Craig Monk

I must say that I’m more invested in the success of the incoming Doerkson government than I’ve been in any goverment in nearly a decade. What interests me most is the potential fecundity of the premier-elect’s back-to-basics, normie conservatism. Doerkson isn’t offering political dopamine. His whole pitch is about competent government, economic growth, and public institutions that fulfill their basic purposes. The magnitude of his victory is a sign of how broadly that proposition can appeal. The story, in a nutshell, is a guy from Williams Lake offered a recognizable conservatism that could win in Vancouver-Yaletown. His temperament helped bring together rural communities, suburban families, and urban voters around some straightforward expectations about how their province should work. Schools should teach. The justice system should protect the public. Hospitals should treat patients. The civil service should deliver services competently and impartially. These institutions have important yet bounded missions. They should discharge them effectively and resist the temptation to become vehicles for every passing political or ideological cause. The same practical instinct should guide economic policy: make it possible to build homes, grow businesses, develop resources, and attract investment. Give people reasons to believe that hard work and initiative can produce a better life here. This is the politics of normalcy in practice. And even if its rhetoric is moderate, its ambitions are considerable. Restoring focus and competence to institutions that have lost them will require conviction, persistence, and capable people. That’s another reason for optimism: the quality of the candidates and potential front bench, along with the talented people Doerkson’s leadership drew to the campaign. @gavindew is someone to watch in particular. His interest in both economic growth and making government more productive—including through AI—could make him an important contributor to this governing agenda. The test now is governing. There will be hard choices and inevitable disappointments along the way. But this is a conservatism that I want to see succeed—and an unusually promising opportunity to show what it can accomplish.

Progressives blaming Eby’s defeat in the election timing are totally missing the point. The whole purpose of the early election was to try to overcome the government’s unpopularity rooted in its poor outcomes. The real problem was the cumulative cost of Eby’s ideological agenda. His government was the last holdout of the failures of Trudeauian progressivism: a subordination of economic growth in favour of deficit financed welfare spending, a dogmatic commitment to climate change and its anti-development effects, excessive identity politics and an overly self critical posture towards Canadian history, and its radical experiment with the harm reduction model. Election timing and campaign choices didn’t defeat the Eby government. A broad cross-section of British Columbians—from rural parts of the province to downtown Vancouver—rejected it based on the self-evident failure of its ideas.