Former cabinet minister Corky Evans on the NDP’s rural blind spot
“New Democrat leadership forgot [resource development] is how we make a living.””
–Corky Evans
A former NDP cabinet minister and two-time leadership candidate says we’re seeing the disintegration of social democracy in B.C. today.
Corky Evans, who served three terms as an MLA for what was then known as Nelson-Creston, says the party leadership has forgotten the people of rural B.C. He ran for the top job in 1996, finishing second to Glen Clark, and second again in 2000 to Ujjal Dosanjh.
Back in the 1980s, when Evans first ran for provincial office, he says things were different: “The NDP in those days actually gave a shit about how people live.”
Evans still votes NDP and sometimes donates to campaigns. But he laments the state of the party and the coalition of labour leaders and workers, rural dwellers, and urban activists who built it. He also notes the consolidation of media, which has made it harder for rural populations to be heard.
“How did we lose rural politics out here?”
Corky Evans
“The question is, how did we lose rural politics out here? I mean, I logged for 20 years and worked in sawmills and stuff and that’s what people do in rural areas. They work on pipelines, fish, or mine, [things] like that. Not everybody, but, of course, a substantial number of people. “
Over the past 30 years though, “New Democrat leadership forgot that’s how we make a living.”
NDP orange nearly disappears from rural electoral map
Evans had a wide-ranging interview with Northern Beat in his home on two hectares of farmland in the Slocan Valley in the West Kootenay, where he moved when he arrived from the U.S. more than 50 years ago. He and his partner now live in a small bungalow, while his stepdaughter and her husband have taken over the house he built, with its sweeping view of the fertile valley, flanked by the snow-capped Selkirk Mountains.
He still ducks outside periodically for a smoke: “I was the last Minister of Health in Canada who still smoked cigarettes.”
The two ridings here, Kootenay-Monashee and Kootenay Central, both stayed NDP orange in the last provincial election, although the New Democrats’ hold is not as strong as it once was.
In Kootenay Central, New Democrat Brittny Anderson won with 39 per cent of the vote. In Kootenay-Monashee, Steve Morrisette took 52 per cent of the vote, a clear majority over the second place Conservatives, but down more than nine points from Katrine Conroy’s winning total in what was then Kootenay West in 2020.
Evans says the old NDP coalition is still solid enough to win elections in the West Kootenay. Along with Vernon-Lumby, these two electoral districts represent the NDP’s toehold in the southern interior. In the north, only the traditional NDP riding of North Coast elected a New Democrat.
Other than that, it’s a sea of blue from the U.S. border to the Yukon. Yet the NDP still managed to form a majority, albeit the slimmest possible, with 47 seats, compared to 44 for the Conservatives and two for the Greens (Although, the Conservatives are now down to 41 seats, following the departure of three MLAs from caucus).
Evans rues the fact it’s now possible in B.C. to win an election with little rural support.
It was very different when he was first elected in 1991 and served in the government of then premier Mike Harcourt. In that election, the NDP benefited from the split created by the collapse of the Social Credit Party and the rise of the BC Liberals.
New Democrat members, 51 in all, were elected in virtually every region of the province, sweeping the Kootenays, east and west. Only the traditionally right-of-centre Peace River region remained out of reach. Yet the party received a smaller percentage of the popular vote province wide than it did under David Eby’s leadership last October: 40.7 per cent in 1991 compared to 47.7 per cent in 2024.
With a clear majority, the Harcourt government embarked on a program of far-reaching reforms, doubling the amount of provincial parkland, introducing the first Forest Practices Code, and launching the Commission on Resources and Environment (CORE), which attempted to bring stakeholders together to resolve contentious issues of land use management.
The CORE process was sometimes fractious; on Vancouver Island, thousands of loggers, worried about losing their livelihood, packed the lawn of the B.C. legislature to protest the creation of dozens of new parks in what had been working forest. But in the Kootenays, CORE had more success finding a consensus to guide land use management.
Today, Evans once again advocates a collaborative approach that brings “greens and browns” together at one table to seek solutions. That may not be easy in a province now so polarized between urban and rural populations.
‘They don’t have a platform’
So, what does he think of the current NDP platform?
“Well, they don’t have a platform. Yeah, they talk about housing and fentanyl and transit, but they don’t talk about anything that has to do with us, right? I don’t know the answer to that question,” Evans says.
