What do party name changes say about politics?

This is a speculative post, with a bit of a hypothesis.

Where I live in British Columbia there is a provincial election campaign on. It is happening in the midst of a kind of permanent federal campaign that, although not officially begun, has been manufactured by the Conservative Party of Canada as they try to topple the Liberal Party minority government.

Political branding is all the rage at the moment, and I’ve been reflecting on an interesting pattern: parties on the right are largely unstable alliances that unite under a common banner for a while and then engage in cycles of ascendancy and self-destruction. Parties on the centre and left exhibit outward stability even as they drift to the right or left, depending on internal politics. I think this says something about how they choose to act when in government. Here’s some interesting history.

In BC, the right has just rebranded itself again. When I first moved here in 1994, the “party of free enterprise” as it was known was the BC Social Credit Party. It held power from 1952 to 1991 except for three years in the early 1970s when the Dave Barrett-led New Democratic Party formed government. The party folded after Bill Vander Zalm lost power and fell into a corruption scandal. The NDP held power under Mike Harcourt and then Glen Clark for two terms. When the party folded, many of the former Socred members invaded the BC Liberal Party which was, at the time a classical centre-left Liberal party, similar to the federal Liberals. They ousted the leader, Gordon Wilson, and became a broader party of the right, uniting conservatives, the centrists that had been scared away from Clark’s leftward tilt of the NDP, and a few right-wing populists. Under Gordon Campbell, they won the 2001 election and held power until 2017. During that time, they drifted further and further right under Christie Clark. In 2017 John Horgan, a relatively centrist premier, won the election for the NDP with the support of the Green Party. The centre mainly had abandoned the BC Liberals, and the party name became too associated with the federal Liberal Party. And so, they changed their name and became BC United.

That new name only lasted 16 months before the party’s financial backers decided they wanted to align with the BC Conservative Party probably mostly for the better branding. There had always been a BC Conservative Party, but it was always weak, mostly acting as the home to former political leaders who had just a bit too much right wing grievance for their own good. In 2020, seizing the upswing in popularity of the federal Conservatives, they changed their name to the Conservative Party of BC, which mirrored the Conservative Party of Canada, even though it is technically an independent party. In 2023 John Rustad became the latest of the high profile political exiles to find a home in the CPBC after he was kicked out of the BC Liberal Party for having ridiculous views on climate change among other weird ideas currently trendy on the populist right.

With BC United flailing in the polls and the federal Conservatives flourishing, the financial backers of the BC LIberals/United threw their support to the CPBC and the United leader Kevin Falcon, on the verge of a provincial election took the unprecedented action of essentially folding his party without talking to anyone. Although this seemed suicidal, it seems to have eliminated the possibility that the right will be split in this election, and suddenly, the NDP have a powerful – if weird – political opponent. The election will be close and God forbid we get another strange populist government here like Alberta, Saskatchewan and Ontario have experienced.

Populists make terrible governors, but they are really good at getting power. So, typically, the strategy of right-wing populism is to grab power using emotional appeals and scapegoats and then cede it to private interests or the market, selling off public assets, cutting the funding for public services until they no longer work, and then handing them to their backers for pennies on the dollar. Their governments, like their parties, tend to be short-lived and short-sighted. They hold power through appeals to emotions like fear and insecurity. When they collapse, they often regroup with a a trendy set of populist principles and a little dose of outrage so that they can get power again solely to keep it away from policy based parties. Robust government policy tends to restrict and regulate what the “free market” can do, so that’s the flash point. Elections are contested on that space.

The right wing, and especially the populist right wing, seems to live in this cycle of uniting a coalition under a new name, operating for a while and then flaming out because while outrage is helpful for winning elections, it is a corrosive force once in power. It always splinters and divides and the splitters often run off to other parties or form new ones. Alberta and Saskatchewan have both seen this (Conservative, Wild Rose, United Conservative Party in Alberta; Conservative to Saskatchewan Party to their east). In contrast on the left, parties tend to split when a leadership regime has been in power for a while. Folks may flee the party to alternatives on the left or the right, but the remarkable stability of parties like the Liberal Party of Canada and the New Democratic Party are a testament to the fact that in general party members see value in long term stability, even as they contest stark differences within the tent.

These new right-wing parties and brands were formed in the years after the old school federal Progressive Conservative Party split and the Reform Party became the powerful conservative voice of the West, before reuniting into the short lived and infamously named Conservative Reform Alliance Party (CRAP) and then becoming the Conservative Party of Canada. Stephen Harper, who was at one point the head of the right wing Canadian Taxpayers Federation and then a prominent voice in the Reform Party came to power as Canada’s first elected Conservative Prime Minister since Brian Mulroney. That party has drifted a long way right of the old Progressive Conservative Party and that enabled the federal LIberal Party of Canada (who bill themselves as the natural party of government) to come to power in 2015. Since Harper retired, a few leaders have come and gone but a relentless campaign against Justin Trudeau personally, aided by screech owls from the far right People’s Party of Canada, angry westerners, and folks driven out of their minds by the public health response to COVID has resulted in the federal Conservative Party riding high in the polls but sitting atop an incredibly volatile mix of competing and populist self-interests with very few policy oriented folks wielding much power. Anyone who values the role of government on the right is currently sitting with the federal LIberals. The current Conservative leader Pierre Pollievre is a long time conservative politician and strategist and he’s parlaying populism into a force to be reckoned with in Canada. He’s weird, as are many members of his party, but weird is doing well these days.

This is really what it comes down to, in my eyes. The new political spectrum is not right-left, but populism-policy. This polarity tends to mirror right-left, but not exclusively. In Canada there are folks on the right who think deeply about policy and wrestle with how conservative principles can address issues like climate change and the social good. However, their voices tend to be drowned out by the feverish outrage against immigrants, First Nations, and LGBTQ+ folks. Climate science deniers, COVID skeptics, isolationists and anti-woke culture warriors make up the loudest wings of the party now. The result is that we have political parties who have a real chance of forming power and will achieve that goal by punching down on people and promising that if elected, they will essentially cede the field of governance to the market or other players through tax cuts, austerity, and the elimination of regulations against harm and programs that provide robust public support for education, health and opportunity.

When a person running for the leader of a government tells you that they think that government is not a good thing, it’s useful to believe them. They will not treat it well, and in fact, the instability they create through incompetence or negligence often results in huge opportunities for private operators who are poised to bring the profit motive to public services, at the expense of the public good. If you want to see how a party will govern, look at it’s own history of dealing with dissent and unification. Canada’s right-wing is mercenary and opportunistic and, in the century anyway, has rarely governed with any immutable principle beyond the fact that chaos is good for bank accounts. The left tends to value stability and a long term role for government and seeks to hold folks together in difference even as they dissent. They usually lose power when they drift too far from the centre to bring the policy minded into the fold.

If we elect populists, we will enter a period of instability and, worse, vulnerability for those who are already being deeply scapegoated by messages designed to score wins. I’m not optimistic about what will happen in the next few years in Canada as my heart lies with people and parties that are committed to thoughtful policy responses to complex challenges. We shall see.