Caroline Elliott’s theory of culture war: persuasion, not anger

Article content

A week is a long time in politics. This one in British Columbia produced a party rupture and reconsolidation, a leadership resignation, and a snap election.

Article content

When I talked with Caroline Elliott last week, the official opposition B.C. Conservative Party was already fracturing. By Friday, more MLAs were peeling away and the upstart CentreBC was stocking itself with the defectors. On Sunday, Kerry-Lynne Findlay resigned as leader, four months after her narrow win over Elliott. On Tuesday, Premier David Eby dropped the writ for an Oct. 24 election, casting it as a firebreak against Donald Trump — and seven of CentreBC’s eight legislators, including Peter Milobar, walked back to the Conservative fold. One stayed behind.

Article content

Article content

Article content

So much has changed since I first spoke to Elliott that the interview has aged in dog years.

Article content

Article content

Among other things, Elliott’s own situation has changed. She is no longer just the well-respected but recently failed runner-up for the leadership; she appears likely to run as a B.C. Conservative candidate on Oct. 24 (more later on that), and who knows what happens after that. The party is being led by an interim leader; the party is saying he gets to keep the job if the Conservatives win the election.

Article content

Amid all this, Elliott has been making a sharp case for her worldview in Without Diminishment, the publication she co-founded: any party promising “free enterprise and nothing else” will not fix British Columbia.

Article content

In that way, our original conversation is only more relevant.

Article content

“In British Columbia,” she told me, “we have people saying, ‘We can’t fight the culture wars, we have to stick to free enterprise.’”

Article content

She knows that strategy’s lineage. Gordon Campbell, premier from 2001 to 2011 and her mentor, built the B.C. Liberals as the province’s “free-enterprise alternative” to the NDP.

Article content

Article content

Elliott can recite the free-enterprise catechism without notes: “Grow the economy. Control government spending. Develop our resources. Deal with affordability. That’s it. Nothing else.”

Article content

Article content

That approach, she argues, was “an old way of doing things, effective for the time it was in.” Campbell launched it to repair the wreckage of the 1990s. “I respect what he did immensely; he turned the economy around, he got B.C. booming again. Inarguably, that was the right approach for those times.”

Article content

“Today, we’re in a different world where the budget’s a mess, the economy’s a mess. Those things have to be dealt with.” But the NDP, she says, has spent its more recent years in office doing far more than labour economics. It has pushed identity politics and social-justice ideology into ministries, schools, courts and professional bodies. “So the battle is much different than it was.”

Article content

Talk of “culture wars” makes people flinch. Elliott thinks that flinch is the point. “When we use that framing, and then step away from it in fear, because we shouldn’t talk about these things, what we’re actually doing is buying into the left’s framing.” They do not want those files examined, she says, because they are vulnerable on them — and because those files are producing worse economic results.