MCLEAN: It's a new era in BC politics

The Conservative Party of BC is choosing its next leader at a moment when the province is in the middle of something larger than any single party’s internal drama. 

For most of the past two decades, elections in BC were largely contests over administration, not always direction. The basic assumptions of provincial governance remained broadly stable over time. 

It was a managerial consensus, unspoken and largely unexamined. Most people didn’t really notice it until it stopped working. 

It has stopped working. Housing is no longer a public policy problem for many younger British Columbians; it is a personal crisis. 

General public disorder, specifically crime and rampant open-air drug use in urban cores has become impossible for even the most ideological left-wing academics and politicians to explain away. 

The economic picture is genuinely alarming: BC’s mining sector generates $19.6 billion in annual output from just 18 mines and two smelters, according to industry figures, with $67 billion in northern projects mostly sitting in permitting limbo. The ironically-named John Horgan Dam, approved, funded, and politically committed to, still blew past $16 billion under NDP leadership and took the better part of a decade.

The next leader of the BC Conservatives — and likely the province — needs to understand this record as a warning, and not as a template.

Recent Heritage Conservation Act amendment proposals would only make it worse, adding another unnecessary layer of complexity and creating a parallel approval regime with effective veto authority over resource projects outside the framework voters understood to exist. 

That uncertainty is no longer just economic. The provincial government recently dropped the word “Provincial” from BC’s provincial parks signage. There was no debate, no vote, and nobody bothered to explain it to the taxpayers who paid for it.

Joffre Lakes has been closed to non-Indigenous visitors several times, again with little to no public consultation. Statues have come down across Victoria and the province, also with no consultation. The curriculum has been substantially reoriented away from Canadian civic history. Symbolic gestures have become compulsory in institutional settings province-wide, with almost no public discussion about what they mean or who they serve. 

We have become a nation and province of strangers with a disintegrating identity. All of these soft cultural changes may not seem important in a vacuum, but they are part of a larger ideologically driven agenda that the BC Conservatives don’t need to just stop, but actively reverse. 

I hear frustration about this from people who don’t consider themselves political, who aren’t motivated by grievance, and who would bristle at the suggestion that caring about cultural continuity or our history makes you hostile to Indigenous peoples. It doesn’t. 

But when a government makes decisions of this consequence through administrative fiat rather than democratic process, it isn’t modernising. It’s quietly withdrawing the basis on which citizens consent to be governed. As with the economy, the goal should be for every single British Columbian, status or not, to have a place in this province. 

The political class in Victoria still treats skepticism about the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act as a fringe position, while the rest of the province stopped treating it that way some time ago.

Three years ago, those questions were typically confined to industry lawyers and a handful of backbench MLAs. Today I hear them from young parents, school trustees, municipal councillors, and small business owners who couldn’t have told you what DRIPA stood for in 2022. Since then, we have seen the Overton Window take unheard-of leaps, and very few people predicted it.

DRIPA was passed with minimal public debate and even less public understanding of what it meant in practice. The province adopted obligations from an international framework without explaining how they’d interact with democratic accountability, provincial and federal Crown authority, or the permitting systems the economy depends on. 

Last December, the BC Court of Appeal ruled that DRIPA incorporates UNDRIP and creates legally enforceable obligations in Gitxaala v. British Columbia. The implications are substantial, and Premier Eby has faced sustained criticism for flip-flopping on whether to amend or suspend parts of the act. He knows there’s a problem and has deliberately chosen not to fix it.

While DRIPA gave us a legal architecture, these instincts predate the act, when the Wet’suwet’en dispute in 2019 over the Coastal GasLink pipeline made the stakes concrete. Courts issued injunctions, and the government declined to enforce them.

The signal from this was unmistakable: court orders are negotiable when the politics are uncomfortable. A government that selectively enforces its own legal orders is eroding the basis of its own authority and sovereignty. That went largely without consequence, which is its own kind of answer.

The result of this uncertainty is paralysis. As the Mining Association of BC put it: investment hates uncertainty. The BC Conservatives will need to offer more than criticism. British Columbians deserve a clear account of how a conservative government restores democratic accountability to a framework that currently provides none.

The BC Conservatives' rise is a story about institutional failure and poor policy creating political opportunity. The province is not short of anger. It is short of serious answers.

The party is not rebuilding from collapse, trying to claw its way back from death. It’s a party with momentum, and the organizational work by a great team of dedicated people that helped produce the 2024 result, the membership growth, the sustained effort to build something durable, didn’t happen by accident. 

The next leader inherits something real.

But opposition energy and governing discipline are different muscles. The leadership race is a test of whether the party can develop both, and go stronger into the next election — not the only test, but the first serious one. British Columbians paying attention are already asking the harder question: what does a BC Conservative government actually do on day one, and what does the province look like in year four? 

British Columbia has already arrived at a new political era. The old coalitions are fragmenting. The questions once considered too sensitive for polite company are now being asked by people who’ve run out of patience for the polite version.

Whoever emerges from this race will inherit a party that has done the hard work. The organization is there. The membership is there. The argument is there. What remains to be seen is whether the next leader is prepared to carry it with the seriousness the moment demands.

The new political era is already here. The question is whether anyone is prepared to deserve it.

Evan McLean is a Vancouver-based political and public affairs professional.