How a ‘Blue Wave’ Washed Away NDP Cabinet Ministers

B.C.’s electoral map is looking significantly bluer this week, in large part because the province’s biggest riding, Bulkley Valley-Stikine in the northwest, flipped from NDP to Conservative over the weekend.

It was an upset for NDP incumbent Nathan Cullen, who was first elected to the B.C. legislature in 2020 but previously spent 15 years representing the region as a federal member of Parliament. Most recently, he was B.C.’s minister of water, land and resource stewardship.

Cullen is among several cabinet ministers who were unseated as the current BC NDP government teeters in an incredibly tight election race. The party is currently favoured to win 46 seats with the upstart Conservatives taking 45 seats and the BC Greens winning two.

But that could change as Elections BC continues to tally mail-in ballots and does recounts of the votes in Juan de Fuca-Malahat and Surrey City Centre, two close ridings currently favoured to go NDP. Final results aren’t expected for another week.

As the count crept up steadily in favour of Bulkley Valley-Stikine Conservative candidate Sharon Hartwell on Saturday evening, Cullen didn’t wait for the official word before telling supporters he would call his opponent and wish her well.

“It’s an incredibly difficult and demanding job in a particularly complex part of the world, and we want our elected representatives to be successful,” Cullen said during a concession speech at his Smithers campaign office on Saturday evening.

He added that there was “an underlying tension and grievance” throughout the campaign that “I don’t think reflected the best of the northwest.”

“I think we, as New Democrats, as progressive people, responded with consistent grace and integrity,” he said.

Cullen’s defeat comes after a difficult campaign in Bulkley Valley-Stikine, where Cullen saw roughly half his election signs stolen or destroyed in the weeks leading up to the Oct. 19 election.

As Cullen gave his concession speech late Saturday evening, he was repeatedly drowned out by a pickup truck flying a Canadian flag and blasting its horn on the street outside the campaign office.

The Conservative winner

Hartwell, who previously served 12 years as mayor of Telkwa, has repeatedly praised organizers of the “Freedom Convoy,” which gridlocked downtown Ottawa for a month in early 2022, as “an inspiration” and has called for the firing of provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry and said that “those who pushed the vaccine should be held accountable.”

Hartwell has also supported calls for Canada to withdraw from the United Nations and the World Health Organization and falsely stated that former U.S. president Donald Trump won the last American election.

Speaking with The Tyee on Monday, Cullen expressed concern about some of the extreme views expressed by Conservative candidates.

“I do worry that a party elected people who think that school shootings were staged and fake, and COVID vaccines give you AIDS,” Cullen told The Tyee in an interview Monday. “I don't think people check the label before reaching for a new thing. Grievances were felt and legitimate, but the very empty solutions offered are going to be very disappointing.”

Other upsets

Cullen isn’t the only experienced politician who was unseated by Conservatives.

Additional cabinet ministers who lost their seats were Education Minister Rachna Singh and Agriculture and Food Minister Pam Alexis. Several junior cabinet ministers were also unseated, including Dan Coulter, Andrew Mercier and Kelli Paddon, parliamentary secretary for gender equity. All ran in ridings in the Lower Mainland.

Richard Johnston, professor emeritus in the University of British Columbia’s political science department, said the flipped ridings likely have more to do with broader political trends than with individual candidates.

“It’s a bad decade to be an incumbent,” he said.

The NDP, which landed a majority government in 2020, was “way beyond its base,” said Johnston, something he attributed to a combination of the pandemic, former premier John Horgan’s popularity and a weak BC Liberal leadership.

The party has been faced with social challenges that extend well beyond the provincial boundary, such as housing, the toxic drug crisis and homelessness.

“These are real grievances, and after seven years in power, the NDP has to wear them,” Johnston added.

He said Cullen’s loss in the north has its roots in a widening rural-urban gap in Canadian politics, dating back to the 1960s when federal politics began “to reorient on a rural-urban pattern.” Traditionally, the NDP has transcended that divide by speaking to both an urban working class and resource-rich rural areas, he added.

But that has been steadily changing, he said.

“As the NDP grew into being a genuine rival for power in this province, it started to look like the federal Liberal party,” he said. While that increased NDP popularity in metropolitan areas, the “flip side” has been a loss of support in rural areas, he said.

