Kevin Falcon Says BC United Isn’t Doomed. Here’s Why

BC United Leader Kevin Falcon has little use for recent polls showing his party floundering, trailing not just the governing NDP but also the upstart Conservative Party of BC.

“Often the pundits and the pollsters are dramatically wrong,” said Falcon in a year-end interview in his B.C. legislature office, explaining why he refuses to worry 10 months out from the next scheduled election.

“I feel the pulse of this province way better than some stupid online panel that’s trying to gauge the public.”

Right or wrong, the poll aggregator 338Canada shows the NDP at around 45 per cent support, the Conservatives at 23 per cent and BC United at 19 per cent. The Greens trail at around 11 per cent.

Until recent months Falcon’s party, which holds 26 of the legislature’s 87 seats, had been consistently in the low to mid-30s and the Conservative support had been negligible.

The trajectories shifted last spring, shortly after the BC Liberal Party changed its name to BC United.

The name change was something Falcon pledged to pursue in his successful campaign to lead the party, and he doesn’t blame it for his party’s falling support.

Instead, he said, voters are confusing John Rustad’s provincial Conservative party with the federal Conservatives led by Pierre Poilievre.

The federal Conservatives have also seen rising popularity, though the upward trend started in late summer, a few months after the provincial party began gaining.

If support for the provincial Conservatives were real, Falcon said, people would be able to name the leader of the party. They can’t, he said, and they aren’t donating to it.

By election day, Falcon said, the Conservative support will return to his party, making it competitive again with the NDP. That kind of turnaround has happened before, he added, giving the example of Christy Clark’s poll-defying BC Liberal victory in 2013 and Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim’s ABC winning in Vancouver with a new party and an unfamiliar name.

“I look at all that B.C. Conservative vote as largely our vote,” Falcon said. “I really do.”

A key factor in galvanizing support for BC United will be the release of the party’s platform, Falcon said.

Falcon said it can seem like MLAs in opposition are constantly being negative and critical, but it is their job to hold the government to account. In that role BC United has been successful, he added, at getting the government to restrict public drug use and bringing scrutiny to the Drug User Liberation Front.

DULF had been running a compassion club providing tested heroin, cocaine and meth to substance users. The club’s supporters have said that shutting it down will lead to more deaths as people will be vulnerable to the toxicity of the illicit drug supply.

“What I try to squeeze in is the things that we want to do, too, going forward,” Falcon said. “That’s always a tougher message to get out because the media don’t generally come to us for ‘What would you do?’ They come to us for ‘What are they doing wrong?’”

But even when asked for policy details in recent months, Falcon acknowledged, he has had few answers.

The party has released positions on crime and mental health and addictions, and there is more to come on health care, housing and other topics as the province gets closer to election day, he said. “I promise you people are going to know exactly what we’re going to do.”

So, The Tyee asked, what’s one idea Falcon has to make health care better?

“One in five British Columbians can’t access a family doctor, and yet we have literally hundreds and hundreds of British Columbians who have studied and trained abroad in medicine... that want to come back to British Columbia and practise medicine and cannot do so because of regulatory red tape that’s built up over the last 75 years,” Falcon said.

There has long been pressure to make it easier for Canadians who studied abroad to practise medicine in the province, but when the BC Liberal government looked at the issue more than a decade ago, officials concluded that treating Canadians differently than other international medical graduates would create a human rights problem for the government.

“I would take a chainsaw to that red tape and I would make sure we get those doctors in here practising. It will ruffle all kinds of feathers; too bad,” Falcon said. “We’ve got to get our kids back home here helping patients who need to have access to a family physician.”

One idea to address public safety?

“Stop [Premier] David Eby’s catch-and-release program,” Falcon said. “I’d give direction to Crown counsel that repeat prolific offenders are going to be held in detention, that they’re not going to be released back into the public to cause more crime and havoc.”

What about housing?

“If you want housing more affordable, you have to make it less expensive, and that means they can’t keep adding costs and delays onto housing and somehow expect it to get less expensive,” said Falcon. Asked for a specific example, he cited Metro Vancouver increasing development cost charges, saying they will add costs of up to $24,000 per unit. “Eby needs to veto that.”

Another way to make life more affordable?

“We would permanently eliminate fuel taxes in B.C., saving British Columbians up to 15 cents a litre in gas. That would be a dramatic, overnight, instantaneous cost saving for the vast majority of families that are out there that are struggling to meet family budgets.”

And one priority for the environment?

“To take seriously global emission reductions, and the best way we can do that is exporting our [liquefied natural gas] to Asia so that we can get dramatic global reductions in emissions, not destroying our economy here in British Columbia for an infinitesimal contribution to global emission reductions.”

The argument against that approach includes the fact that it ignores methane leakage during extraction and transportation that makes burning LNG for power in Asia at least as bad for global warming as burning coal. LNG from B.C. is also just as likely to displace new wind or solar projects as it is coal plants.

“I recognize that we’re not getting to the Promised Land overnight,” Falcon said when asked about the criticisms. “What I mean by that is we could turn off every light, park every car, shut down our entire province in British Columbia and it would be less than two days of emissions out of China. So why wouldn’t we want to fish where the fish are, go and help them achieve dramatic global emission reductions?”

Over the next 10 months, Falcon said, he will be laying out the details of BC United’s policy platform and making sure people understand who he is and what he cares about. He’s confident people will warm to him and his party and many will agree it’s time for a change of government.

“I’m not interested in being elected just to be elected,” he said. “I came back into politics because I care a lot about this province and I’m very, very concerned about the direction this government’s taken us and the fact that we’re not getting good results in virtually everything they’re responsible for.”

Falcon said he’s been getting out frequently to B.C. communities and spends a lot of time talking with people, and he feels support that’s much stronger than the polls would suggest.

“We are the coalition party,” he said. “I think by the time that next election rolls around and people are looking and starting to actually pay attention and see the calibre of our candidates, see the power of our platform, they’re going to vote for us. I really believe it.”

For anyone who genuinely wants to see a change in government, BC United will be the choice, he said. “I have no doubt about that.”

This is the third of four year-end interviews with B.C.’s four party leaders. Next, NDP Leader David Eby.

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