Recent polls show Kevin Falcon’s BC United party bleeding support to the provincial Conservatives.
A Leger poll this month placed the NDP first, to no great surprise. But shockingly, the Conservatives came second.
Falcon’s party limped home in third place, with just 19 per cent support, against 25 per cent for the Conservatives, and 42 per cent for David Eby’s NDP.
Nor does it appear this was an outlier. BC United managed just 20 per cent support in a September poll, basically tied with the Conservatives.
Falcon blamed the Leger result on confusion among voters. He argued that a significant number mistook the provincial Conservatives for the federal party of that name.
Perhaps. But it’s noteworthy that the provincial Conservatives have run in several recent general elections, and come nowhere.
In 2013, 2017 and 2020 the party never gained more than 4.75 per cent of the vote and none of its candidates were elected.
No confusion with the federal Tories there, it would seem.
What’s more apparent is that Falcon committed a colossal error in forcing through the name change. “BC United” is not a name that people instinctively associate with a political party. It sounds too much like a soccer team.
However, a more obvious problem is that Falcon spent a full year immersed in the internal dynamics of a name change operation, when he should have been out broadening the party’s reach.
We saw a consequence of that last month when Bruce Banman, MLA for Abbotsford South, fled BC United and joined the Conservatives, giving the latter official status in the Legislature.
Banman, and party leader John Rustad who was kicked out by the Liberals before their name change, may be on the outer wing of B.C. politics. Yet their departure threatens to divide the right-of-centre vote.
The question is whether Falcon can recover. At a minimum, it looks a tall order.
No-one would accuse him of being a natural politician.
Rather he comes across as somewhat grim-faced, all taken up with purpose, but lacking grace-notes in his speeches.
Some of this perhaps dates back to his time as finance minister under premier Christy Clark. That’s not a portfolio often associated with warmth and congeniality.
Even so the opportunities are there. In that same Leger poll, the top of mind issues were housing prices, health care and the cost of living, in that order.
Yet each reached its present level of crisis under the current NDP government. There is an opening here for Falcon, if he is organized enough to take it.
Meanwhile, surprisingly, issues that would traditionally attract left-leaning voters are nowhere in the Leger poll. Concerns about climate change have fallen from 20 per cent in 2019, to just eight per cent today.
Homelessness stands at four per cent, unemployment at one per cent, and systemic racism at less than one per cent.
These are all concerns that right-of-centre parties have traditionally struggled with. Nevertheless, for the time being at least, they’ve fallen back, due likely to the critical state of housing costs and health care.
It’s been said that opposition parties don’t win elections, but rather governing parties lose them.
And despite the NDP lead in the polls, that could still happen. For whatever else may be true of Eby and his colleagues, cautious and middle-of-the-road they are not.
But time is running short. The next provincial election is just 12 months away.
That may be a long time in politics. Yet it is barely enough for Falcon to drag his party out of the wilderness, consign the B.C. Conservatives to the dustbin of politics, and convince voters he offers a better way forward.
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