Why Does This Keep Happening?

Some in the media have framed 2024 as a year of anti-incumbency revolt: it’s just what happens now, they say. And despite the close race, the NDP’s result marked the party’s second-best showing in its history — winning 44.8 percent and securing its third consecutive victory, a first for the party.

So. . . nothing to see here? Can we turn off the hot-take oven?

Parts of this tale of unavoidable anti-incumbency sentiment are undoubtedly true. But it is also a tad overly comforting. Framing these shifts as an inevitable backlash against ruling parties worldwide sidesteps the need for reflection or self-examination.

The high cost of everyday life for working people, along with the crises of health care and housing, long predate the pandemic — especially in BC. And that impressive second-strongest result was achieved on the back of a 57 percent voter turnout, sharply down from the more than 70 percent of registered voters casting ballots in elections in the late ’90s and into the new millennium.

In addition, BC’s Conservative Party — unconnected to the Conservative Party of Canada — was until very recently a fringe right-wing party well to the right of mainline conservatism with no seats, barely registering in opinion polls. Pandemic, war, and inflation are insufficient to explain the party’s sudden, blistering success. There is a British Columbian specificity to what happened.

One possible explanation, still broadly supporting the anti-incumbency narrative, is a tale of voter confusion. That story goes something like this: for decades, the province’s mainline center-right party was known as the BC Liberal Party, likewise unconnected with the federal, centrist Liberal Party of Canada, despite the identical name. It positioned itself as a “free enterprise coalition” of market-oriented liberals and liberal conservatives. But last year, the BC Liberals changed their name to the quirky and football-club-esque “BC United,” instantly losing brand recognition amongst some voters.

Separately, BC United also ousted from their caucus John Rustad, a former cabinet minister, for retweeting a post that claimed that people have been “hoodwinked” into believing that CO2 causes global warming. The Liberals insisted that climate denial was not welcome in their free enterprise coalition. Rustad then crossed the floor to the Conservative Party, becoming its sole MLA (member of the legislative assembly) and overseeing a startling rise in the Tories’ fortunes to the point of eclipsing the party that had expelled him.

In the Grip of the MANGOs

The Conservative’s stunning success, seemingly out of nowhere, has also been attributed to an unthinking association in the minds of voters with the federal Conservatives led by the populist (but still thoroughly market-fundamentalist) Pierre Poilievre, coupled with the bungled rebranding of the BC Liberal Party. Then, just weeks ahead of the 2024 election, the leader of BC United, Kevin Falcon, threw in the towel and orchestrated a surprise merger between BC United and the Conservatives.

But even here, this story of voter confusion is condescending at best and antidemocratic at worst, for it assumes most voters are too thick to understand distinctions between parties. And this explanation does not tell us how it is that so many younger voters tilted toward the Conservatives while older voters leaned toward the NDP.

Some on the environmental left have rejected the anti-incumbency narrative. They argue that the NDP’s result reflects a “hard shift to the center”— as the associate director of the Wilderness Committee, one of the province’s leading conservation NGOs, put it on Twitter/X. This rightward maneuver — or, as some call it, betrayal — allegedly can be seen in the NDP’s environmental stances: support for a controversial clean electricity project — the Site C hydroelectric dam; its backing for development of liquified natural gas (LNG) terminals and pipelines; its indifference to the “clear-cut devastation” of logging old-growth trees in the Fairy Creek watershed near Port Renfrew on Vancouver Island; and the party’s rediscovery of its opposition to the federal carbon tax.

Beyond environmental concerns, critics of the NDP’s supposed centrism also point to the government’s retreat from a sixteen-month experiment in the decriminalization of hard-drug use in public places and Premier David Eby’s related expansion of involuntary care for those with mental health and addiction issues.

Critics claim that if the NDP establishment had not steamrolled insurgent green-left candidate and Sierra Club campaigner Anjali Appadurai — endorsed by renowned climate journalist and activist Bill McKibben — in favor of Eby during the party’s 2022 leadership race, they would have romped home to a much more thumping victory. But this analysis is as unconvincing as the complacency and condescension of the anti-incumbency-and-voter-confusion narrative.

The charge of NDP “betrayal” does, however, highlight where the party — and many left parties globally — have indeed stumbled. The stumble isn’t that the party has abandoned “the movement” or forgotten the activists on the streets after entering government. The truth is that the NDP remains too much enmeshed with the movement — specifically in the urban professionals and NGO sphere that largely shapes it. This segment, cheekily dubbed “MANGOs” (media, academia, and NGOs) by socialist writer Alex Hochuli is far from forgotten. Rather, it is the party’s traditional working-class base in resource-dependent rural areas that has been, if not forgotten, then misplaced.

