Western Canada: The BC Liberal leadership race is a test of ‘big tent’ politics

Good morning. Wendy Cox in Vancouver today.

The BC Liberals will choose a new leader this weekend after a race that generated little excitement and even less media coverage. The party dominated B.C. politics for 16 years before falling into minority status and then being reduced to a weakling opposition. It now has an unenviable task ahead of it: Widen the appeal to voters by attracting a diversity of candidates and speak with a clear voice on climate change, affordable housing, child care and improvements to health care, including mental-health services.

By the way, those themes are all ones the BC NDP has claimed as bedrock. So if the Liberals are going to crawl out of the basement, they are going to have to reclaim some of the many centre-left voters they lost in the 2020 election, but also appeal to those voters who are further right on the spectrum. The BC Liberals’ traditional constituency has been the business and resource communities and those with an allergy to heavy taxation. The party has always promoted itself as a big tent that includes federal Liberals and federal Conservatives and hanging on to both of those wings has been key to any electoral success.

Now, though, threading that existential needle seems particularly difficult. This week, the federal Conservatives and those within Alberta Premier Jason Kenney’s government have been engaged in public cage matches that have already cost Erin O’Toole his leadership and have further weakened Mr. Kenney. They have suffered by trying to maintain support among right-leaning Canadians while also satisfying the demands of more extreme party members and elected representatives who oppose health measures aimed at curbing COVID-19 infections and who are willing to support protesters linked to demonstrations that have included some racist flags and aggressive behaviour.

There’s always the option to simplify things by cutting the extremists loose.

“These are not mere differences over policy,” columnist Andrew Coyne wrote about the federal Conservatives this week. “There is room for debate over how best to deal with climate change. There is no serious dispute that it is actually happening. Whether vaccine mandates are wise policy is likewise a matter on which reasonable people can differ; whether they are akin to Nazi experiments on Jewish prisoners is not. This is what makes the party’s extremists so toxic to the public: not so much the substance of this or that position, as the generally unhinged quality they exude.”

In Alberta, Mr. Kenney is trying to succeed where Mr. O’Toole failed. Alberta columnist Kelly Cryderman points out that like Mr. O’Toole, Mr. Kenney has attempted to face the trucker blockade on his own turf with a double-barrelled message on the protests – condemning instances of bad behaviour, but arguing that the U.S.-Canada trucker vaccine mandate was unnecessarily heavy-handed and ill-timed.

Pandemic health restrictions are the responsibility of provinces, not the federal government, so Mr. Kenney is squarely in the sights of people who mostly voted for the United Conservative Party in 2019.

The trucker blockade in Coutts, Alta., this week has galvanized UCP MLAs who want the province’s health restrictions and vaccine-passport system scrapped – many of whom are the same backbenchers who have long challenged Mr. Kenney’s leadership. In recent days, it appeared they were setting the agenda. Certainly, the truckers at the blockade in Coutts thought they had that kind of influence.

“They said, if we open that lane of traffic, they will drop … the [vaccination-passport system],” one of the protesters said in a video posted online. “If they do not meet our requests, that border is shut again immediately.”

The group’s lawyer, Martin Rejman, told The Globe and Mail that there were “backchannel” discussions with members of the legislature, but would not reveal who was involved.

Reporter Carrie Tait writes that a day after the phantom deal, Mr. Kenney accelerated the timeline for lifting Alberta’s COVID-19 protocols. Meanwhile, scores of UCP caucus members issued statements denouncing the pandemic policies.

In an unannounced Facebook Live broadcast on Thursday evening, Mr. Kenney said that, because of widespread vaccination rates and protection from prior COVID-19 infections, the rationale for Alberta’s restrictions-exemption program (REP) – code for a vaccination-passport system – is not as strong as it was when it was introduced in September.

“That is why, early next week, Alberta will announce a firm date to end the REP and do so in the very near future,” he said. “We will also lay out a simple, phased plan to remove almost all public-health restrictions later this month, as long as we see a trend of declining pressure on our hospitals.”

Never mind that earlier in the day, Alberta’s Chief Medical Officer Deena Hinshaw noted that the province’s health care system is still strained. No downward trend in hospital admissions has started. Alberta counted 1,584 people with COVID-19 in hospital when Mr. Kenney made his remarks on Thursday. On Jan. 27 – as a convoy of truckers and motorists was converging on Ottawa, but before the protest emerged at Coutts – Alberta’s hospitals had 1,570 people with COVID-19.

In B.C., whoever wins the Liberal leadership will confront some of the same sentiments within their big tent. The BC Liberals have always worried that their right flank would split off to support a B.C. version of the Reform party and later the BC Conservatives. That remains a concern. But so does worry that any shift right will alienate voters who were once staunch BC Liberal supporters but who now seem quite content with the BC NDP.

This is the weekly Western Canada newsletter written by B.C. Editor Wendy Cox and Alberta Bureau Chief James Keller. If you’re reading this on the web, or it was forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for it and all Globe newsletters here.