BC Conservative Leader John Rustad walks on stage to address supporters on election night in Vancouver, on Oct. 19.ETHAN CAIRNS/The Canadian Press
In the final days leading up to the B.C. election, things couldn’t have gone worse for Conservative candidate Brent Chapman.
Mr. Chapman was seen as a strong candidate in the riding of Surrey South. But then radio host Jas Johal made public a 2015 Facebook post in which Mr. Chapman referred to Palestinians as “inbred walking, talking, breathing time bombs.”
Mr. Johal also revealed a podcast appearance that Mr. Chapman made in which he referred to the controversies around residential schools as a “massive fraud,” as well as a post from 2017 questioning the official accounts of mass shootings in Canada and the United States.
BC Conservative Party Leader John Rustad, however, stood by his candidate, saying voters would render their judgment on his past behaviour.
And on Saturday, they did. Mr. Chapman won his riding handily.
Of all the tactics that the New Democratic Party employed during the election campaign to defeat the upstart Conservatives, casting them as unfit for office based on past comments from candidates that reflected racist and bigoted attitudes appears to have been a massive fail. The NDP depicted Mr. Rustad as a climate-change denier and COVID-vaccine skeptic. Didn’t matter.
Mr. Rustad stood by a candidate who suggested COVID vaccines caused AIDS. He stood by another who presented herself as a medical doctor – but wasn’t. Still, people weren’t prepared to reject the Conservatives because their leader backed candidates who exhibited questionable behaviour or expressed highly offensive views.
The appetite for change, apparently, trumped any concern people may have had about the character or makeup of the BC Conservative Party writ large.
In some respects, it’s a microcosm of what we are witnessing in the United States. It doesn’t seem to matter how appallingly Donald Trump behaves or how truly disgusting some of his remarks are; tens of millions still intend to vote for him because they believe he’s a change from the Democratic challenger, Vice-President Kamala Harris, and the current Biden administration.
Perhaps worse, many actually love his style, his crassness and stomach-churning bravado.
Some will now question whether the NDP’s strategy of focusing so much on past comments was a wise move. Did it make the NDP look overly negative, thus turning many voters off? I don’t agree. I don’t think you can simply give the Conservatives a pass on some of the egregious comments attributed to their candidates. And when the Leader stands by them, it speaks to the character of the entire party itself.
The fact so many people felt that other matters eclipsed questions about the moral character of the Conservatives says something. It speaks to one of the most inevitable forces in politics: the “time for a change” narrative.
Once the electorate has tired of a government and its leader – once it’s made up its mind that they can’t take another day of them – it’s an extremely difficult phenomenon to overcome. Just ask Justin Trudeau. He is up against the “time for a change” narrative in a major way. It doesn’t matter how irritating or repulsive Pierre Poilievre may seem at times; people are going to vote for him because they are fed up with Mr. Trudeau and want to see him gone, even if it means they have to plug their noses and vote for someone to whom they don’t necessarily warm.
In the case of the B.C. election, the NDP wasn’t bounced from office – at least not yet. They are still clinging to power. Depending on the recounts underway, the NDP will likely try to press onward with the help of the two Green Party members who were elected.
No one can predict what that will look like, or what demands the Greens might make in an effort to make a confidence-and-supply agreement become reality. How far might the Greens push it in terms of their wish list? Many British Columbians tired of the NDP after seven years in power because, at least in part, they felt the party had drifted too far to the left. I can’t imagine NDP Leader David Eby agreeing to anything that creates the perception the New Democrats are moving even further in that direction.
Also, it’s hard to imagine an NDP government supported by the Greens having much in the way of an ambitious mandate. There could well be a natural tension between an NDP that wants to move closer to the centre and a governing partner whose priorities are much further to the left.
If this election did anything, it was putting the NDP on notice. When it comes to making sensible and significant progress on some of the big issues of the day, the public’s patience is clearly running thin.