Deals (Between The Lines Of Age)

On The Death Of BC United

If you are a BC Conservative candidate in a Lower Mainland seat, is today’s announcement’s good thing?

For those of you blissfully unaware, the absolute clown show that was Kevin Falcon’s BC United, also known in these pages as BC FC, are in some manner not contesting the election in October. (We don’t know what the legal status of the party will be, but they’re not running candidates this fall.) So what we have is a situation where the conventional wisdom is now racing ahead of the facts.

To be clear, I’ve been fairly low on the BC NDP all year, to the point where I have it on very good authority that NDP MLAs and Ministers have seen my past dooming and dismissed it out of hand. But now, I really don’t think this is going to help the Conservatives to the extent that people think. And honestly, I’m prepared to make the case that this could be a disastrous mistake from the right.

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This is definitely a boon to the BC Conservatives in some places - it helps them in the interior, the North, and on Vancouver Island, places where the majority of United’s vote is people who will be voting for Pierre Poilievre. It absolutely helps them win seats in Kootenay and Kamloops and Comox. There is no denying that there are places where the Conservatives are gaining votes because of this decision. But that’s not everywhere.

Let’s say you’re a Conservative candidate in Vancouver, and you project for something like 39% of the vote currently. The NDP might be at 42%, United is maybe 12%, and the Greens might be at 7%, something like that. (If this seems like I’m using frenemy of mine Bryan Breguet’s Langara seat as a rough mental model, you win the prize.) Is this result particularly good for you?

At a superficial level, it’s kind of a nothingburger. Abacus Data polling from May said that 49% of BC United's vote were voting for Poilievre federally, whereas 46% were voting for JT. So, in a sense, it’s not much at all. But that assumes that those splits apply equally everywhere, and we know that’s just not true. It’s much more likely, just given the sheer number (or lack of number, more precisely) of Federal Liberals on Vancouver Island and in the North and Interior, that the vast majority of BC United voters in Skeena or Powell River or Kootenay are Poilievre voters federally. But to make that 49/46 split make sense, you’d need a majority of that BC United vote in the Lower Mainland to be federal Liberals. And that does make sense.

Who were the voters in the Lower Mainland who dislike David Eby and aren’t already voting for John Rustad? It makes sense that they’d be socially liberal, worried about Rustad’s complaints about SOGI and the presence of pro-lifers amongst the Conservative candidate mix, but worried about the economics. Eby’s running a deficit that is legitimately concerning, and there are reasons to doubt his ability to keep the reins from coming undone. But Rustad leads a party that can be characterized as focused on social conservative culture wars.

If those voters in the Lower Mainland are likelier to be socially liberal and scared of Rustad and co’s social conservatism, then they’ll do what longtime BC Liberal Mark Marissen announced he’s doing and vote for Eby. And if that’s the case then in that hypothetical Vancouver seat, you might see the NDP pick up 8% of that 12%. And that would be the ballgame across swathes of the Lower Mainland where the NDP already project ahead.

I hold no particular torch for the NDP - I have said they could easily lose, and I stand by it. They’re a party that has done some good, but it’s far from a utopia over there right now. There’s nothing wrong with holding those two beliefs at the same time. Now, I have private reporting that the NDP believed they could hold some of their wave seats from 2020, and yeah, your Kelownas and your Kootenays and your Vernons are in way worse spots today than they were under a split. But I never thought they were holding those anyways, because the thing about the Global Fucking Realignment is that Kootenay and Campbell River won’t keep voting for the left.

One of the fault lines on how impactful this will be is how much you thought BC FC still mattered. I didn’t think they were going to win any seats and I thought they were mostly an irrelevance. Now that they’ve exited stage right, I can’t suddenly call them substantial players on the stage. I do think this matters on the margins, but this election will be fundamentally decided by whether the NDP can effectively scare enough moderates that Rustad - and the untested team behind him - are too big of a risk.

The comparison that will make my progressive readers happy is actually (hilariously) Doug Ford. Faced with an insurgent threat in 2018, Ford pivoted from attacking Andrea Horwath to pointing out that nobody in Ontario had any clue who the fuck the rest of the cabinet would be. He spent the debate, and the last 10 days, doing every event flanked by Christine Elliott and Carolyn Mulroney in an explicit effort to contrast his “team” against the untested rookies of the Ontario NDP. Here, the opportunity for Eby to highlight the uncertainty around a BC Conservative government and the ministers who would be running schools and health and whatever else is very real. If Rustad wants to win, he’ll need to have better answers than Horwath did.

October’s election is close, and it’s hard to say who will win. That was true yesterday, and it’s true today. I just don’t think today’s announcement helps the Conservatives. They can easily still win, but it’s likely in my view the BC Conservatives just added a ton of votes in places they were already going to win while the NDP got reinforcements in key Vancouver-area marginals.

But before we go, let’s pour one out for Kevin Falcon. He inherited a political party that, before Covid, was arguably in a decent position to win a 5th election in 6 tries. He decided to rename it for #reasons, and then failed so badly the party will cease to exist. We will never see a bigger failure than this. What a time to be alive.