor the technocratic BC United, who governed the province for 16 years under the Liberal banner before the New Democrats regained office in 2017, effectively addressed the multiple crises as they emerged and grew. And both presided over the decline of B.C.’s vast and diverse natural resource-based economy, adding stacks of restrictions and regulations as high as the Rocky Mountains.
For the first time since 1952, the B.C. Conservatives are truly resurgent; the latest polls have them pulling just ahead of the NDP. Every populist conservative movement has its own nuances and policy prescriptions, of course. John Rustad is not Boris Johnson, just as Boris Johnson is not Marine Le Pen. Rustad’s conservatism will be familiar to Canadians. It’s based on cutting taxes and regulations, balancing the budget, boosting the natural resource sector, and upholding law and order. The party’s appeal lies largely in how diametrically opposed its platform is to that of the NDP.
The New Democrats have made life very difficult for the natural resources sector, whether through regulatory burdens on forestry or crippling uncertainty for mineral exploration and mining. They have run huge deficits and piled up record debt, and overseen a staggering deterioration of law and order due to their handling of the addictions crisis, which they’ve tried to solve with “safe supply” and decriminalization. More than one-third of B.C. residents have considered leaving the province due to the worsening living situation. With BC United promising only moderate change, the Conservatives are the clear alternative, proposing to dismantle the NDP’s legacy and wipe the slate clean.
The widespread support for Pierre Poilievre’s federal Conservatives suggests Canada is primed for a populist conservative wave. The B.C. Conservatives will get one of the first shots at the crumbling political order.
B.C.’s Populist Pedigree
It may seem hard to believe given B.C.’s reputation as a bastion of “progressive” leftist politics, but conservative populism has a long and remarkably successful history in the province.
No politician embodied an authentic B.C. populism more than William Andrew Cecil Bennett, leader of the Social Credit Party of B.C., popularly known as the Socreds, and premier from 1952 to 1972. W.A.C. Bennett’s political success was tied up in North America’s economic boom following the end of World War II. B.C. was perfectly positioned to benefit from the demand for raw materials required to rebuild Europe and fuel the post-war expansion of Canada’s rapidly growing housing subdivisions, industries and public infrastructure. B.C.’s forestry, mining and fisheries sectors drove prosperity and built the province we know today.
W.A.C. Bennett was a small-business owner from Kelowna and former provincial Conservative MLA who crossed the floor to join the Socreds and become its leader by 1952. “Social Credit” was then a prominent albeit unfulfilled ideology of economic reform (also popular in Alberta and Quebec) that included strange proposals like replacing money with government credit, but Bennett eschewed such experiments in favour of populist conservatism while retaining the Socred name.
Strongly anti-socialist and pro-individualist in his rhetoric, Bennett embodied the B.C. of the 1950s. It was mainly a small-town, resource-driven economy; Vancouver was nothing like the sprawling metropolis of today. Family-owned and corporate sawmills, mines and fisheries businesses provided a sturdy economic backbone, with Vancouver – sitting at the mouth of the great Fraser River – serving as the export point to global markets.
Bennett incorporated fiscal conservatism into his populist ethos, routinely balancing the provincial budget. He once even celebrated his government’s success at reducing public debt by firing a flaming arrow into a wooden boat filled with void government bonds. It was part of Bennett’s larger-than-life persona, along with his permanent toothy grin and a political cunning that led journalists to label him “Wacky” Bennett. (One reporter noted he was “Wacky like a fox.”) His opponents derided him as a sort of country hick, but B.C.’s voters returned him to the premier’s office no fewer than seven times.
The W.A.C. Bennett era was also the height of influence for the Non-Partisan Association, an ironically-named conservative municipal party that dominated Vancouver politics in an astonishing run from 1941 to 2008, producing 10 of the city’s 16 mayors during that time.
