British Columbia Torn Between Goofus And Gallant

When the going gets weird, the weird turn out to be surprisingly electable.

BC is not OK. (Screengrab: Monty Python’s Flying Circus)

As we barrel towards the finish line of what pretty much everyone agrees will be the most consequential election in American history, polls insist it’s still a coin toss between the current vice president and a guy whose recent campaign highlights include cosplaying as a fry cook, sharing locker room talk about a fellow golfer’s tremendous trouser snake, stanning for Hitler, and turning a townhall Q&A into “a music” where he swayed for 39 uncomfortable minutes to a playlist of golden oldies. (Billy Idol’s “Dancing With Myself” was regrettably not tossed into the mix.)

The current mood amongst us progressive types is somewhere between the confidence of the Harlem Globetrotters before an important game against the Washington Generals and the dread felt by Winterfell residents before their big showdown with the White Walkers. We all know this could go either way.

So I’d hoped to write a comforting post about a different North American democracy that just had an election where advance polls showed an incumbent lefty party in a virtual dead heat with a MAGA-adjacent challenger, and then handily beat the crap out of them on election day. You’ve no doubt deduced from the headline this will not be that.

British Columbia experienced the heaviest rainfall in five years the day voters cast their ballots last week. The resulting fatal flooding seemed like Mother Nature’s way of suggesting maybe not letting the lunatics take over the asylum given the BC Conservatives believe the existential climate crisis isn’t actually a thing.

Several days after the general election, it’s still too close to call. The governing NDP under Premier David Eby won a total of 46 mostly urban districts and the Conservatives scored 45 mostly rural ones, neither enough for a 47-seat majority government. The eventual winner will also need to appoint a speaker in the Legislature, chopping their party’s numbers by one. Two rookie Green Party candidates also won seats, and time will tell if they’ll be willing to prop up the New Democrats again like they did seven years ago after a similarly close election. As Kermit the Frog famously said, it’s not easy being Green but it’s hard to imagine them teaming up with climate science deniers instead. The final tally likely won’t be until Oct. 28, the cutoff for mail-in ballots and after automatic recounts in two electoral ridings won by the NDP decided by fewer than 100 votes. But at least there won’t be any hanging chads or sketchy Supreme Courts involved.

The climate crisis is sort of what got my adopted home province into this mess in the first place. John Rustad, a former BC Liberal cabinet minister, was unceremoniously booted from the party two years ago for repeatedly expressing wackadoodle beliefs on the subject. After briefly sitting as an independent, he ran unopposed for the leadership of the hapless BC Conservatives — who won a whopping one percent of the popular vote in the previous election and hadn’t run a successful candidate since 1952 — and convinced a couple of disgruntled BC Liberal MLAs to cross the floor to join him, giving the party official status for the first time in yonks. (A note for non-Canadian readers: The BC Conservatives aren’t affiliated with the federal Conservatives led by Pierre Poilievre, which may come as a surprise to a substantial number of low information voters who thought they were sticking it to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.) The center-right Liberals promptly self-immolated through a disastrous rebranding attempt as BC United and essentially surrendered to the trendier Tories to avoid splitting the rightwing vote. More on all that here:

BC Conservatives Doing Like The French Left And Uniting Maybe! They Should Do Not That.

Rustad is also an anti-vaxxer who attracted precisely the sort of candidates you’d expect. See if you can guess if the following quote is from a newly minted lawmaker or a parody of Alex Jones from an HBO superhero show:

Below their lying, liberal human faces lurk extraterrestrial beings, who want nothing other than our civilization to fail! They are among us!

Ha! Sorry, that was a Wonkette gotcha as it’s actually the same person. Brent Chapman is both the new MLA for Surrey South and a struggling actor who played the host of an Infowars spoof called Fact Attack on the new John Cena series “Peacemaker.” His acting career has been mostly bit parts but, giving credit where it’s due, he has the distinction of having been decapitated by both Jason Voorhees AND Michael Myers (the durable Halloween slasher, not Austin Powers) although it turns out the actor can be surprisingly camera-shy, as evidenced when he hid in a closet like a common John Edwards after a TV reporter showed up at his office to ask about some of the awful things he’s said online.

Like furious tomato Alex Jones, Chapman has also cast doubt about the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary and other mass shootings. In a Facebook post just days after a white supremacist murdered six people at a Quebec mosque, he wrote:

I’m sorry but all the recent “mass shooting” events also have some other things in common they all happened in the last eight years, they all have sketchy stories that change drastically from initial events… Why did Aurora, Sandy Hook and Quebec City all have witnesses that saw multiple shooters and are, ultimately, ignored by police and the legacy media? Look, I really hope no one was actually killed at these events but in the Orlando nightclub shooting, the people that talked to the press were not actually shot.

So that was gross, but at least he was “just asking questions” rather than monetizing tragedy like Mr. Jones. Not to mention reinforcing a Canadian stereotype by apologizing in advance before saying something shitty, although he doesn’t always manage this. Like the time he called Palestinians “little inbred walking, talking, breathing time bombs… figuratively and quite literally.” In saner times, this would’ve been the end of his campaign but — let’s be real — nowadays likely earned him some votes for showing his bonafides as a bigot. It’s worth noting nearly half of the population of Surrey South is of South Asian descent, as were the two campaign staffers who kicked out the reporter, so it’s not as if Caucasians have a lock on making poor decisions at the ballot box.

But while the BC Conservatives may not technically be in bed with their federal counterparts, Chapman himself actually is. He’s married to Surrey South-White Rock MP Kerry-Lynne Findlay, a former Minister of National Revenue when the Tories were in power under Stephen Harper. Ironically, her current gig is party whip, meaning she’s the one in charge of maintaining in-house discipline and minimizing damage from the inevitable bozo eruptions Harper was so effective at clamping down on.

But at least she now has plenty of opportunity to practice at home.

[Global News / CBC / IMDB]