The Betrayal That Wasn’t

I won’t attempt to relitigate every allegation of left betrayal here, as each concern would require its own deep dive into climate, energy, and biodiversity policy. But some of the criticism of supposed “eco-perfidy” warrants correction, so here’s a brief overview.

Take BC’s publicly owned Site C hydroelectric dam, which, once completed, will deliver extremely low-carbon, around-the-clock electricity — an invaluable complement to the variable supply from often privately developed wind and solar. Thanks to BC’s bounty of hydroelectricity, the province enjoys the cleanest grid on the continent, tied with Quebec’s similarly hydro-based network. BC’s grid is already effectively decarbonized — a climate victory that many parts of the world are still far from achieving.

The same goes for LNG — up to a point. BC produces some of the cleanest fossil gas in the world, which, as a bridge-fuel to replace coal-fired electricity generation in Asia on the way to truly clean sources, is, again, a major climate win. We cannot abandon fossil fuels tomorrow, so the ones that we continue to use — as we sunset those same industries — need to be as clean as possible. To be sure, the licensing duration of LNG projects is too long to align with net-zero timelines, but that’s where the climate battle should have been fought — and if it had been fought there, critics might actually have won — rather than on whether LNG terminals or pipelines should exist at all.

Regarding logging near Port Renfrew, which lies within the Fairy Creek watershed: the cutblocks are small, not large clearcuts and, thanks in no small part to the NDP, BC is home to some of the most stringent forest management legislation in the world. On behalf of green NGOs like Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, The Incredible Hulk actor Mark Ruffalo and Mean Girls’s Rachel McAdams filmed a video in which they said that Fairy Creek is “some of the last old-growth rainforest in the world.” It’s not true. According to the government, there are some eleven million hectares of old-growth forest in the province, and of that, nine million are either protected or not economical to harvest. Put another way, some 80 percent of BC’s old growth is not going anywhere, and the old-growth trees that are logged are sustainably managed.

Fibbing and exaggerating undermine the case for biodiversity protection and alienates resource-sector workers who know the NGOs are not telling the whole story. These workers, who need local logging to be truly sustainable in order to maintain their communities for generations, are the most important conservation ally we can have.

In each case of the NDP’s “unholy environmental trinity,” the demands of the environmental NGOs are the opposite of what needs to be done from a climate and biodiversity perspective. There simply has been no “hard shift to the center.”

Moreover, these initiatives, often shepherded or owned outright by the public sector, provide high-skilled, typically unionized jobs and apprenticeships with decent, family-supporting, community-maintaining incomes and, thanks to agreements with indigenous groups, represent good first steps toward true economic reconciliation with First Nations. Due to the scale of government intervention — whether in terms of ownership, tough regulation, or conscious design of parts of the economy — and the red thread of strong union protections, not a jot of this could be described as neoliberal. It’s social democratic through and through.

As for the party’s retreat from backing the federal Liberals’ carbon tax, this stance should be seen as a reversion to the standard socialist position on carbon pricing. When the provincial Liberal government introduced a carbon tax in 2008, later largely copied by Ottawa, the BC NDP had correctly critiqued it as an inegalitarian flat tax that, even with rebates, doesn’t eliminate its impact on rural and lower-income populations. In many parts of BC, public transport is sparse, and commuting often requires long drives in larger vehicles.

Rather than relying on carbon pricing, which socialists have seen as a market-based solution poorly suited for a problem requiring large-scale planning, the NDP’s attention to industrial policy and public ownership — which is what the bulk of the party’s climate and energy policy amounts to — represents a more effective, socially just approach to climate action. If anything, as we will see for a host of reasons beyond climate issues, the party needs to lean into such industrial policy much further.

Hating on Real Fixes

On the issues of drugs and crime, reality does not support the movementist MANGO’s claims that the NDP has turned its back on social justice. As frequent Jacobin contributor and Philadelphia Teamsters director of operations Dustin Guastella has argued, the low-cost, quick-fix policies of hard-drug decriminalization and safe injection sites on their own are not really left-wing at all, but instead libertarian and ambivalent toward drug markets.

