B.C.'s 43rd provincial election has come and gone, and the people have spoken. Some of them. Sort of.
By now you probably know that we don't know who will actually form government. There are 93 seats in the B.C. Legislature, which means that in order to have a majority, one party needs to win 47 of them. However, as of the time of writing this (the afternoon of Oct. 21), the B.C. NDP had 46 seats, the B.C. Conservatives had 45, the B.C. Green Party had two, and a lot of people probably had a massive headache.
"Surely this is an unusual situation!" I hear you cry. Please. This is B.C. politics we're talking about, where "Expect the unexpected" should probably be the provincial motto, rather than the more stately Splendor sine occasu ('Splendour without diminishment", for those whose Latin is a bit rusty).
In fact, we've been here before: in 2017, when almost the exact same thing happened. The two major parties (B.C. Liberals and B.C. NDP) had almost the same number of seats, neither had a majority, and the B.C. Greens, with three seats, held the balance of power, which they eventually threw behind the NDP, which kept that party in power for three years.
Could such a thing happen again? Absolutely. Indeed, both the NDP and Conservatives have already started wooing the Green Party, and speculation is rife about what happens next. Will one of the parties dangle the position of Speaker in front of the Greens? Perhaps offer the other one a cabinet position? Will (as happened in 2017) someone cross the floor from one party to another, to swell their numbers? Will the Greens make committing to a carbon tax part of any deal? We'll soon find out.
That's what I mean by the people having "sort of" spoken: we did, but we didn't make it clear what we wanted. What is clear is that the province's voters are pretty evenly split between left and right, which I would hope both major parties take as a warning. Neither of them has received a clear mandate to move full speed ahead. A little humility is in order on both sides, and I'd hope everyone involved is taking that on board.
So you could say "Good on the voters!" for (perhaps) forcing our elected representatives to consider casting aside their differences to work together for the common good of British Columbians, so that exhausted voters aren't dragged to the polls again within a few months. Don't hold your breath, however: B.C. Conservative leader John Rustad told the Globe and Mail that "the majority of people in the province are not interested in what the NDP are offering, and so more of the same is, in my opinion, unacceptable. . . If that means we have to trigger an election right away, that’s what we’ll do.”
That clearly isn't going to concern the British Columbians who couldn't be bothered to vote, however, which is rather a lot of people. How many? Well, looking on the bright side, Elections BC said that more people voted in this provincial election than in any other in our history: some 2,037,897 people, according to the initial count.
Awesome, right? Yay us! But hold on; that's only 57.41 per cent of the eligible voters in the province, which means that somewhere around 1.5 million people didn't vote. They didn't vote at advance polls, or at an Elections BC office, or by mail, or by phone, or on General Voting Day; they simply didn't bother.
I get that with no centrist party in the race, many people simply didn't know where to park their vote, but that's not good enough. No one ever said democracy was easy. We might (Heaven help us) be going back to the polls a lot sooner than we wanted to. If that happens, get out there and vote, otherwise we could be stuck in our own version of Groundhog Day, one that isn't at all funny.