“I didn’t see a thing that suggested that the New Democrats want us to have sawmills or mines or a smelter or a pulp mill.”
In recent weeks Premier David Eby has shifted gears, promising to expedite approvals of mines and energy projects to counter the threat posed by US tariffs. But these days, left-wing thought is often preoccupied with identity politics.
“I don’t understand it and I didn’t like it,” he says.
“When I ran for leader those times, I observed that trade unionists tend to vote for who their union tells them to. Environmentalists tend to vote for who their leadership tells them to. Feminists tend to vote for what the feminist caucus of the NDP tell them to, and I found that very disturbing. I thought you should listen to the candidates, and make a choice for the best one, rather than put your vote into whatever group you’re a part of.”
Evans smiles as he tells an anecdote about his 2000 leadership campaign, in which Ujjal Dosanjh’s organizers recruited hundreds of new members.
“When I ran against Ujjal, I thought I was winning. And the night before the vote, a group of young New Democrats came to me, and they said, ‘We have a plan for how you can win.’ I said, ‘I think I am winning.’ And they said, ‘Well, tomorrow, there’s going to be 400 people in school buses coming across the bridge from Surrey and they’re going to vote against you. So, our plan is we’re going to take a couple of old beater cars that belong to our members and go out and have a car wreck on the bridge at 9 o’clock in the morning.’
“And I said, ‘Well, you can’t do that.’ And I lost.”
Evans traces his disillusionment with the political process to events like that one. He’s not alone in feeling rural voices aren’t being heard in Victoria as political professionals run the show.
‘Hanging by a thread’ in NDP camp
“It’s just like they’re leaving us to our own devices, and it doesn’t feel very good,” says Ramona Faust, a longtime activist in the Kootenays. “People tend to stay in the city and make decisions from there, rather than getting out and putting boots to the ground.”
Faust served for 14 years on the Regional District of Central Kootenay Council. She also worked as general manager of the Harrop-Procter Community Forest near Nelson, which oversees a working forest on Kootenay Lake, a tree nursery, and a sawmill. It’s a community-based cooperative that many people, including Evans, believe is a model of good forest management.
She’s supported both NDP and BC Green Party candidates in the past. She’s in the NDP camp now, “hanging on by a thread.”
Today, as Faust relaxes with a coffee at the busy Oso Negro Cafe in Nelson, she’s concerned about the direction of B.C. politics.
“The NDP has always had way too many groups to try and appease.”
Ramona Faust
She bristles at drug policies, such as safe supply, imposed by the B.C. government without consultation and without the needed supports.
“Proper treatment centres, counselling, outreach, all of those things needed hefty investment, and instead we have a group that wants people to be able to do whatever they do, wherever and whenever.
“That was naivety, extreme naivety.”
Then there’s the lingering strike that’s reduced the Kootenay Lake ferry – described as the longest free ferry ride in the world – to essential service only: three crossings per day, rather than the usual winter schedule of 10.
It’s crippled transportation in the West Kootenay since early November; the only possible detour is the circuitous Kootenay Pass route between Salmo and Creston, which is often snowbound or closed for avalanche clearing.
Online forums are filled with complaints that the B.C. government is doing nothing while people suffer. The issue is a tough one politically for the NDP. Lean one way or the other and the government will be accused of either favouring, or abandoning, its backers in the labour movement.
So, the strike continues.
Faust says people in the West Kootenay feel abandoned. “I think that the NDP has always had way too many groups to try and appease.”
Emphasis on ideology turns off rural voters
That may be why many rural voters have now turned to the Conservatives.
“I think part of what happened is emphasis on ideology that tends to throw off voters in northern and southern BC,” says pollster Mario Canseco of Research Co.
“There’s a tendency to look at things from a more urban standpoint, especially about the environment. I think that’s been the major complexity for the NDP for the past six or seven years.”
“Emphasis on ideology… tends to throw off voters in northern and southern BC.”
Mario Canseco
Canseco says modern campaigns are “all about voter identification. Which seats can we win? How do we spend our money? In a way, it’s become a lot like an American election campaign. There’s no point in sending Joe Biden to Wyoming.”
Or, for that matter, sending David Eby to interior ridings his party has little chance of winning.
