The election in B.C. was as close as it could have been and after a week of suspense, many breathed a sigh of relief as the Trump-like Rustad fell short of taking power. But it is difficult for anyone to call this a “win”. The B.C. NDP barely eked out a razor-thin victory and now the right-populists are waiting at the gates. With Poilievre leading in the polls nationally, this is a warning to the working class. Establishment reformists and liberals cannot defeat right populism.
In his usual, uninspiring, robotic tone, B.C. NDP leader David Eby said, “I think this was a message that was sent, certainly to me, to our government, from British Columbia—that they expect us to do better on a number of key files.”
You don’t say! After seven years of crisis, the NDP have been unable to solve any of the pressing problems facing working class British Columbians. With skyrocketing rents and eroding wages, climbing opioid deaths, and poorly managed natural disasters, nobody is happy with the B.C. NDP.
What saved the NDP was the mass fear of what a Conservative government would look like. The Conservative Party is full of evil bastards: climate change deniers, 5G conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, fraudulent doctors, Islamophobes, and residential school deniers populate their ranks. They promised to scrap the province’s rent freeze, attack unions, and shut down safe consumption sites.
The only problem is that the NDP is full of their own swathe of “lesser” evil bureaucrats. Eby is a landlord in his own riding, and didn’t even become party leader democratically, winning only after disqualifying self described eco-socialist activist Anjali Appadurai from the leadership contest. Eby agrees with Conservative leader John Rustad in involuntarily imprisoning people suffering with addiction in formerly abandoned insane asylums. They both support subsidizing oil and gas capitalists.
In the B.C. NDP cabinet, there are wonderful people like Minister of the Interior Mike Farnworth, who was the one who called the RCMP to violently crush the Wet’suwet’en when they defended their land rights against a multinational gas company’s pipeline. The NDP resisted the BCGEU’s struggle for inflation-adjusted-wages and most shamefully have been vocal supporters of the genocidal Zionist regime, pushing universities to fire pro-Palestine professors. Zionist B.C. NDP MLA Selena Robinson even claimed that before the creation of Israel, Palestine was “a crappy piece of land with nothing on it.”
By trying to appease the real estate and mining magnates, Zionists and oil corporations, the NDP has simply alienated the working class and youth and created the conditions for right populism to flourish. And this strategy does not make these capitalist forces any friendlier to the NDP who will always pick the Conservatives over the NDP.
Therefore, you would be hard pressed to find anyone who was excited to vote NDP. In one poll over half said they’d only vote NDP because they hate the Conservatives, and only a third think the NDP are the most capable to solve the housing crisis. Not exactly a glowing endorsement for an already unstable government. Therefore, many who did vote NDP, did so holding their noses.
Now, Eby’s majority is the smallest possible at 47 out of 93 seats—only a byelection or two away from triggering a snap election which could usher in a Conservative government. Meanwhile, none of the problems caused by the capitalist crisis have gotten any better. The NDP, by accepting the rules of capitalism, have dug their own graves as the anger against their government will only grow, to the benefit of Rustad.
The real winner of the B.C. election was therefore John Rustad and the B.C. Conservatives. It’s been 96 years since the Conservatives last governed in B.C. and they garnered just 1.9 per cent and zero seats in the previous election. However, this ex-Liberal, arch opportunist managed to resuscitate the Conservatives.
In a similar way that Trump galvanizes anger against the failures of the Democrats in the United States, Rustad capitalized on the same mood, channeling anger into his self-proclaimed “anti-status-quo” Conservatives.
We must have a clear understanding of what the popularity of people like Rustad and Poilievre means. These demagogic rightwingers are only able to gain in popularity because the official leftwing in the NDP has abandoned the struggle for socialism and has embraced the establishment, putting themselves forward as responsible captains of a ship that is going down.
Unsurprisingly, the NDP brass seems to have learned nothing from this development.
For example, in a CBC interview, former NDP MLA Nathan Cullen expressed he was surprised and disappointed at losing his seat, despite running “the best campaign” he ever had. Perhaps Cullen, former minister of water, land and resource stewardship, was unaware the Wet’suwet’en were violently repressed by his party a short drive from his constituency office.
One Gitanyow Nation member in Cullen’s riding spoke of the B.C. NDP’s betrayal to The Narwhal, saying, “There was a lot of pretending, a lot of false promises and a lot of false hope that wasted our time.” This says everything about the reason for the situation in British Columbia.
The near victory of Rustad and the B.C. Conservatives represents a warning to the working class. We cannot rely on establishment liberals and reformists to fight against the threat posed by the right populists as the right populists derive their strength precisely from the fact that many people hate establishment politicians with a justifiable passion.
The rise of figures like Trump, Boris Johnson, Marine le Pen, Gert Wilders and others represents anger against the system—albeit in a distorted form. You cannot fight these charlatans, many of whom are capitalists themselves (and will most definitely make the lives of workers worse) by draping ourselves in the capitalist establishment.
What is needed is a genuine revolutionary leftwing force. One that bases itself on the workers and the youth and not on the capitalist state and its institutions. A veritable movement of the working class, mobilized and led by people who patiently explain that it is the capitalists and their system who are to blame for the crisis—not immigrants, trans youth or whichever scapegoat the Trumpites try to find. This is what we are fighting for with the Revolutionary Communist Party.