As such, they are insufficiently ambitious to address the full scale of the problem and evince an indifference toward the addiction of users — an addiction in service of drug markets’ profits. What’s needed is coordinated social policy, ideally on a provincial or national scale, that includes measures like slashing housing costs, the creation of good, unionized jobs for both skilled and unskilled labor, and, where appropriate, compulsory rehabilitation of users and expansion of involuntary care — all alongside harm reduction. Such measures would better fit the description of a left-wing approach to drugs and crime.

This expansive policy vision would undoubtedly cost much more than the de facto neoliberal version of drug policy, which is done on the cheap. It’s a suite of policies that should come more naturally to social democrats, with their greater support for progressive taxation and state borrowing.

This is the direction the NDP now appears to be taking — showing a return, not a departure, to social democratic values. And let’s not be under any illusion; if it is not the Left that deals compassionately with the very real issues of anti-social street disorder, then voters will, understandably, plump for a conservative, hang ’em high, law-and-order approach that promises solutions, but with no compassion at all.

The party’s record on social spending speaks for itself; there’s no need to repeat their campaign points here. But if the accusation is that the party is a made-in-BC replica of the UK Labour Party’s Tony Blair or Keir Starmer, then this too needs to be challenged. The NDP hiked the minimum wage from one of the country’s lowest rates to the highest, tying it to inflation. They introduced five days of paid sick leave for all workers, including part-timers.

When the private sector was refusing to deliver high-speed internet to rural, remote, and indigenous communities, the government stepped in. The NDP are investing $36 billion to expand the power grid. They have enacted a 20 percent house–flipping tax, a speculator and vacant-homes tax, and euro-style restrictions on Airbnb — which the Tories pledged to overturn. They have legalized building twenty-story apartment buildings near mass-transit (Skytrain) stations and are lifting other restrictions on home-building while also building out homes directly.

Much more can be done to solve the housing crisis, as left-wing housing analyst Alex Hemingway has argued in these pages, particularly when it comes to public sector–driven and nonprofit housing and allowing such nonmarket housing to be built at higher densities without requiring site-by-site rezoning applications. But the NDP’s suite of actions has experts like Hemingway declaring the province to be, well, home to the most pro-housing policy program in North America.

Decades of deep cuts to federal health care funding from both Liberals and Tories, as well as cuts to post-secondary education and the consequent dearth of trained medical professionals, are the ultimate reason for the province’s struggles with repeated emergency room closures, egregious wait times, and lack of family doctors. Nevertheless, the BC NDP have gone on a health care spending spree, building or expanding twenty-nine hospitals and hiring hundreds of doctors and thousands of nurses.

It will take a couple of electoral cycles for these moves to resolve the crisis, but the NDP’s response contrasts sharply with the Tory move toward partial privatization. This commitment to spending what is necessary to defend public health care — and the taxation and borrowing that it requires — cannot be described as bland Third-Way centrism.

Forget the Tinfoil

Much of the discourse surrounding the rise of the BC Conservatives has focused on leader Rustad’s genuinely cranky anti-vaccine beliefs (including a suggestion that BC would be open to participating in a “Nuremberg-style” trial of public health officials deemed responsible for COVID-19 “crimes against humanity”). His dismissal of the reality of climate change, and the myriad other tinfoil-hatted and often outrageously bigoted statements of Tory candidates creates sensational fodder for fear-and-loathing television, blogs, and podcasts.

These comments — such as those of Surrey-South victor Brent Chapman’s suggestion that mass shootings in Sandy Hook and Quebec City were staged and that Muslims are inbred — need to be exposed and opposed. There is no doubt that this is Trumpism, Canadian-style. The rise of what political scientist Mark Blyth calls “Global Trumpism” is a serious threat, is no fantasy of deranged liberals, and must be defeated.

But focusing solely on these extreme examples risks tripping into an antidemocratic elitism if it suggests that most Tory voters are mouth-breathing conspiracists and racist dum-dums who agree with such crackpottery, instead of what is more likely: that they voted for the party despite all the craziness.

In much of rural BC, the Conservative appeal that was especially well received was not the conspiracy theories, but the economic program. The Tories promised to overturn the NDP’s commitment to protect 30 percent of all land and water in the province by 2030, to expand the LNG sector, and to loosen regulations on forestry, fisheries, and mining. In rural and strongly unionized resource-sector areas that have been NDP strongholds for decades —such as the riding of North Island that was ultimately won by the Tories — the Conservative pledge to unshackle the province’s extractive industries was roundly cheered.

