The Day After

I wrote this yesterday on Discord. It took a lot of effort, but I managed to avoid bringing up the Socreds.

Election day! I’m going to rant about BC politics for a minute.

In BC we’ve had two main parties for most of my life: the BC NDP (centre-left), and BC Liberals (right).

The BC Liberals were a fiscally conservative party. You could get kicked out of the party for, say, vaccine skepticism, or climate change denial, or saying nasty things about minorities and immigrants. You can see where this is going.

In 2023 they renamed themselves to BC United, presumably in an attempt to unite the conservative vote.

We also have the BC Greens, who have a few MLAs, and the BC Conservatives. The latter is a fringe party and hasn’t had a single candidate elected since the 80s. A few BC Liberal MLAs jumped to the BC Conservatives over the last several years, and this election, for the first time in decades, they’re running candidates in every riding. You can see where this is going.

A few months ago, the leadership of BC United dissolved the party without telling their candidates. Including currently-elected MLAs. They decided that the only way to unite the conservative vote was to give up.

The election’s gone from an NDP cakewalk to a “who knows?” affair. Will the NDP stay in power? How many MLAs in legislature will be right-wing Twitter trolls? Will provincial politics be sucked into the cultural war whirlpool? Who knows!

It’s (still) the day after the election. Preliminary results show the NDP with 46 seats, the Tories with 45, and the Greens with two. Eleven ridings are so close that we’re having automatic recounts. We won’t know the final numbers for another week.

It’s a bad result. I can’t imagine the next government lasting for more than a year or two. But at least it’s not a Conservative majority.