The election has been on for two weeks now, and we have seen a lot of the usual stuff – new policy ideas, a debate, and lots of nasty attack ads. But the presence of the Green Party makes this election very different and unpredictable.
For the past 75 years, BC politics has been dominated by two parties: the Socreds followed by the Liberal Party on the centre-right (a coalition of conservative and liberal voters), and the NDP on the centre-left.
If the centre-right factions are united in a single party, the socialist hordes are kept at bay. This is the golden rule of B.C. politics.
When the centre right was fractured in 1972 and again in the 1990s, the NDP were able to score their only victories.
In 2017, the party system is unlike anything we have seen before. This time it is the centre-left that appears fractured between the NDP and the Greens. This would seem to give the Liberals an insuperable advantage in this election, but we can’t be exactly sure how the dynamics of this new party system will play out.
When the NDP came out against the Kinder Morgan pipeline in the last election, Christy Clark skilfully portrayed the NDP as the “party of no” and won the election. But that strategy may not work for Christy Clark in the new party system.
The NDP is still opposed to Kinder Morgan, but open to the development of the LNG industry, and will review the Site C Dam project. The Greens are opposed to all three.
On other issues, the Greens have also staked out positions to the left of the NDP. We all know about the NDP’s plan for $10 a day daycare, but the Greens have promised free daycare for kids up to 3 with working parents and free pre-school for 3 and 4 year old kids.
The NDP has promised to increase income and disability assistance rates (frozen for more than a decade under the Liberals) by $100, while the Greens have promised to increase the rates by 50 percent.
And the Greens of course have a more ambitious environmental plan than the NDP.
In this new party system, the Liberals are still the party of the right, but the Greens are now the party of the left, while the NDP is, for the first time, firmly in the middle. This may make the NDP look less scary to erstwhile Liberal voters who would like to see a change in government.
The centre-right vote has never been rock solid. In generations past, there were “10 second Socreds” and more recently “10 second Liberals” – voters who were only with the centre-right party for the 10 seconds they were in the ballot booth and couldn’t bring themselves to vote NDP. If John Horgan plays his cards right and employs the Greens as a foil, he might be able to convert them to “10 second NDPers.”
Hamish Telford is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of the Fraser Valley. He specializes in the politics of federalism, nationalism and secession. He is the past president of the BC Political Studies Association.