Caroline Elliott’s theory of culture war: persuasion, not anger

A week is a long time in politics. This one in British Columbia produced a party rupture and reconsolidation, a leadership resignation, and a snap election.

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When I talked with Caroline Elliott last week, the official opposition B.C. Conservative Party was already fracturing. By Friday, more MLAs were peeling away and the upstart CentreBC was stocking itself with the defectors. On Sunday, Kerry-Lynne Findlay resigned as leader, four months after her narrow win over Elliott. On Tuesday, Premier David Eby dropped the writ for an Oct. 24 election, casting it as a firebreak against Donald Trump — and seven of CentreBC’s eight legislators, including Peter Milobar, walked back to the Conservative fold. One stayed behind.

So much has changed since I first spoke to Elliott that the interview has aged in dog years.

Among other things, Elliott’s own situation has changed. She is no longer just the well-respected but recently failed runner-up for the leadership; she appears likely to run as a B.C. Conservative candidate on Oct. 24 (more later on that), and who knows what happens after that. The party is being led by an interim leader; the party is saying he gets to keep the job if the Conservatives win the election.

Amid all this, Elliott has been making a sharp case for her worldview in Without Diminishment, the publication she co-founded: any party promising “free enterprise and nothing else” will not fix British Columbia.

In that way, our original conversation is only more relevant.

“In British Columbia,” she told me, “we have people saying, ‘We can’t fight the culture wars, we have to stick to free enterprise.’”

She knows that strategy’s lineage. Gordon Campbell, premier from 2001 to 2011 and her mentor, built the B.C. Liberals as the province’s “free-enterprise alternative” to the NDP.

Elliott can recite the free-enterprise catechism without notes: “Grow the economy. Control government spending. Develop our resources. Deal with affordability. That’s it. Nothing else.”

That approach, she argues, was “an old way of doing things, effective for the time it was in.” Campbell launched it to repair the wreckage of the 1990s. “I respect what he did immensely; he turned the economy around, he got B.C. booming again. Inarguably, that was the right approach for those times.”

“Today, we’re in a different world where the budget’s a mess, the economy’s a mess. Those things have to be dealt with.” But the NDP, she says, has spent its more recent years in office doing far more than labour economics. It has pushed identity politics and social-justice ideology into ministries, schools, courts and professional bodies. “So the battle is much different than it was.”

Talk of “culture wars” makes people flinch. Elliott thinks that flinch is the point. “When we use that framing, and then step away from it in fear, because we shouldn’t talk about these things, what we’re actually doing is buying into the left’s framing.” They do not want those files examined, she says, because they are vulnerable on them — and because those files are producing worse economic results.

“I want to scream from the rooftops: You can’t just focus on the economic issues because the economic issues are cultural issues and cultural issues are economic issues.”

Her method is not a call to join a battlefield; it is to name the files. “Take on the problems with ancestry-based access to provincial parks. Take on the issue of land giveaways where you’re handing away people’s land. Take on the issue of the catch and release criminal justice system that is wreaking havoc on people’s lives. Take on the activism in our education system that is teaching kids they have to develop mindsets of cultural humility, that teaches them to be ashamed of being Canadian.”

Do that without rage-bait, she says, “and people will open their ears and their minds to that in a way they won’t if you just say, ‘Come join me on the cultural battlefield.’”

Then she connects the dots with the patience of someone who has lived inside the argument. An education system that denigrates the resource sector produces voters who will not elect pro-resource governments. Pitch equity over equality of opportunity and “get ready for high taxes” and policies that make the province less competitive. Run a catch-and-release justice system “all day every day, which we’re doing in British Columbia,” and “don’t be surprised when small businesses just shut down and leave.”

“The Indigenous policy sphere is maybe the best example of the overlap between cultural issues and economic issues,” she says. “What starts as a land acknowledgement, and the ideological training that’s pushed into every professional association and the public service … becomes something very real. It becomes the public’s acceptance of something like DRIPA, which then in turn sends investment away and sends away all those free enterprise jobs that we’re all so excited about.”

She has not been in the room with Ottawa on this file, but she expects a collision. “They’re going to have a bit of a rude awakening when it comes to something like a pipeline plan, major projects plans. All these big ideas are going to run into a big brick wall that’s built around the word ‘consent.’ And that is not something that’s constitutionally required; it’s not something that’s ever been required by our courts. But that has been brought into life by the NDP here in B.C., through their DRIPA law.”

The Indigenous policy sphere is maybe the best example of the overlap between cultural issues and economic issues

The consequences, she says, are already visible. “We’re seeing it play out in mineral exploration. We’re seeing it play out in forestry.” Job postings at companies that used to be rooted in B.C. look plentiful — until you check the location. “They’re in the U.S. They’re not in British Columbia.” Mills close, in part because they cannot get the fibre they need; tariffs take the blame. “Why can’t they get access?” she asks. “A big part of it is the expectation you need consent from First Nations to proceed.”

“Indigenous decision-making over public land and resources can potentially threaten our ability to manage things in the interest of Canada,” she warns. She has read founding documents in which some First Nations “view themselves as their own sovereign entity that has never accepted Canada and Canadian sovereignty.”

This is not only seminar talk. Elliott spent several years at B.C. Hydro on the Site C dam, including the joint federal-provincial environmental assessment and the case put to the province for its 2014 final investment decision — a project built, she says, within constitutional duties to consult and, where appropriate, accommodate.

“I don’t believe a project like Site C can be built under DRIPA, and I don’t know that the federal government’s vision of a pipeline can be built under DRIPA. You’re welcome to prove me wrong, but with those consent-based provisions, it’s either going to cost an inordinate amount of money or it’s not going to happen at all.”

“Are you going to run?” I asked last week.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t made a decision.”

She still hasn’t.

In B.C., a week is long enough to rearrange the furniture and start an election. It is not long enough to settle the argument she is making: you cannot restore prosperity while pretending the institutions that govern land, schools and public safety are someone else’s culture war.

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