The political landscape in British Columbia has shifted with John Rustad's Conservatives now carrying the centre-right banner heading into a fall election campaign.
BC United Leader Kevin Falcon's decision to pull his party from the upcoming campaign has opened the province to a clear left-versus-right choice for voters, but almost two dozen incumbent BC United politicians are now pondering their futures.
Veteran BC United member Mike Bernier, who represents the staunchly Conservative Peace River South riding in the Dawson Creek area, says caucus members and staff were blindsided by Falcon's decision to drop the campaign.
Bernier, a three-term incumbent, says he still wants to represent his constituents and would likely accept an opportunity to seek re-election as a B.C. Conservative, but if the offer does not arrive, he may run in the riding as an independent.
Falcon and Rustad say the two parties will jointly work out a process to field the best candidates for the Oct. 19 election, but the details have yet to be arranged.
Bernier says he respects Falcon's decision to move to prevent a centre-right vote split, but he wants to be part of the campaign to defeat Premier David Eby's New Democrats.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 29, 2024.
Comments
In BC politics, ever since the arrival of the NDP, groups on the right who would instinctively prefer to have at least two different parties tend to coalesce around one. But others stick around in sort of vestigial form.
The interesting thing is how just which party it is keeps changing. The current main one starts looking tired and discredited because it's corrupt and because right wing policies eventually become obviously bad. And then one of the tiny rivals has a good day, starts to grow, seems like a fresh new thing and at some point the power brokers, determined not to split the right wing/centrist vote and let the NDP waltz to victory, dump the existing big party and jump ship to the new one. So the first united-right party was Social Credit, and for years both Liberals and Conservatives were tiny rumps who got like 1% of the vote. Then the SoCreds were looking long in the tooth and Gordon Wilson of the Liberals cleaned up in a televised debate, and all the SoCreds jumped to the Liberals. So then it was the Liberals, who were sort of half-Liberal but more Conservative, and the Conservative party was about as tiny as the Christian Heritage party. But the Liberals sucked, they were corrupt as hell and screwed a ton of things up, and the NDP eventually got an appealing leader and wiped the floor with them. Their brand was looking bad, nobody liked them, and nobody likes Kevin Falcon. So he tried doing the rebrand within the existing party, to like pretend it was brand new, but it didn't stick and now the new glued-together right wing party is the Conservatives. Frankly, from the looks of those guys I don't think they can hold it together as long as the Liberals did, but I'm just hoping their honeymoon doesn't last long enough to pull off an election win because they seem like they are really impressively bad.