Three provinces are going to the polls this fall—New Brunswick, Saskatchewan and British Columbia—and all three feature conservative parties that are shifting further away from the centre as two of them vie for re-election, and one to overtake the incumbent NDP government. In all three cases, the rights of queer and trans people are very much in question, but most immediately in Saskatchewan where the Notwithstanding Clause has been used to attack the rights of trans youth at schools, and it may very well be that the provincial government of Scott Moe won’t pay a political price for this move.
In New Brunswick, incumbent Blaine Higgs has seen his popularity tank while he has been turning increasingly toward a strategy of embracing Christian nationalism, which the attack on trans rights has been a part of. It’s fairly telling that several members of his Progressive Conservative party have either resigned outright or indicated that they won’t run again, because it’s no longer a party that they recognize. In a couple of cases, former members of the party are coming out of political retirement in the hopes of running for the provincial Liberal Party, which could be an indication that there is more appetite on the centre-right to move toward a centrist party rather than moving further to the right along with Higgs than Higgs may be counting on.
Of the three elections, this seems the likeliest to see an upset, and a win for the provincial Liberals, but nothing is guaranteed, particularly if Higgs can try to taint the provincial Liberals with the association with Justin Trudeau, whose popularity is doing extremely poorly across the country right now. He’ll try, but I also suspect that the provincial Liberal leader, Susan Holt, will give him a good fight (which is not something I can say about a lot of provincial opposition leaders).
Saskatchewan is where queer and trans rights are most immediately at stake, given Moe’s use of the notwithstanding clause before his legislation had lost a proper challenge in the courts, and then inoculated themselves from lawsuits from anyone who might sue them in the future for being harmed by their policies. Moe losing government could give the provincial NDP, with new leader Carla Beck, a chance to overturn those policies before the year is out, but that could be easier said than done. Saskatchewan’s electoral map is disproportionately rural, which tends to favour conservative parties, and Moe’s Saskatchewan Party has had a lock on the province for the past 17 years as a result.
In recent months, the party has been shifting further to the right as more centre-right MLAs are either resigning or being pushed out, and there has even been drama where the Speaker of the legislature, Randy Weekes, was pushed out of the party in his own nomination and he went on to tear up his party membership card after calling out members of the government for harassing and attempting to intimidate him in trying to influence his rulings. As well, there are concerns that the government has essentially been giving away resource royalties that could better be spent to fix their healthcare or education systems, but is that enough to push Moe out, given that he is still relatively popular in recent polls, and the geographic advantage?
The third election this fall will be in B.C., and while the NDP are the incumbents in that race, the entire dynamic has been upended as the centre-right BC United party has just entirely capitulated to the far-right Conservative Party of BC, helmed by John Rustad. Rustad was ousted from BC United two years ago for climate denial, before he joined the B.C. Conservatives, who didn’t hold any seats at the time. Rustad has since tried to pass a bill to ban trans women from sports, has compared education around gender and sexuality to residential schools and recently was on Jordan Peterson’s podcast to rail about schools “indoctrinating” children. Clearly he is a threat to the rights of queer and trans people in the province.
The decision by the now-former BC United leader Kevin Falcon to take his party out of the running is essentially a move to push centre-right voters further to the right, under the rubric that so long as the “right” parties in the province were divided, they couldn’t defeat the NDP. That has never actually been true, and the B.C. Conservatives had been a marginal party until Rustad was expelled and joined them, gaining them a seat and attracting a collection of candidates who endorse conspiracy theories. Rustad has also ridden on the coattails of the rising popularity of Pierre Poilievre as federal Conservative leader, and has aped many of his talking points, especially around B.C.’s experiment in limited drug decriminalization as a way of trying to deal with the toxic drug and opioid crisis that is most acute in Vancouver, and has been successful enough at creating a moral panic that incumbent premier David Eby walked back some of those measures.
Eby should still be able to win this election, but the fact that we have watched in real-time how the centre-right in the province completely folded in favour of the far-right, and justifying it with “I don’t agree with everything he says, but it’s better than the NDP” is an alarming turn of events. Because those things that Rustad says that Falcon doesn’t agree with are pretty fundamental, whether it’s climate change, or the rights of queer and trans people.
It is difficult to know what these three provincial elections could portend about the next federal election. It could be the anti-incumbency feeling that has been observed in elections around the Western world takes hold here as well. It could be the challenges around cost of living and perceptions around crime driven by the opioid epidemic will drive voters toward more conservative alternatives. Or maybe they will portend nothing at all, given the different situations in each of those provinces and the current unpopularity of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau forcing very different calculations. The rights of queer and trans people are at stake in each of these elections, and will be a factor in the next federal election and nothing can be taken for granted in any of them.
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