Bennett was also a product of the era’s Keynesian economic spirit, however, and along with his fixation on balanced budgets came a belief in the government’s ability to do big things. His Socreds directed the expansion of B.C. Rail and created BC Ferries as a Crown corporation. Both services were essential to residents of B.C.’s less-populated areas. He also oversaw the building of the great dam on the Peace River in northeastern B.C., later named the WAC Bennett Dam, which along with numerous dams in the Columbia River basin provided the province with an abundance of cheap electricity to power its economic expansion.
Vancouver as Industrial City
B.C.’s commercial capital, Vancouver, was a very different place during the W.A.C. Bennett era. Today’s modern, attractive residential enclaves of False Creek and Yaletown were once bustling industrial areas with sawmills and lumber yards, where freight trains bearing cargoes of raw materials from the province’s great Interior passed through what are today upscale downtown neighbourhoods.
In the immediate post-war era, Vancouver was also a city deeply divided politically and economically. Although Bennett was the champion of small-town businessmen like himself, his Socreds also found enormous support in Vancouver’s downtown business community, as well as in the middle- to upper-class neighbourhoods of the city’s affluent West Side, then a Progressive Conservative bastion at the federal level.
The era was also the height of influence for the Non-Partisan Association (NPA), an ironically-named conservative municipal party that dominated Vancouver politics in an astonishing run from 1941 to 2008, producing 10 of the city’s 16 mayors during that time. Like the Socreds, the NPA was the party of the West Side, battling challengers who often drew most of their support from working-class East Vancouver.
One of the most notable politicians of the NPA era was Tom Campbell, a tough-talking conservative populist who was mayor from 1966 to 1972. A collaborator with W.A.C. Bennett’s Socreds, Campbell championed the city’s more socially conservative residents amidst the rising counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. In 1971, in what was either his most infamous or his finest hour, Campbell ordered mounted police to charge a gathering of hippies and other marijuana enthusiasts, reportedly 2000-strong, who were staging a “Smoke-In” in the Gastown neighbourhood.
The alliance of urban conservatives in Vancouver with rural populists across the province constituted W.A.C. Bennett’s electoral coalition, enabling the Socreds to dominate B.C. politics until 1972, when the NDP edged into power.
The NDP Interregnum
A strong showing from the provincial PCs shaved 12 percent of the popular vote away from the Socreds that year, helping enable an NDP majority government. Led by Dave Barrett, a charismatic, working-class populist from East Vancouver, the NDP made several permanent changes in its three short years in power. Barrett’s government outlawed public pay toilets, turning many of Vancouver’s public washrooms into havens for people to use hard drugs in the decades that followed. He also lowered the drinking age to 19, which was very nice of him.
Most notorious, however, was Barrett’s nationalization of auto insurance to create the Insurance Corporation of BC (ICBC), whose massive bureaucracy and meagre payouts for claims have made it one of the province’s most hated institutions. He also increased government spending per-person by over 50 percent, a record among B.C. premiers since 1952, taking the government from Bennett’s celebrated surpluses and into debt.
Unfortunately for Barrett, W.A.C. Bennett’s son Bill Bennett took the reins of the Socreds and avenged his father in the 1975 election. Led by the younger Bennett, the Socreds underwent their own transformation from the populist party of the post-war boom to the technocratic economic managers of the economically liberal wave of the 1980s. Shrinking markets and intensifying international competition would put the natural resources sector into a slow but long decline, eventually gutting the rural B.C. economy.
The Rise of the Technocrats
Bill Bennett was a new kind of leader in post-war B.C. Not the grinning champion of small-town businessmen like his father, he preferred to laser in on economic and budgetary management while cultivating close ties with downtown Vancouver’s business community. His government brought in the “Restraint” program, which entailed deeply cutting government spending and slashing the public service payroll. Regarded as a cold but effective manager, the younger Bennett was never mistaken for his folksier father although he maintained the same relentless focus on balanced budgets.
