B.C. Needs A Political Mastectomy
Kevin Falcon should face up to reality and dismantle his party.
It may go down as one of the most epic miscalculations in the history of B.C. politics.
In 2022, after winning the leadership of the B.C. Liberal Party in February of 2022, and with the party still smarting from its 2020 thrashing at the hands of the John Horgan-led NDP, Kevin Falcon decided the Libs could do with a re-branding. He wanted to distance his centrist party from the federal Liberals, who had stampeded so far to the left that the only thing left to distinguish Prime Minister Justin Trudeau from NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh was the latter’s colourful headgear.
After a months-long quest for a new name, “B.C. United Party” emerged as the new moniker. Whereupon the irreverent among us immediately noted that adopting a bra size as a name— BCUP — might not do wonders for the party’s, er, support.
And support for BC United has indeed cratered. The name change, by rendering the party less recognizable to voters, may well have had something to do with it.
But that’s not the miscalculation I’m referring to. The larger misstep, by far, was Falcon’s ousting of long-serving MLA and former cabinet minister John Rustad from caucus for the sin of questioning the climate-change gospel. Rustad had the temerity to retweet this blurb from climate skeptic (and Greenpeace co-founder) Patrick Moore:
And that was pretty much it: he was out. Falcon’s indignant, retaliatory tweet, before giving his colleague the boot:
After a short stint as an Independent MLA, Rustad joined the previously moribund BC Conservative Party last February, and then became its leader in March. That presaged an astonishing, almost meteoric rise in popularity for the Conservatives, a rise in almost direct proportion to the rapid shrinking (forgive me, I can’t help it) of BCUP’s support.
Rustad has surely been buoyed by the steep rise in popularity of Pierre Poilievre’s federal Conservative Party. But Falcon’s limp-wristed leadership has been a major contributor: his “playing-both-sides-of-the-fence” posturing on everything from gender policy to climate change often left scant daylight between his party’s positions and those of the NDP he was supposed to oppose. There’s been no doubting, by contrast, the stark differences between Rustad’s Conservatives and the NDP, now led by current Premier David Eby.
Falcon has learned the hard way what then-Conservative leader Erin O’Toole learned in the 2021 federal election. O’Toole positioned himself as a bland centrist in an attempt to broaden his support, but voters shrugged their shoulders at what appeared to be nothing more than a diluted version of the Liberal brand and voted Trudeau back in. (Well , the Greater Toronto area did, anyway — and in our messed up electoral system, that was enough to allow the worst prime minister in Canada’s history to slither his way back into office.)
Undoubtedly prompted by his party’s plunge in popularity, Falcon has undergone a conversion of late, with stronger language on parental rights and a vow to ditch the carbon tax (which his Liberals, under the stewardship of Gordon Campbell, were the first in North America to introduce).
But it’s too little, too late. The Falcon is cooked.
A Liaison poll on April 3rd tells the tale:
That photo is from a BC Conservative social media post. The poll numbers are correct; but the “Catching the BC NDP” caption is overly hopeful on the part of the Conservatives.
Because BCUP’s 16 per cent, while comparatively meagre, isn’t nothing. Jt’s more than enough to splinter the anti-Eby vote and return the NDP to office again this October with another majority — subjecting British Columbians to another four years of anti-business policies, runaway bureaucracy, erosion of private property rights, climate alarmism, SOGI nonsense in schools, pandering to anti-semites, and disastrous “safe supply” shenanigans that are the opposite of safe, having contributed to skyrocketing overdose deaths, burgeoning homeless camps, and addicted hospital patients opening smoking dope in their rooms (while packing weapons, for good measure).
If that’s the future Kevin Falcon wants, he should stay the course. But he’d do far better to throw in the towel and join forces with John Rustad. If he ceded the stage and leadership to Rustad, and encouraged BCUP MLAs to stand for re-election under the Conservative banner, there’d be an excellent chance of sending the NDP packing this fall.
It’s a gambit that Rustad, at least, is open to considering.
Falcon is done in any case. If he stays and leads BCUP into the fall election, he’ll depart soundly defeated and badly humiliated.
Instead, he can be remembered as a man of deep principle who did the right thing in the interests of the people of his province.
The choice is clear: Falcon should give British Columbians the political mastectomy they desperately need, and excise BCUP from the landscape.
One of the things that Patrick Moore does well is point out the bas faith faith framing of various environmental concerns by activists and lobbies. One he pointed out a couple of years ago was about the 'destruction' of the Amazon Rain Forest. If you listen to MSM and political rhetoric about 'the lungs of the world' etc you'd assume its nearly all cut down. But if you do even a cursory inspection via Google Earth (I hate Google but what can you do?) of the Amazon basin, its clear that A) its the size of Quebec and Ontario combined B) it is very clearly mostly forest canopy of a massive scale and C) there is no devastating destruction. Period. Now on the Southern perimeter that HAS been some deforestation for cropland and grazing land, yes. It is a concern? I would say yes. Is it something we should keep paying attention to? Yes. It is a global environmental catastrophe from which the world will never recover? Not even close. So the lesson, is - with regards to media reports and activist claims, there is no enviro issue that this cohort wont distort with nuclear powered hyperbole.