British Columbia, as the name suggests, is the Canadian province in which the memory and mores of the old country are most faithfully preserved. Beloved of retired naval officers, ‘B.C.’ was planned out as a staid outpost of English suburbia in a climate reminiscent of the home isles — a sort of rainy Kenya without any of the drugs. Though it has lately gone the same way as the rest of Canada, the provincial capital — which is even called Victoria, as if in deliberate self-parody — still maintains a certain Old England charm, and its residents are known to enjoy a beverage called London Fog, which to the best of my knowledge is consumed in no other place on earth. But the parallels to the mother country do not end there, and for once, this not especially gifted daughter of empire may have something to teach her parents in the art of populist politics.
For the most part, British Columbia has lived up to its original promise of a deracinated post-imperial lifestyle spent in perpetual boredom. Beyond Vancouver, a town mainly notable for a ‘creative industry’ that thrives on tax incentives for Hollywood producers to film there, and whose dystopian Downtown Eastside has a propensity to shock even visitors who remember wartime Mogadishu and Russia in the 90s, the province is a sparsely populated wilderness whose economy is based on resource extraction and agriculture/fishing. Politics simply does not touch the lives of this nation of surly primary producers; there are no networks of patronage or regional bosses; during my own childhood there I cannot remember a single intrusion of the democratic public sphere onto my extended family’s social life apart from the periodic apparitions of a great aunt’s lodger who once ran on the provincial Green ticket, and whose major concern was that the province’s lumber should be processed locally to save on transportation costs to the United States. Even the Indian gangs and shifty Hong Kong businessmen who have made Vancouver their playground maintain a bit of the old decorum. This is a province whose most famous native son is the Captive Dreamer; it is one of the most boring parts of the world conceivable, perhaps even drearier than Saxony-Anhalt, and there was no need, until last week, for any thinking person to pay attention to elections here.
Despite its location, British Columbia is culturally quite distinct from Western Canada. The pervasive feeling of ‘western alienation’ that in Alberta and Saskatchewan manifests in stable conservative supermajorities is largely absent from local political rhetoric, although the same underlying concerns about the federal government interfering in the free exploitation of its natural resources are present. The temper of local politics, though moved by different concerns than the central core of Ontario and Quebec, tacks closer to the national mainstream. Thus when David Eby, top human rights barrister and provincial premier from the centre-left New Democratic Party, called a snap election two years ahead of time on September 22nd, it seemed a foregone conclusion that British Columbia would be condemned to four more years of Sisyphean labour under his Woke regime. In fact, the opposition Conservatives won a stunning 63 of 93 seats, their first majority since 1926, by running a bombastic culture war campaign in a province in which elections have traditionally been dull, technocratic affairs contested between a barely differentiable centre-right and centre-left. What happened here?
Prior to the Conservatives’ remarkable triumph, the centre-right camp in British Columbia had undergone a traumatic ‘time of troubles’ from which, by the time of Eby’s election call, it had still not recovered. The old Liberal Party (a provincial institution which had nothing in common with the Liberal Party of Canada except its name) had split asunder during lockdown, and, as is periodically known to happen in the province — the Liberals themselves having inherited the mantle and much of the personnel of the old Social Credit Party after its own collapse in the 1990s in a conflict of interest scandal surrounding the sale of then-premier Bill Vander Zalm’s Dutch Protestant amusement park — had reconstituted itself under the auspices of the old Conservative Party. This was a remarkable comeback: despite playing an important role in the province’s early history, the Tories had been out of government for the better part of a century, yet somehow persisted on the fringes, battling for votes with numberless minor libertarian, Calvinist, and marijuana legalisation parties in a limited number of mostly rural ‘ridings’, as the Canadians call their constituencies. In my own youth, the only sign of their existence, like a polite cough alerting the other people in life’s waiting room to their presence, was a faded placard on a broken-down barn by a roadside hamlet that I would sometimes drive past; a desolate memento mori amidst the faded sepia scrubland that gives life on the province’s outlying islands its timeless, melancholic colour. But this reformation on the right boded less a political earthquake than business as usual under a new name, and indeed, when, under former Liberal forestry minister John Rustad, the Conservatives fought the NDP to a single-seat majority at the 2024 provincial election, they did so on a recognisably Liberal program of lower taxes, less red tape, and not much else.