Vancouver used to be a port city with an industrial base and a large working class, all of which served as the economic nerve center that transformed and connected the province’s rich natural-resource bounty to the rest of the world. Today much of the NDP’s blue-collar base has been squeezed out. Vancouver is now a deindustrialized economy of trade, tech and, above all, real estate. The province’s largest metropole is now home to more middle-class and wealthier — and “progressive” — professionals with little connection to resource extraction. Across the water on Vancouver Island, Victoria, the provincial capital, has similarly become a hub for academics and civil servants no less removed from its working-class base. And yet these progressive middle-class metropoles have turned into the NDP’s new strongholds. They are responsible for giving BC social democracy without workers.

Green Dreams Are Made of These

But it cannot last. Even if the party eked out a win this time, the metropolitan professionals are numerically too slim a slice of the population, too vote-poor, compared to the NDP’s historic vote-rich industrial- and resource-sector base. If the NDP is to avoid further decline, they need to respond to the Tories’ resource populism better and lean into social democratic industrial policy much more aggressively. This approach should not shy away from confronting the green MANGOs, whose NIMBYism is detrimental to the environment and hinders the prosperity of working-class and indigenous communities, ultimately undermining the economic foundation needed to fund strong social programs.

The Conservatives’ free-market free-for-all in the resource sector would not be able to avoid the boom-and-bust volatility that has plagued extractive industries in the past. Without industrial policy, there is little to enable the diversification necessary to capture more value and to enable communities to maintain themselves through slumps. With respect to the environment, the laissez-faire approach the Tories embrace will not achieve multigenerationally sustainable jobs or the clean, healthy, and biodiverse ecosystems that allow us all to flourish. And it should go without saying that Tories are no friends of unions.

This means that the NDP needs to strategically facilitate the mineral extraction crucial for a clean energy transition while establishing public enterprises in areas like mineral processing where private investment is often lacking. This would help capture more revenues, coordinate the process to reduce boom-and-bust volatility, enhance diversification, and ensure strong union rights that deliver both safety and egalitarian prosperity. The NDP should also defend the large infrastructural public works that are necessary in any modern society against their small-is-beautiful critics.

Such a strategy would create good, family-supporting and community-sustaining union jobs across various skill levels, delivering the economic reconciliation and true prosperity that First Nations urgently need — far more than empty land acknowledgements. It would also accelerate decarbonization efforts in the face of green-NIMBY obstructionism.

A muscular social democratic, industrial-policy-driven economic development with strong union rights would also deliver much more money to pay for world-class social programs and innovation, to expand public transport — including more rail — to fix and expand the province’s ailing ferry system, and accelerate the electrification of all sectors.

With its abundant critical minerals and clean energy, Canada, especially BC, has huge potential to lead the way in the clean transition that the world needs. If it plays its cards right, BC could be the Norway of North America: a land of high-prosperity, equality, and exceptional infrastructure.

False Friends

The NDP must recognize the dangers posed by the MANGOs even as it takes the resource fight to the Tories, but the party faces other threats from false friends that also endanger its long-term survival. This recent win was partly due to support from socially liberal neoliberals and red Tories who were previously part of the BC Liberal coalition. Figures like Kareem Allam, the manager of Falcon’s leadership campaign, and Mark Marissen, another senior BC Liberal politico, who, like the handful of BC United MLAs who ran as independents rather than joining the Conservatives, were horrified at the unhinged conspiracy-mongering and bigotry of so many Tories.

But these neoliberals are no friends of the working class or unions. They oppose the interventionism and economic planning of industrial policy and public enterprise, dismissing it as “picking winners.” They loathe the taxes and borrowing that make public services and infrastructure possible.

Over the past thirty years, these same neoliberals championed austerity measures that devastated public health care and promoted free-market policies that lead to the deindustrialization that has so battered the working class. These are the very policies that paved the way for Trumpism both Canadian-style and the original recipe. At best, they will fiscally flounce out of the NDP at the drop of a hat, and at worst, stay in the party to try to bend its economic thinking toward a free-market agenda.

To stage a comeback — to survive and win — the NDP needs to understand that it has not one but three sets of opponents: the anti-populist neoliberals, the populist right, and the eco-austerian MANGOs. To be sure, it’s hard to fight a war on three fronts, but it must be done. Like the fading social democratic parties of many other countries, the NDP will cease to matter, or even exist, if it fails to take on these adversaries.