Many B.C. voters gravitated to the provincial Conservatives as federal leader Pierre Poilievre’s polling results began to soar, but Canseco doesn’t think it’s because they’re confused. They’re just saying that “if I like Poilievre federally, and I’m upset with Trudeau, then maybe it’s time to give John Rustad a chance as well when it comes to the BC Conservatives.”
Conservative policies align with rural resource voters
Like their federal counterparts, the BC Conservatives ran on a platform that emphasized “common sense” solutions, axing the carbon tax, building and upgrading highway infrastructure, cutting red tape and costs in resource industries, and removing ideology from classrooms.
“It’s an unabashed offering that was aligned with rural resource community values and embracing some of those hot button issues that work well in the interior but do not work as well in the city, so Conservatives almost won the election, and they ran the table in the interior,” says Mike McDonald, a veteran political strategist who served as chief of staff to former premier Christy Clark.
“[BC Premier David Eby] did not have the same appeal in the resource communities that Horgan did.”
Mike McDonald
“David Eby is not John Horgan,” McDonald adds, “so he did not have the same appeal in the resource communities that Horgan did, for starters. But secondly, the Conservative brand was hitting a bullseye for voters who were not necessarily planning to go NDP. They were serving up what the voter base wanted, and they probably maximized their ability to get votes there.”
Right-wing politics deliver short-term gain, long-term pain
Former New Democrat MLA Roly Russell says he still believes that in the long term, rural communities will be better served by progressive governments, which invest in health care, public services, and a sustainable environment.
Russell was born and raised in Grand Forks but left to get an education and see the world before returning from Manhattan with his family – PhD in marine ecology in hand – to resume the rural life. Russell represented the riding of Boundary-Similkameen for one term from 2020. Well regarded by municipal representatives for his grasp of rural issues, Russell served as parliamentary secretary for rural development, before losing to a Conservative in October.
He notes right-leaning parties tend to dominate politics in rural areas in B.C. and elsewhere. It’s short-term gain for long-term pain, he argues, citing communities that call for an increased timber harvest, only to find their mill closes when it runs short of wood fibre.
“Let’s say I could warm up my house by pulling two by fours out of the walls, one by one, and it would make the house warm, and everybody would be happy for the time being, and eventually we’d have no house left, and we’d all be left in the cold.”
If rural voices aren’t being heard, it shows the need for better communication of government programs and priorities: “When a decision is being made in Victoria, is there a rural lens that is an obligatory step that a ministry or minister has to take, to say, did we think about how this impacts differently an individual that lives in Barriere versus an individual that lives in Oak Bay?”
Russell says he isn’t a lifelong partisan, “and I take offence at the notion that people were getting elected in rural B.C. that refused to engage with the public in terms what they were going to fight for.”
His Conservative opponent in Boundary-Similkameen didn’t have a campaign office, wouldn’t participate in all-candidates debates, and rarely made any public appearances during the election.
“My goal isn’t to get more NDP people elected. My goal is to get more people elected that care about the communities they live in,” Russell said.
Winning doesn’t look the same
In the Slocan Valley, meanwhile, Corky Evans is in a reflective mood as he contemplates his political career. Times have changed, and perhaps he’s been left behind.
But Evans takes pride when he relates a story he heard recently from a political insider who told him how the new Conservative MLAs prepared for their work in the legislature. They were shown videos of several exemplary MLA speeches, including Evans’ 1992 maiden address to the legislature.
In that speech, the newly-elected MLA for Nelson-Creston gave a capsule history of his electoral district going back centuries, speaking of the land, the resources, the industries, the communities, and the people who built and shaped them.
“We do not want a bag of money, pot of power, or ideologically driven political process to solve our problems,” Evans told his fellow legislators at the time. “We want to let the communities decide what is good for the communities. We want to let the patient heal itself.”
Evans’ MLA peers rose in applause.
After hearing the speech, New Democrat MLA Emery Barnes wrote Evans a note saying it was first time he had ever heard a rookie MLA get a standing ovation for a first-time speech.
Now, another generation of B.C. politicians of a different political stripe has heard the same old-school message about the importance of community input.
Today, Corky Evans, 77 years old, long out of politics, looks back and wonders: “Is this winning? I assume it is.”