Content area
Full Text
THE CANADIAN ALLIANCE PARTY IN BC*
WHAT PLACE FOR BRITISH COLUMBIA IN FEDERAL POLITICS?
FOR MANY, THE CANADIAN ALLIANCE'S SUCCESS in British Columbia in the November 2000 general election was no great surprise. The party - in its earlier guise as Reform - had dominated the province in the previous two elections, and public opinion polls had made it clear that it continued to command public opinion. While British Columbians had preferred Preston Manning for the leadership of the new Canadian Alliance Party, when the Reform founder lost to the Albertan Stockwell Day they showed no hard feelings and sent Day to Parliament from a constituency in the Okanagan. After the general election, it was clear that the province's affair with the new party was continuing unabated. The Alliance's vote share climbed to half of the electorate, and it captured 8o per cent of British Columbia's seats in the House of Commons. Only once before in the last half-century did a single party (Diefenbaker's Conservatives in 1958) so dominate British Columbia's voice in Ottawa.
From another perspective the Alliance's quick mastery of the province is a surprise. British Columbia has long been characterized as politically volatile, with parties of the left, right, and centre all able to mobilize substantial support. The decade before Reform/Alliance's ascendancy was marked by sharp swings of the political pendulum. In 1984, the Conservatives swept the province, taking two-thirds of the electoral districts. That impulse was reversed in 1988 by large left-wing gains as the New Democrat Party (NDP) captured 6o per cent of the province's seats in the Commons. Then, in 1993, the province again rejected the vast majority of its incumbent representatives, including Kim Campbell, one of only two British Columbians ever to become prime minister, and gave three-quarters of its seats to the new Reform party. In just nine years British Columbians had provided successive electoral sweeps for three different parties and had overturned the electoral habits of virtually every corner of the province: after three elections only two of its elected federal politicians were left standing. By 1993, few political strategists would want to count on British Columbia - and so its subsequent embrace of the Reform/Alliance party only seems to have added to the puzzle of...