After once expelling John Rustad from his party for pushing anti-science views on climate change, BC United leader Kevin Falcon has decided if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, ending his campaign.
The details of the deal, which was largely brokered here on the North Shore, are still quite messy.
What is clear is that the big-tent alliance between free enterprise-oriented centrists and conservatives has just been uprooted and moved a few hundred metres to the right.
It certainly makes strategic sense to avoid vote splitting in a first-past-the-post electoral system, but are B.C.’s centre-right voters more united now than they were before?
It remains very much to be seen whether the centrists will feel motivated to vote for a party that campaigns on social conservative populist bugaboos like quashing sexual orientation and gender identity programming in schools and firing B.C.’s public health officer to appease anti-vaxxers in the party’s base.
In any event, it is the biggest shake-up in B.C.’s party politics since the Social Credit Party collapsed in 1996 and the centre-right found a home in the BC Liberals.
In 2020, when the NDP called an early election amidst a pandemic, a mere 53.8 per cent of eligible voters bothered to cast a ballot – the second-lowest turnout in the province’s modern history. If nothing else, we hope this sudden shakeup in the political landscape leads to a higher level of engagement.
That’s the surest way of knowing whether we’re really getting the government we deserve on Oct. 19.
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