“They could have run Kermit the Frog in my riding and he would have won.”
––Mike Bernier
Rural British Columbia voters overwhelmingly backed the upstart BC Conservative party in Saturday’s election, pushing New Democrats deeper into urban areas and further entrenching the province’s rural-urban political divide.
The NDP have a slim one-seat lead over the Conservatives, under the preliminary results of the OCt. 19 election. Recounts and final ballots are set to be counted Oct. 26-28. The BC NDP still technically remain in government, ministers in place, until final results are known.
But the Conservative sweep outside urban B.C. took out NDP senior rural cabinet minister Nathan Cullen, and parliamentary secretary for Rural Development, Roly Russell.
The outcome weakens Premier David Eby’s already-limited representation outside of Metro Vancouver and southern Vancouver Island.
“I would say the wave that just went through parts of rural B.C., any of that based on anger, resentment, grievances, that energy can only last so long,” said Cullen, the Water, Land and Resource Stewardship minister who lost his Bulkley Valley-Stikine seat to former Telkwa mayor Sharon Hartwell.
“Folks are going to want to see that improvement to quality of life, access to a nurse and a doctor, and that rural B.C. can find common values with the government if we are working harder on being more inclusive of the conversation, especially around reconciliation.”
Only five NDP seats outside Metro Vancouver and Island
The election results leave the NDP with only five seats outside Metro Vancouver and the Island — North Coast-Haida Gwaii, Powell River-Sunshine Coast, Vernon Lumby, Kootenay-Monashee and Kootenay Central. Three of the five seats are held by first-time MLAs, while the other two, Brittny Anderson and Harwinder Sandhu, were first elected in 2020.
Conservatives campaigned hard in B.C.’s interior and north, pushing on issues of forestry, mining and natural gas development, agriculture, blue-collar jobs, hunting and fishing, and affordability.
Leader John Rustad promised to repeal the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (DRIPA) legislation, saying the NDP’s direction on reconciliation – through measures like the proposed Land Act changes and the Haida Gwaii title agreement – infringed on non-Indigenous people’s tenures, Crown land and personal property rights.
“This collective worry about the resource sector, along with anti-vax sentiments, which were very high in parts of my riding, disproportionately high, and over time some of the SOGI stuff, and maybe a real fear of reconciliation agreements, we heard that quite a bit,” said Cullen.
“Based on things that weren’t true. But there was enough to animate people.”
The ‘get-rid-of-the-NDP’ vote
None of the five former incumbent BC United MLAs won their reelection bids as independents. Coralee Oakes, Dan Davies and Tom Shypitka were based in rural B.C., while Karin Kirkpatrick ran in a Vancouver riding.
“It doesn’t make sense to me other than the blue wave,” said Mike Bernier, a three-term MLA who lost the riding of Peace River South to Conservative engineer and small businessman Larry Neufeld.
“When you have people who are controversial, racists and bigots and who say horrible things, who win the elections, that says to me people weren’t paying attention to the person, it was just a brand.”
“I knew I was in trouble two weeks ago, when I was out door knocking,” added Bernier.
“Even people who have always been supporters were like, ‘We really like you Mike, but we’ve got to get rid of the NDP.’”
‘I’m a little bit disillusioned’
Russell, who lost his riding of Boundary-Similkameen, said he felt like he was “running against a ghost” to Conservative Donegal Wilson.
“My campaign team was good, and I worked super hard, but I was up against somebody who didn’t engage with media, didn’t engage with all-candidates forums, they didn’t have a campaign office,” he said.
The experience matched with numerous other MLAs in the election, who weren’t able to debate their Conservative challengers and who heard very little about their local proposals.
“I’m a little bit disillusioned with the role of elections,” said Russell.
“If you’d asked me two months ago I would have said the candidate and who we are and what we stand for really matters, particularly in rural communities. And this one to me seems to drive home the fact that that was naive on my part.
“The reality was this was carried, certainly here, carried by the federal election. On the doorsteps when I’m talking to people and they said they weren’t supporting me, and I’d ask them why, some people didn’t want to answer, and that’s fair, but those who did answer almost exclusively said they are just tired of [Prime Minister Justin] Trudeau and [federal NDP leader Jagmeet] Singh.
“That’s pretty disappointing.”
“The reality was this [election] was carried… by the federal election.”
Roly Russell
Russell is well-respected among rural officials and worked hard behind-the-scenes to help Eby solve rural economic crises, including the BC Tree Fruit cooperative crisis, the cold weather damage to the wine sector, and more.
“I don’t get a sense any of those issues were of real significance,” he said.
“I absolutely believe frustration with Justin Trudeau was a much bigger influence on this outcome than anything we were or were not doing.”
Advice for new government: don’t further alienate rural BC
For Cullen, who shepherded the controversial Land Act amendments – which called for co-statutory decision making with Indigenous peoples on Crown land and were paused due to public backlash – the challenges for the remaining NDP government MLAs in the north, interior and southeast are many.
“There are things that this government has committed to do that will dramatically improve the lives of rural British Columbians,” he said.
“Anger and grievance is one thing to campaign on. You can’t govern with it. And I get the sense from watching rural Conservatives that they seem more interested in using problems than solving them. Ultimately, small town folks want to see things fixed, not just complained about. We’ll see how things settle out.”
Russell said Eby will need to continue to get urban cabinet ministers out to rural B.C., not just to show them rural communities, but also to illustrate the unique ways that small towns and cities solve service-delivery problems that may not be understood in Victoria.
Bernier said the NDP will have to be cautious about not alienating rural B.C. even further as they try to partner with the Greens to maintain a minority government. The Greens are opposed to many of the job-generating industries in the interior and north in the natural resource sector.
“That’s going to be scary,” said Bernier. “That’s going to be a balance that Eby and team is really going to have to work through.”
None of the three defeated MLAs say they’ve decided what to do next. They, like the rest of the province, are still processing the results.
“It was a a weird campaign, it wasn’t based on policy [or]… who would be the better MLA.”
Mike Bernier
“It was a weird campaign, it wasn’t based on policy, it wasn’t based on personality, it wasn’t based on who would be the better MLA — which is a bit of a gut shot in a way, because when I look at it, I lost to somebody who can’t do the job, who nobody knows,” said Bernier.
“They could have run Kermit the Frog in my riding and he would have won the election just because of the blue wave.”