Opinion: The provincial election was a wake-up call for NDP to deliver a livable BC

Corwin Davidson (he/him) is a fourth-year political science major who has spent some time bouncing around the North American political world. He's interned for a US congressman, knocked on doors for the BC NDP and spent too much time for his own good looking at electoral data.

At long last, the dust is beginning to settle around the BC provincial election. Revealed behind the dust is a big mess. As of this writing, the BC NDP hold 47 seats, the BC Conservatives 44 and the Greens 2. The NDP held a bare majority of seats, but due to some fun mechanics stuff involving the appointment of a speaker, the NDP may still be reliant on the Greens for some votes. As I said: big mess.

What is there to take away from all this? Well, depends who you ask. Despite not having much chance of forming government, John Rustad (of the Conservative)’s takeaway has been pretty positive for himself. He’s got fair reason to be. A party that was generally considered a bunch of far-right lunatics four years ago (and had zero seats) has now come up a few seats short of being able to do whatever they want with the province. This sort of rapid ascendance bears some comparison to the Saskatchewan Party near-win of 2003, which certainly bodes well for Rustad in the long term. Regardless of the ultimate result, the big story from the election will be just how well a formerly seatless party did against a party that formerly held a strong majority.

David Eby of the NDP has tried his own hand at a smug takeaway for himself, but he’s been much more tentative about it. He called the election “a victory for progressive values,” but also acknowledged that the NDP has a lot more work to do.

So, what gives? Why are the BC Conservatives doing so well? They piggybacked off the popularity of the federal Conservatives, sure. But why are the federal Conservatives so darn popular in the first place?

The easy answer is because there’s a strong anti-incumbent trend going on in Canada right now. The polling for the federal Liberals is getting concerningly close to former Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff levels, which is to say terrible. (Back in 2011, Ignatieff led the liberals to a vote share below 20 per cent and a whopping 34 seats.) Trudeau isn’t polling that poorly yet, but he’s certainly getting there. The likes of now-former premiers Blaine Higgs of New Brunswick and Heather Stefanson of Manitoba have been thoroughly thrashed by their respective oppositions in recent provincial elections. Hell, in the most recent Albertan election, the NDP didn’t win, but they received the highest share of the vote for a left-of-center party since the United Farmers back in the 1930s. In this sense, the NDP have done pretty well to manage a bare majority of seats in BC. The coattails of Pierre Poilievre’s popularity doubtless render some aid to provincial conservatives, but as seen in New Brunswick and Manitoba, those coattails aren’t enough in the face of widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo, whichever party the status quo may be.

The matter of the culture war is admittedly hard to ignore. Conservatives nationwide have been gleefully fearmongering over it, and Rustad is no exception. Still, social issues alone don’t win you an election. New Brunswick’s new premier Susan Holt routed Blaine Higgs last month with a focus on economic issues, which played well against the Higgs campaign’s focus on frothing hatred of trans kids. The culture war stuff works, but it works a lot less well against a strong economic message.

However, neither of those really get to the heart of it. And the heart of it can’t quite be boiled down to “a lot of people gleefully support the policies of a deranged climate denialist.” No, it’s down to the sources behind that anti-incumbent trend, which is in fact connected to why the fearmongering culture war garbage sort of worked. It’s pretty simple: incumbents nationwide are starting to lose because people are not satisfied with the status quo. I might even go so far as to say that people are deeply unsatisfied. Unsatisfied enough to vote for a climate denier who centered his campaign around opposition to a tax he voted to create.

Looking around, it’s not too hard to see why. Rents are immensely high. Grocery prices grow unspeakable. The livability of Vancouver is essentially down the toilet, and the rest of the province isn’t far behind.

The chain of logic is starting to look pretty inescapable here: David Eby nearly lost his majority because he hasn’t done enough to make the province livable. This isn’t to take away from what he has accomplished on housing policy (his zoning reform, for example, has led to great strides in density near transit hubs) but it’s simply not enough, and the voters seem to concur.

What, then, should Eby have been doing? Tangible change in the housing market would have been a start. Perhaps even a mild acknowledgement that the market has proved insufficient at distribution. All the market is allowing for at the moment is a vast increase in anti-immigrant sentiment and general racism. The problem — shocker — is not immigration, but the inability of the market to keep up with it. One might go so far as to say that the BC NDP had a golden opportunity to first suspend zoning rules province-wide, then establish a provincial crown corporation with the sole purpose of building as many housing units as humanly possible as fast as humanly possible. The way landlording tends to work around here, the government might well profit off it, too. Incremental changes to zoning are a start, but they no longer cut the mustard. The housing crisis is just that: a crisis, and when you’re faced with a crisis, you don’t take tentative steps to resolve the issue in the future — you do everything you can to fix it right now.

If you’re talking really crazy stuff that could have been done to make BC more livable, perhaps even some price controls on household goods. Now, yes, I have taken Econ 101. I’m aware of the idea that prices rise due to demand, and price controls thus tend to constrict supply. This is, at least, how it works in the model. In the real world, it appears more like every company has implicitly decided to raise prices enormously to please themselves. This has little to do with basic economics, so much as naked corporate greed. More to the point, prices are reaching the extent where I suspect a lot of people would accept constrained supply over unaffordable supply. At least somebody would be able to afford their dang groceries that way.

Eby stated in his election night speech that the party had work to do to win back the trust of the province. Nothing’s off the table, he’s since said. The above would certainly be a start, if he can overcome centrist timidity and start trying to fulfill his party’s social-democratic legacy.

Speaking of legacies, a comparison might be drawn to Dave Barrett’s NDP government back in the 70s. The Barrett government passed an average of one law every three days according to the Vancouver Sun, and permanently transformed the province with fun stuff like the banning of corporal punishment and the creation of ICBC. But, some might say, Barrett lost his majority after one term. To that I can only say, gee, who else very nearly did that but without the policy wins?

Long-term electoral success or not, bold governments like Barrett’s can create positive legacies, which matters a great deal more than winning elections. Take Woodrow Lloyd, former Co-operative Commonwealth Federation premier of Saskatchewan. He successfully implemented Medicare despite a bruising doctor’s strike, and lost reelection to the Saskatchewan Liberals in 1964. But, though Lloyd was gone, Medicare remained in Saskatchewan, and nobody’s saying Woodrow Lloyd was a fool for instituting good policy. And even if he’d lost this year, nobody would be saying David Eby is a fool right now if he had left a legacy like that behind.

Still, thanks to a few hundred votes in key ridings, Eby is luckier than Barrett and Lloyd: he’s actually gotten a second term. This is his chance to dispense with the incrementalism and actually make that vast positive change.

The election was, as Eby says, a victory for progressive values. But the victory was for the progressive values we want, not the ones we’re getting. For the good, even for the survivability, of British Columbia, the NDP need to go further, perceived electability or not. The livability of the province and David Eby’s ultimate legacy are at stake.

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