To anyone following politics recently in British Columbia, it sounds familiar: An alliance of Liberals and Conservatives collapses, and then a botched attempt to thwart the left wing ends up elevating a moribund party.
Under W.A.C. Bennett, the Social Credit Party came to dominate the province’s politics.Credit…Bettmann
That was the 1952 election in the province, though it could just as easily describe next week’s vote. And that earlier election, with all its twists and turns, reshaped British Columbia’s politics for decades.
Connections between federal and provincial branches of political parties are often weak. The B.C. Liberals made this abundantly clear in 1987 when they formally cut ties to the federal party. At the time, they held no seats in the legislature.
But the provincial party benefited in 1991 when Bill Vander Zalm, then the premier, resigned because of a conflict-of-interest scandal over the sale of a Christian theme park he owned. His Social Credit Party collapsed. Liberal voters who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for the New Democrats joined most of the province’s conservatives in supporting and reviving the B.C. Liberal Party.
It became the official opposition that year and would go on to govern from 2001 to 2017. But by the time the party took power, its leaders “were not Liberals at all,” David J. Mitchell, an author, historian, university administrator and former Liberal member of the B.C. legislature, told me.