The Canadian conservative movement is, for the most part, a kind of Rick’s Café Americain outside the culture wars, but for reasons inscrutable — perhaps by mustering up every last drop of the nihilatory power that springs from its sheer deracination and bleakness — British Columbia has emerged as a hotbed of social conservative activism cutting across ethnic lines. That even so firm a buttress of provincial socialism as northern Vancouver Island returned perhaps the country’s most right-wing MP, the aptly named Aaron Gunn, to Ottawa at the most recent federal election ought to have set the alarm ringing in Victoria’s — increasingly few, as inflation begins to bite — chic vegan restaurants. This rightward shift has not been to every old BC Liberal’s taste, and under the Tories’ cantankerous former leader Kerry-Ann Findlay, the party was haemorrhaging both MPs and supporters, and trailed the NDP in opinion polling by ten percentage points, prompting Findlay’s departure. When the province headed to the polls, the Tories were preparing for their own leadership contest and were headed on an interim basis by obscure backwoods businessman Lorne Doerksen, a political unknown whose main credentials were his lack of ambition and agreeableness to all the party’s factions.
How did the Conservatives turn it around? Despite the signs at Vancouver airport welcoming the traveller to ‘the best place on earth’, all is not well in British Columbia; the same inflationary concerns persist as everywhere, exacerbated by the low purchasing power of the Canadian dollar and the high costs of transporting goods into the province’s remote mountain valleys and islands. Immigration, miraculously, is a minor concern, having swamped the cities and mostly spared the hinterland. Wokeness is largely (still!) focused on that trans business, which remains a presence in schools, but like everywhere it has its own local flourish, which in British Columbia is the decriminalisation of those substances that in Britain are classified as Class A drugs. This, the NDP government did through a two-year pilot program that expired in January, thereby pushing the frontiers of the Downtown Eastside ever further into the working-class towns whose zombified lumpenproletariat it had hitherto acted as a sponge for. Though the New Democrats’ manifesto walked back this experiment in favour of a law-and-order approach little different from that favoured by the Conservatives, the googly-eyed ultraviolence that these drugs have unleashed on British Columbian socialism’s once placid heartlands is not soon to be forgotten.
More consequential than anything the NDP has legislated has been what Eby’s Woke human rights lawyer friends have done with his tacit permission. Back in 2019, the NDP government had enacted vague but nonetheless legally binding legislation (DRIPA) to align the province’s laws with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which under Eby’s premiership the courts were beginning to creatively enforce. Had these new rights merely been wielded as a lawfare tool for crafty rentiers with tribal status to negotiate a share in resource extraction projects out in the boondocks, the whole thing might have stayed out of sight, out of mind, but in a 2025 suit by the Cowichan tribes against the federal government, the B.C. Supreme Court established, almost as an afterthought, that indigenous title can override fee simple, i.e. the right to property in the generally understood sense. Notwithstanding the obvious constitutional ramifications of this decision, it broke new ground for race relations in the province, the parcel of land that the suit directly concerned being located in a heavily Chinese suburb of Vancouver, while it was a Sikh trucker who registered the formal petition against DRIPA with the BC electoral commission. Beyond a general sense of moral malaise, the Conservatives owe their mandate to a well-founded perception that the NDP had put most fundamental guarantees of the Rechtsstaat under threat, and that the Canadian liberal project had begun to eat its children.
There is a great deal of dooming around Reform at present. The polls look bad, scandal is brewing, Farage, no less than Mrs Findlay, is a divisive and gaffe-prone figure — might the gooey hot honey dolloped out by Andeh’s chips and gravy van cloud the Englishman’s vision to the world crumbling around him? Do not fall for this rigmarolean nonsense. The lesson the right should take from British Columbia is that the people are fed up and will vote for any faceless suit whose Potemkin party can step in to make the hell of 21st-century life end. The British people care not for personnel nor policy nor great ideas nor Yoruba washerwomen; they want to see the crystal-clear waters of pure nihility crashing down on Westminster like a melting glacier, and have yearned for nothing else since Brexit. If it can happen there, it can happen anywhere. Advance victoriously, deepen the criticism of Labour.
This article was written by Gordon Strathdouglas, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.
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