Johnston attributed Hartwell’s win to “a sense of rural resentment” in Bulkley Valley-Stikine.

Land Act controversy

Doug Donaldson, former NDP MLA in Bulkley Valley-Stikine, disagreed that shifts in a rural-urban divide played a role in the weekend’s upset in his riding. Donaldson was elected for three terms, beginning in 2009, and served as minister of forests.

“I know people in the ranching community who are extremely concerned with climate change. They feel the daily impacts, whether it's erosion of their pastures or whether it's forest fires and having to move their cattle,” he said. “I think that’s a prime example of that stereotypical characterization that doesn't hold water.”

Donaldson, who helped with Cullen’s campaign, added that the NDP saw “overwhelming” support in many small First Nations villages in the riding.

He added that governments currently face “some pretty complex issues” that don’t lend themselves to overly simplified campaign slogans.

Cullen faced criticism earlier this year as his NDP government attempted to make amendments to the province’s Land Act that would bring the legislation into alignment with B.C.’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act. The new wording would have facilitated joint decision-making agreements with First Nations — something the province has already done with the Tahltan Nation over plans to expand mining on the nation’s traditional territory.

But as the province moved to update the Land Act, criticism from BC United and the BC Conservatives created a backlash. The Land Ministry backed away from its plans in February.

Cullen told The Tyee on Monday that the reversal came after the opposition parties spread “misinformation” and stoked fears about the proposed changes.

“It showed me that there was a backlash on reconciliation and that perhaps the government needs to do more and deeper work in bringing non-Indigenous folks along in the conversation,” he said, adding that the backlash was sparked by a “weak legal reading” by lawyers who “set off a storm” that was heard on the campaign trail.

“The irony, of course, is that the economic certainty folks are looking for is through negotiated agreements, as opposed to threatened by negotiated agreements,” Cullen said.

Donaldson said that, while there’s a certain segment of the population that thinks moving ahead with DRIPA is “too much too fast,” the First Nations perspective is “too little and not fast enough.”

“That ‘too much too fast’ narrative was something that was appealing to many Conservative voters who, again, were talking about a complex topic that has many, many different facets that are hard to reduce it to a simple message,” he said.

Hartwell was asked at an Oct. 8 all-candidates forum about Indigenous land rights and how the Conservatives will address “long-standing issues of land ownership and historical injustice” towards First Nations.

She responded by saying the party has “committed to revisiting the DRIPA.” While leader John Rustad initially said he would repeal the legislation, he backed away from that promise during the election, saying the United Nations declaration that the B.C. legislation is based on would be used as a “guiding principle.”

“There has been two [First Nations] bands that have contested [DRIPA] in the province and said that they weren't treated fairly,” Hartwell said about the first court challenge to DRIPA. “We want a proper consultation process to go through where all stakeholders are asked and participate in the consultation process. After that, we can sit down and move forward with everything. We believe that economic reconciliation is the best way to do this for all parties involved.”

Blue wave

Ultimately, Donaldson said, the Bulkley Valley, particularly the communities of Smithers and Telkwa, was caught up in the “blue wave” that swept the province.

“People who were interested in voting Conservative really were motivated and came out in large numbers,” he said. The riding saw nearly a 30 per cent increase in voter turnout over the last election.

The Conservatives also drew votes from the ultra-conservative Christian Heritage Party, whose showing declined significantly this year over previous elections. This indicates that BC United Leader Kevin Falcon’s gamble, when he folded his party’s campaign in August in an effort to unite the right, paid off, at least in Bulkley Valley-Stikine.

Hartwell also ran for the BC Liberals in 2013, losing to Donaldson. That election, the combined centre-right vote, which was split among a Liberal, a Conservative and a CHP candidate, was equal to the NDP vote.

On Saturday evening, Cullen noted key issues like cost of living and health care and said he didn’t hold resentment for those who voted for the Conservatives. He called for unity in a region where Indigenous rights and resource extraction are often divisive issues.

“I'm incredibly proud of this campaign. I'm waking up tomorrow morning with no regrets,” he told supporters. “We did everything we could. I sincerely believe that.”