Karin Kirkpatrick was supposed to be retired from public life by this point. Instead, the former West Vancouver-Capilano MLA is founding CentreBC, a new provincial party that aims to – as the name suggests – find a path to victory through the political centre.
Kirkpatrick was elected as a BC Liberal, left office as a BC United member and ran once as an independent.
When Kevin Falcon agreed to fold BC United and let John Rustad’s BC Conservatives take the wheel in the race against the NDP in 2024, Kirkpatrick described it as a “stab in the back” to centrists.
In launching CentreBC, Kirkpatrick’s instinct is that there are voters who value low taxes, balanced budgets and business-friendly policies but who aren’t comfortable with the current social conservative fixations on conspiracy theories, reckless populism and Donald Trump.
We believe she’s onto something.
From 2001 to 2017, B.C. was governed by a coalition of liberals and conservatives who managed to fit together under one big “free enterprise” tent. That coalition under the BC Conservatives today is showing signs of being an unhappy marriage, as Rustad has booted one MLA for mocking residential school survivors only to see two more of his members join her in protest.
It’s a trope in political coverage, but it very much “remains to be seen” whether support will coalesce around CentreBC. It’s an extremely tall order to start from scratch, but don’t count Kirkpatrick or her party of moderates out before they’ve been tested. If there’s any lesson from politics, both at the provincial and federal levels recently, it’s that fortunes can change very suddenly.
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