In reading the BC Liberals’ report about its October 2020 election campaign, it is hard to believe it was a North American political juggernaut only three years earlier.
And as its post-mortem suggests, the party itself believes the once-mighty structure has to be taken down to the studs, maybe even razed. The open question is whether it will be located in the wilderness. The report offers little in the way of an answer.
An election loss typically unfurls unflattering details when a review is conducted. There are many noses out of joint, mouths tasting bitter and fingers wagging. Blame is as plentiful as pandemic public spending.
It’s to be expected no one will wax enthusiastic about its worst drubbing since Canadian teams were winning the Stanley Cup. But another open question is what it considers the teachable moments upon which to build. The report offers little again.
The focus of a campaign these days is leader-focused, and about the best takeaway for Andrew Wilkinson from the 34-page report is being damned with faint praise – a smart guy buried in an uncomfortable presence, a campaign hindered by a pandemic that couldn’t humanize him, an election that was always unwinnable, and so on.
The 2020 election may well have been an impossible task, but a couple of events made the impossible insufferable.
There was consensus, albeit with the benefit of hindsight, that Wilkinson had been slow to push the ejection button on MLA Laurie Throness for defying the leader and associating birth control with eugenics after a history of advertising in an anti-gay publication. That there had been room for Throness in any party calling itself Liberal is remarkable.
There was also consensus, albeit with more hindsight, that Wilkinson likely wished no one had pushed the recording button on a bizarre Zoom “roast” of MLA Ralph Sultan during which colleague Jane Thornthwaite made offensive remarks about NDP MLA Bowinn Ma. It didn’t help that the leader didn’t step in to say enough, enough, when giggles and snickers took hold. He took a couple of days to condemn the remarks and left Thornthwaite under the bus but still a candidate.
But yet another open question is what Wilkinson’s wannabe successors can learn in how to steer the public perception to more electable ground. What might a leader be in this age of reckless social media and feckless conduct? The report offers little once more.
Most troubling in the findings is how the identity of the party appears at stake among its stakeholders. Among its recommendations is some sort of rebranding exercise – code for a significant rethink – to make the BC Liberals palatable to the persuadable.
There is a vague suggestion of appealing to “ordinary people” and their values and aspirations, which can be interpreted as almost anything to almost anyone at almost any time. The immediate result is that while the NDP are roaring, the Liberals are offering a Rorschach test.
Many Liberals I’ve heard from include members who weren’t interviewed for the report but invited to participate in an extensive online survey. Their consensus is that they’re far more livid than they would ever commit to a keyboard with their fingers to risk exposure. The beauty of the interview, as a journalist might tell you, is the capacity to take candid notes and never disclose the source. Such would be the notes of the three-person review team.
But the report provides enough of the gist of general sentiment to tell a decent story, and it’s of a party in a phase of self-loathing that has for the time being lost the plot. Still, there are salvageable through lines: rejuvenate the youth wing, credibly build the candidate pipeline, have “marquee” ideas marketed well ahead of the vote, compel incumbents to keep raising funds and identifying the vote between elections and, yes, offer a much more diverse pool of would-be MLAs.
These await, presumably, the next leader and executive director, which means the 2021 review of 2018, 2019 and 2020 will take until 2022 and 2023 to mean much more in 2024 than a downloadable PDF sitting on the hard drives and in the clouds of the BC Liberal faithful.
They can only hope the NDP develop a case of the stumbles as the rebuild takes hold and the party is ready as history repeats itself in politics – the history that says governments generally unelect themselves.
Kirk LaPointe is publisher and editor-in-chief of Business in Vancouver and vice-president, editorial, of Glacier Media.
