BC United Leader Kevin Falcon, left, speaks as BC Conservative Leader John Rustad listens during a news conference in Vancouver, on Aug. 28.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
British Columbia’s corporate leaders, who once delivered millions of dollars annually to keep the province’s centre-right coalition party in power, played a significant role in reshaping the political landscape ahead of the October provincial election.
Kevin Falcon, leader of the BC United Party, threw his support to the rival BC Conservatives this week after intense pressure from the business community to ensure there is only one party on the right to challenge the governing New Democratic Party.
It was a decision Mr. Falcon made for the party without consulting his caucus or membership, under pressure from long-time allies and friends in the business community who were willing to abandon him publicly. While he is only suspending his party’s campaign rather than folding the entity, the move signals the death-knell of a coalition that has a long track record in government, and leaves a political gap for centrist voters who have been reluctant to embrace the New Democrats.
Chris Gardner, president of the Independent Contractors and Businesses Association, a lobby group for the province’s real estate development and construction industry, said many of the owners of the 4,000-odd businesses in his group had been registering their displeasure about the prospect of BC United splitting the right-wing vote. They were voting with their wallets, withholding donations that the party desperately needed to run the upcoming campaign.
“What [Mr. Falcon] was facing was MLAs who had left, candidates who were leaving, donors who were turning off the taps and volunteers who had lost the motivation – so really the BC United Party had become a shell of its former self,” Mr. Gardner said in an interview. He said his board was prepared to issue an official endorsement of the BC Conservatives before the election campaign started.
Norman Stowe, managing partner of the public relations firm Pace Group Communications, said similar messages were delivered to Mr. Falcon by business leaders across a number of industries. Campaign finance reform has changed the nature of their influence – gone are the days that they could cut $50,000 cheques to their party of choice – but they appealed to Mr. Falcon’s fiscal conservative principles.
The movement in the business community is based not on an ideological preference for John Rustad’s untested BC Conservatives, Mr. Stowe noted, but on economic calculations that they will fare better if the NDP loses the next election. “The business community made it very clear: We’re going to be going with the Conservatives. And we’d rather not split the vote.”
By suspending BC United’s campaign, Kevin Falcon upends the province’s political scene
Mr. Stowe, a long-time friend of Mr. Falcon’s and an influential party stalwart, resigned as a BC United riding president when MLA Elenore Sturko defected to the Conservatives in June. He told Mr. Falcon of his decision and offered some parting advice: “I said we should be trying to get behind the party that can at least have a chance at winning. That’s not us.”
British Columbia’s centre-right has usually coalesced under a single banner. The Liberals ruled B.C. for 16 years before falling to an NDP-led minority government, and Mr. Falcon decided to change his party’s name to BC United in a rebranding exercise that went wrong.
But the coalition fractured after Mr. Falcon tossed Mr. Rustad from caucus in 2022 for publicly expressing skepticism that climate change was caused by humans. Mr. Rustad, who was elected five times under the BC Liberal banner, then took over the moribund BC Conservative Party. BC United, the province’s Official Opposition, dropped to third or fourth place in the polls.
The fractious relationship between the two leaders stood in the way of merger talks for months.
Bill Bennett, a former BC Liberal cabinet minister, was one of the voices urging the two to put aside their squabbling and come to an agreement.
Mr. Bennett shared a pied-à-terre in Victoria with Mr. Rustad for the dozen years they both worked in the Legislature. He also backed Mr. Falcon’s latest party leadership bid. He regards both men as friends.
Mr. Falcon, he said, was blindsided by how easy it seemed for Mr. Rustad to ride the same wave of popularity buoying Pierre Poilievre federally to lead the BC Conservatives out of the political hinterland.
“I don’t know what metaphor to use here, whether it’s a bandwagon or whether it’s a snowball rolling downhill or what it is, but he jumped on it,” Mr. Bennett told The Globe in an interview two days before the political earthquake. “John’s got a very successful, emerging, boisterous brand – the Conservative brand – without having to really do anything.”