On Bill Bennett’s watch, Vancouver began its transformation from a provincial lumber town into a global city, beginning in earnest after it hosted the Expo 86 World’s Fair, exposing it to investors and corporate leaders from around the world. The sawmills and warehouses on the shores of False Creek gave way to residential areas, and the freight trains no longer passed through downtown. Small towns like Hope on the periphery of the Lower Mainland, Port Alberni on Vancouver Island, and Cassiar in the province’s northern reaches all suffered from the decline in demand for natural resources, with Cassiar eventually becoming a ghost town.
Bill Vander Zalm’s tenure was controversial in other ways, not only because of his strong social conservative streak but also due to allegations of impropriety and conflict of interest over the sale of his Biblical theme park in Richmond. Vander Zalm resigned in April 1991, handing the reins to the utterly hapless Rita Johnston.
The decline of the rural economy and Vancouver’s increasing detachment from it also encouraged the evolution of East Vancouver from a working-class district into a middle-class area, albeit with a strongly progressive orientation. The city’s politics changed in other ways, too, with East Vancouver remaining a reliable stronghold for the provincial and federal NDP while the former PC bastion of Vancouver Quadra would flip into a Liberal safe seat in 1984 – the very year of a national PC landslide. Federal Tories increasingly found themselves pushed out of Vancouver’s core to its inner suburbs in places like the North Shore and Richmond.
Populism’s Short-Lived Resurgence
Bill Vander Zalm was B.C.’s final Socred premier and the last outright populist to govern B.C. to date. Succeeding Bill Bennett in 1986 – in the afterglow of Expo 86 – he was an unconventional politician, a Dutch immigrant who became a tulip farmer and a theme park operator, whose wife Lillian favoured Olivia Newton-John-style headbands. Vander Zalm was a socially conservative Roman Catholic who staunchly opposed abortion and sought to instill “true Christian principles” in British Columbia. Unlike Bill Bennett, with his close relations with Vancouver’s financial elite, Vander Zalm favoured self-made small businessmen like himself and reliably produced balanced budgets.
Socred premiers and their policies would evolve and shift with the times, but the one quality they all shared was a drive and ability to get things done. Whether it be dams, highways, hospitals or world’s fairs, the Socreds would ram them through with an iron will. Vander Zalm shared that determination to a fault. He pushed through construction of the Coquihalla Highway without Project Labour Agreements (PLA), resulting in tremendous cost overruns. Still, the highway soon proved indispensable. His tenure was controversial in other ways, not only because of his strong social conservative streak but also due to allegations of impropriety and conflict of interest over the sale of his Biblical theme park in Richmond. Vander Zalm resigned in April 1991, handing the reins to the utterly hapless Rita Johnston.
The provincial election seven months later brought the collapse of the Socreds as a functional political party, relegating them to third place behind the resurgent B.C. Liberal Party, which became the Official Opposition. The NDP regained office under leader Mike Harcourt, and there would be three further NDP premiers in succession. Although initially reformed into a centrist alternative to the NDP, the B.C. Liberals quickly became the vehicle for right-of-centre voters in the province who opposed the NDP. By 1995, the Liberals had absorbed most of the Social Credit Party’s former support. Now, they just needed to wait for the effects of NDP misrule to be felt.
The Rise – and Fall – of the B.C. Liberals
Under the leadership of the Ivy League-educated Gordon Campbell (no relation to Tom Campbell), the Liberals stormed back to power in 2001 on a voter base comprising federal Liberal and PC supporters, winning all but two of the province’s 79 seats. Although Campbell deployed some populist rhetoric while campaigning, his governing style evoked Bill much more than W.A.C. Bennett.
Campbell focused on fiscal and economic matters, modernizing the provincial tax system with deep cuts to income and corporate taxes while introducing a slew of consumption taxes to help compensate. His government also embarked on a sweeping deregulation and privatization program, selling off B.C. Rail among other moves. Good times followed – Campbell’s government presided over the creation of over 400,000 jobs – and consecutive majority governments helped hold together the B.C. Liberal voting coalition.
