“It stings a bit.”
Those were the words of British Columbia’s premier at a forestry union summit, after hearing that workers felt sidelined. It was not an easy admission from the leader of the BC New Democrats.
That was in March 2024.
Seven months later, in the last provincial election, many of those workers still did not feel heard and made sure David Eby’s government knew it. When the votes were counted, the NDP won 11 of Vancouver’s 12 ridings, but its rural caucus was gutted with losses in forestry-dependent ridings like North Island and Bulkley Valley–Stikine.
East of Hope, just three New Democrats won their seats. Whatever bridge might have existed between former premier John Horgan’s urban and rural NDP bases was drastically weakened. In the same election, the NDP gained an unexpected win in Vancouver-Langara, a seat it had never won before, which helped to secure its narrow majority, as its dependence on Metro Vancouver deepened.
In the current snap election, Eby’s decision to go to the polls has backfired spetacularly. Rather than sweeping to a larger majority, Eby is fighting for his political life. The premier may well regret having put most of his political eggs in the urban basket. Indeed, if it comes to a difference of three or four seats between the NDP and the Conservatives, frustrated voters in the far reaches of the province could make the difference. And they are much more likely to vote for Eby’s competitors.
There is more to this rural alienation than mere miscommunication between the premier and foresters.
Legislative and policy changes have alienated non-unionized workers across the province, prohibiting publicly funded projects from hiring tradespeople and contractractors not on the list of approved unions. This has sometimes restricted local residents from benefiting from projects in their own communities. Changes in the province’s economy have also damaged the political weight of organized labour outside urban centres.
Rural and urban economies began diverging years ago
The shift long predates Eby’s premiership. In 1989, following Vancouver’s Expo 86, a study in the journal BC Studies found that two distinct economies were forming in the province. On the one hand was Greater Vancouver’s expanding, white-collar, service-oriented economy, while smaller communities remained dependent on natural resource employers.
B.C.’s economy could look good on paper as Vancouver toasted its “modernization” and growth, while the Cariboo and Vancouver Island suffered mill closures that gutted small towns. These diverging economic realities were politically irreconcilable.
Between 2001 and 2023, direct employment in forestry fell by about 45 per cent, from nearly 100,000 to just 45,000 jobs. Many factors contributed to this decline, including beetle infestations, wildfires and changing timber supplies, alongside critical market shocks.
Both parties oversaw this decline, which spanned 16 years of BC Liberal rule and nearly 10 years of NDP governments. Throughout, forestry workers were told the situation was ‘complicated’ and that relief was coming, to no avail.
When a mill closes in the interior, the consequences go beyond the economic devastation wrought upon a single community. It also weakens union networks and their ability to organize politically.
The labour historian and journalist Rod Mickleburgh has written about how British Columbia’s union membership rate fell six percent between 1996 and 2013, the largest provincial decline in Canada, largely driven by private-sector erosion.
In 2018, government and Crown-corporation workers accounted for more than 60 per cent of the British Columbia Federation of Labour’s membership. The shift has had a dramatic impact on political parties.
A mill worker depends on a healthy economy, markets and access to harvestable resources, where public-sector union security depends heavily on government budgets. The NDP could talk all it liked about remaining faithful to organized labour and being the party of the working class, but a populist, working-class identity cannot be sustained without a blue-collar base. And their new union base had become predominantly white collar.
Horgan saw it happening back in 2014 when he sought the NDP leadership.
“We have lost our way to speak to people in resource-based communities; we have become dependent on particular points of view largely focused in the Lower Mainland,” Horgan said at the time.
As opposition leader and premier, Horgan backed the development of liquefied natural gas (LNG), accepted the construction of the Site C dam and pursued other measures to boost employment in the natural resource sector.
The NDP’s rural success in the 2020 snap election reflected both Horgan’s pandemic governance and his attempts to rebuild the party’s traditional base outside Vancouver. He won a historic landslide for the NDP, but tensions soon resurfaced when his government introduced old-growth protections and other restrictions on forestry.
‘Mud hut’ wing and public sector unions drive BC NDP priorities
Former Alberta premier Jason Kenney recently recounted when he and Horgan were both premiers of neighbouring jurisdictions, and Horgan had explained his government’s opposition to an oil pipeline from Alberta. According to Kenney, Horgan spoke of having to manage“two Green parties”—the official BC Greens with which his government had a coalition agreement, and the environmentally focused “mud hut” faction within the NDP itself.
Concessions granted to the NDP’s green faction, largely concentrated in urban areas, were necessary to hold the party together. But they came at a cost.
At the forestry summit in 2024, union members asked Eby why workers seemed to be treated as afterthoughts compared with environmental protection and Indigenous reconciliation. The workers were not rejecting those objectives; they simply did not want them pursued at the expense of their own standing.
After Horgan stepped down, the metropolitan so-called mud hut wing of the NDP coalition has become the party’s driving force. Public-sector employees, urban professionals and wage earners concerned about affordability and services dominate. Even if the party’s leadership is committed to hearing from rural and blue-collar workers, their MLAs are overshadowed by those from Metro Vancouver and Victoria.
Their votes are driven by issues that keep them living well in a city like Vancouver, rather than concerns about how to keep a mine operating in the north. Time and resources are limited for any government, and one that seeks to retain power will not devote too much of either to placating a shrinking bloc of voters. And so, electoral success in Surrey, Richmond and the Tri-Cities is central to both the NDP’s policies and its identity.
When an industry is in jeopardy, political loyalties fall by wayside
The BC Conservatives, meanwhile, have found an opening.
Before the 2024 provincial election, as the Conservatives and their rival BC United battled to become the province’s main centre-right option, both courted alienated rural communities. When BC United folded into the BC Conservatives, then-leader John Rustad offered those communities more than reassurance, pledging substantive policy changes to revive the resource economy.
Rustad pledged to scrap the consumer carbon tax and abandon the target of protecting 30 per cent of provincial land by 2030. For communities dependent on driving, forestry and other land-based industries, Rustad’s positions were bread-and-butter pledges that spoke to strained households and people fearing for their jobs.
Understandably, when the question for a voter is whether his job and local industry can survive, historic loyalties to the NDP mean very little. That concern sidelines class politics and turns employers and workers into allies against what they see as a distant, aloof government.
Then came the compounding problems inherent with the rise in public disorder since the NDP formed government in 2017. Basic public order is a universal desire, and its absence is hardly confined to Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside or Pandora Avenue in Victoria. As crime, public drug use and property damage wreak disproportionate harm on working-class neighbourhoods and smaller communities, the NDP’s credibility and support among this demographic also takes a hit. Eby all but conceded Conservative policy was more effective at addressing public drug use and severe addiction when his party adopted mandatory care in the 2024 election and abandoned safe supply shortly afterwards.
Rural voters did not need to agree with the BC Conservatives on every issue to regard them as a plausible vehicle for change.
For the NDP, its retreat from non-urban B.C. is a self-reinforcing cycle: shrinking numbers of industrial workers have weakened its rural caucus, while growing electoral success in the cities has pushed the concerns of its newer voters to the forefront.
The Conservatives did not create that separation, but they did an excellent job of assuring vulnerable workers that their concerns were front and centre.
As the forestry unions made clear to Eby two years ago, feeling genuinely heard can go further than any complex platform or sweeping promise. They delivered that message in the last provincial election, and may do it again on Saturday.