Mr. Rustad’s Conservatives – with a social conservative agenda and various candidates who advance conspiracy theories – is not the obvious heir to a coalition party with centrist leanings. The BC Liberals introduced North America’s first carbon tax, supported a dramatic expansion of supervised drug-consumption sites, and brought in sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) education in schools. The BC Conservatives have proposed to dismantle all of these policies, although there is no formal policy platform in place yet.
Editorial: Political upheaval in B.C. crystallizes the choice in October
But on Tuesday night, Mr. Falcon and Mr. Rustad met to negotiate a deal. Mr. Falcon offered to suspend his party’s campaign to clear the way for the BC Conservatives, but he wanted to integrate his party’s candidates with the Conservative slate.
As Mr. Falcon was meeting his political rival to hammer out the agreement, his party caucus and staff were oblivious. Caucus spokesperson Sean Roberts was busy posting attacks against the Conservatives on social media, saying they were assembling a “big circus tent” for folks with fringe views. He wasn’t going off script: Mr. Falcon had repeatedly attacked the BC Conservatives in similar language.
The next day, in the lead-up to his joint press conference with his former rival, Mr. Falcon had to make two “really hard” calls to the board of BC United Party and his candidates to break the news of his decision. He said publicly the Conservatives made no commitments to BC United’s incumbent MLAs or their dozens of candidates, just that the two parties would work together to have the Conservatives offer the “best field” to voters in the province’s 93 ridings.
The hastily called caucus meeting, held just minutes before Wednesday’s public announcement, ended badly. Liberal MLA Karin Kirkpatrick (West Vancouver-Capilano) demanded Mr. Falcon resign as leader. Mr. Falcon abruptly ended the call.
“I’m sorry that I couldn’t bring them all into the fold, but you can imagine that these are extremely sensitive discussions and, candidly, I wasn’t even certain that we would get to a good conclusion in these discussions,” Mr. Falcon told reporters at the awkward press conference.
In a social-media post after the news conference, Ms. Kirkpatrick made it clear that she isn’t ready to support a Conservative candidate in her riding. “You have left all of us middle-of-the-road centrist voters with no political home here in B.C. Thanks a lot,” she wrote. She said in an interview that she is considering running as an Independent.
Former B.C. Liberal minister says he may vote NDP, as Eby woos disaffected centrists
Prince George-Valemount MLA Shirley Bond, a powerful member of Mr. Falcon’s caucus who has won six elections as a BC Liberal, bowed out of the election on Thursday. It was clear there was no home for her in the B.C. Conservative tent. A party loyalist through thick and thin, Ms. Bond took a shot at her party leader on her way out the door. “The decision made by BC United party leader Kevin Falcon to suspend our party’s election campaign came as a complete surprise to me,” she said in a statement.
Others were similarly unhappy with having their political careers decided for them without their knowledge.
Meagan Brame, a former Esquimalt councillor nominated in the Esquimalt-Colwood riding, said she was in tears when she heard the announcement, after all her work door-knocking and getting campaign signs in the ground. “It was a gut punch for sure.”
Publicly, the NDP is celebrating the triumph of Mr. Rustad’s party over BC United.
Heather Stoutenburg, provincial director of the NDP, said local campaigns raised double their normal haul on Wednesday after the deal was made public. Premier David Eby, who is set to formally start the Oct. 19 election campaign in just three weeks, recorded a video message shared on social media urging disaffected BC United members to join the NDP.
But the New Democrats will face a tougher contest, because they can no longer count on their rivals to split the centre-right vote. British Columbians who want the NDP out will face one main alternative.
The unknown factor is whether Mr. Rustad’s social-conservative agenda will secure centrist voters.
“What I’m going to do is, I’m going to vote NDP. I don’t know about other Liberals,” said Mark Marissen, a long-time organizer for the BC Liberals and BC United. “There’s no Liberal element to this coalition, so it’s not really a coalition. It’s the Conservative party.”