At the same time, however, a booming real estate industry was driving up home and rental costs, while rural natural resource-based industries like forestry continued to shed thousands of jobs. B.C.’s great prosperity was not being felt equally throughout the province. Campbell would also infamously introduce Canada’s first carbon tax in 2008 as a purportedly revenue-neutral device to combat climate change. Considering subsequent political developments, it’s ironic that the NDP became the first to wield an “axe the tax” slogan in the leadup to the 2009 provincial election, arguing that it would unfairly affect rural British Columbians. While the Liberals won another majority in that contest, questions over the carbon tax and its impact particularly on rural regions were only just beginning.
Campbell’s already shrinking popularity collapsed to single-digits after he merged the provincial sales tax with the federal GST to create the Harmonized Sales Tax (HST), as well as public mistakes like getting arrested in Hawaii for driving while intoxicated. He resigned in 2011 and was succeeded by former cabinet minister Christy Clark, who had been a personable and popular radio host in Vancouver. Fortunately for her, B.C.’s boom still had some life – it was Canada’s best-performing provincial economy in 2013. Importantly, Clark also strongly supported the building of liquified natural gas (LNG) facilities on the B.C. coast, which would become the largest development in the province’s natural resources sector in generations. She also continued the Campbell tradition of ignoring and avoiding social and cultural wedge issues like LGBT rights, which stayed on the backburner so long as the Liberals kept winning elections.
Still, it wasn’t a perfect arrangement, and the long Liberal run ended in 2017 when Conservative Party insurgents peeled off enough Liberal votes to let the NDP squeak through in a handful of seats, leaving the Liberals one seat short of a majority. The NDP then struck a support agreement with the B.C. Greens, who had won a pair of seats, and formed a government for the first time since 2001. Clark resigned as Liberal leader and was replaced by Andrew Wilkinson.
In 2020 amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, the NDP called a snap election and for the first time won without the aid of vote-splitting among their opponents. Wilkinson was then succeeded as Liberal leader by Kevin Falcon, who attempted to revive the party by rebranding it in 2022 as BC United – while insisting that the nebulous “free enterprise” coalition of federal Liberals and Conservatives was still viable.
Falcon also continued to support the provincial carbon tax that the Liberals had introduced in 2008, while decrying the NDP’s meddling with its structure, changing it in 2017 from a revenue-neutral tax to a revenue-generating one. While such hair-splitting probably seemed politically astute to Falcon and his advisers at the time, it became one of a growing list of reasons why voters began to question his sincerity.
Amid all the NDP-caused upheaval, Kevin Falcon’s expulsion in 2022 of Nechako Lakes MLA John Rustad from the Liberal caucus, after Rustad raised questions about the accepted narrative concerning climate change, hardly seemed significant. It has proved seismic.
In their nearly eight years in office, the NDP would disassemble or simply tear down much of the painstakingly constructed legacy of previous governments stretching back 70 years. B.C.’s once sterling economy is now sluggish, the provincial credit rating that was once among Canada’s best at AA+ is now down to AA- thanks to the NDP’s plans threatening to triple the provincial debt. Culture war issues – drug decriminalization and safe supply foremost among them – have divided B.C. communities.
Under the NDP, which returned to office in 2017 led by John Horgan (left), B.C.’s previously sterling economy became sluggish, the debt mounted ever-faster, and culture war issues such as drug decriminalization devastated many communities. (Sources of photos: (left) BC NDP, licensed under CC BY 2.0; (right) Peace Arch News)Amid all this upheaval, Falcon’s expulsion in 2022 of Nechako Lakes MLA John Rustad from the Liberal caucus, after Rustad raised questions about the accepted narrative concerning climate change, hardly seemed significant. It has proved seismic.
Geoff Russ @GeoffRuss3 is a policy analyst and writer in Vancouver. He is a frequent contributor to the National Post and the Hub.
Part IV of our series on British Columbia, on the upcoming provincial election, will be published in early September.
Source of main image: Shutterstock.
