BC United and the BC Conservatives have finally figured out who should be the main opposition party in British Columbia, and now David Eby is actually facing a real challenger. Is it the BC Liberals or the BC Tories?
00:00:00.000No doubt the most confused man in Canada this morning was British Columbia Premier David Eby, who had gotten very used to knowing that he wasn't even going to have to campaign for re-election in this next provincial election in British Columbia.
00:00:14.400He got used to 21, 18, 28% leads over his opponents in the province, but this morning a new Main Street Research poll dropped showing that now the BC NDP are only leading the BC Conservatives by 6 points.
00:00:29.960You can even see in the last Angus Reid poll they were up 21, in Research Co 21, and in Polara they were up all the way in front by 28 points.
00:00:39.360That is an incredible lead, and now this is an incredibly fast shrink to their lead.
00:00:44.260What's really going on here, and this is the poll more in detail, is that the BC Conservatives and the BC United have finally figured out who should be the main opposition party in British Columbia.
00:00:55.400You see, if you don't know this, especially if you don't live in the province of British Columbia, for the longest time British Columbia was the province of social credit, just the way Alberta had been the province of social credit.
00:01:06.820And because the social credit party was a big tent party that you really couldn't peg on a political spectrum, when it finally collapsed in the early 90s, basically nobody knew really where to go on the right.
00:01:19.860And so what we had was all the people on the Conservative right just joining the BC Liberal Party, and the BC Liberal Party became a little bit more of a big tent party than the federal Liberals are.
00:01:31.020There's room for effectively red Tories and moderate Conservatives within the BC Liberals.
00:01:36.760But since the BC Liberals and Christy Clark got thrown out of the provincial government and John Horgan took over, and now David Abbey replacing John Horgan, the BC Liberals' brand is complete mud.
00:01:49.260And that's not just their own fault. It's also the fault of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau making the BC Liberals' brand association look awful.
00:01:58.480So that has led the BC Liberal Party to rebrand themselves now as the BC United, which is a horrible name.
00:02:06.720Like, BC United immediately just feels limp. Like, nobody cares. Like, we aren't even trying anymore. We are BC United. We are the BC Apathy Party.
00:02:15.300And now, because everyone kind of knows they're just another lefty party and there's no room left for Conservatives in that party,
00:02:22.680the BC Conservative Party, which had been on life support since back when the Social Credit Party was around,
00:02:28.380finally had a massive resurgence when John Rusted crossed the floor and joined it and actually became its leader,
00:02:34.800who actually has a seat in the provincial legislature.
00:02:37.880And since then, that happened a little bit more like than a year and a half ago or so.
00:02:41.900Since then, there's been kind of a jockeying for position between the BC Cons and BC United.
00:02:47.420Although the United has a lot more seats than the Cons, who only have two seats due to floor crossings,
00:02:52.900right now the BC United is utterly collapsing because, well, if you're a lefty voter, you might as well go vote for the MVP.
00:03:00.080And if you're on the right, you should go vote for the BC Conservatives.
00:03:03.140And so they're looking a lot like the PC Party under Kim Campbell federally in 1993.