As our election campaign enters its closing days, it appears the NDP and Greens are poised to do well in the Lower Mainland and Greater Victoria, while the Liberals seem to be holding their own across the B.C. Interior.
I still think the NDP will win next Tuesday, and if so, John Horgan will make a fine premier.
But what happened in the recent U.S. election has parallels to a predicament of our own. It appears our neighbours have resolved themselves into two geographic solitudes.
You have a pair of high-income, high-growth enclaves, one along the northeast corridor from New York to Washington D.C., and the other down the southwest coast from San Francisco to L.A. These vote predominantly Democrat.
Then there is the “fly-over” hinterland, which mostly votes Republican. Donald Trump became president thanks to rust-belt states such as Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin.
The coastal enclaves are home to the best universities and most of the major print and network TV agencies. This is where well-to-do families send their kids to be educated and find jobs.
The result is a self-reinforcing upper crust, intermarrying, interchanging ideas and basically drinking their own bathwater. They live in the ideological equivalent of a gated community.
The centre of the country, meanwhile, is in trouble. Large numbers of companies have moved to low-wage, Third World countries, taking with them almost a third of all U.S. manufacturing jobs.
Here, though, is the point. None of this resonated with the coastal elites. Until Trump came along, neither of the major parties gave a thought to “middle America.”
Not surprisingly, that resulted in some ugly behaviour on both sides of the divide. Heartland residents became bitter, and took out their resentment on vulnerable targets such as illegal immigrants.
The elites responded to this “basket of deplorables” (Hillary Clinton’s term) with disdain and condescension.
Let’s return to B.C. Here, too, we see the gradual formation of geographic solitudes. The Lower Mainland and Greater Victoria are going gangbusters.
As in the U.S., these high-income, high-employment communities view politics from a privileged vantage point. Policies such as hiking corporate taxes or beefing up the carbon tax make perfect sense to voters whose jobs, in the main, will not be affected.
On the other hand, pipelines, tankers, dams and clear-cutting are an assault on their shared morality.
But to many residents of the Interior, ideologies such as these send an entirely different message. Essentially, they amount to both a death warrant and a signal of indifference.
Former Kitimat mayor Joanne Monaghan recently warned: “Our town is dying.” The West Fraser paper mill in her community had closed, and 535 high-paying jobs were lost.
And what response did she get? Silence.
The election campaign continues to be dominated by the complaints of our wealthiest communities — expensive housing, bridge tolls, long commutes to work and the like.
This is an almost perfect replica of what led to Trump’s election. For that matter, Brexit, too. We’re not in the same degree of trouble as the U.S. or Britain. Yet our political parties would do well to take note.
So a proposal, if I may. We need a Ministry of the Interior, with two mandates. First, it should act as the spokesperson for an unseen hinterland.
In recent months, we’ve seen the City of Victoria and faculty at our major universities vote to divest their institutions of fossil-fuel investments. Despite the economic kick in the teeth this represents for the northeast of our province, scarcely a dissenting voice was heard. That needs to change.
And second, the new ministry should wield a veto on government-instigated job-killing schemes. That, too, is overdue.
