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Why a Key BC Liberal Strategist Is Voting NDP

‘Trump politics is now here in BC, and it’s terrible,’ says Kareem Allam.

Olamide Olaniyan 14 Oct 2024The Tyee

Olamide Olaniyan is associate editor at The Tyee.

Political strategist and consultant Kareem Allam has been a lifelong conservative. He worked on Erin O’Toole’s Tory federal leadership campaign and on Ken Sim’s ABC party win in Vancouver and managed Kevin Falcon’s successful leadership bid for the BC Liberal Party.

This election, he’s voting NDP.

The shift was, “surprisingly, a lot easier” than Allam, a co-founder of Fairview Strategies, thought it would be.

“I’m not sure my values had changed over the course of the last 25 years, but you could definitely see the party shifting further and further and further to the right,” he said. “In a way, I’m not sure that I left the centre-right movement. I think the centre-right movement left me.”

Allam says many things led him to switch sides. He’s watched as the movement he’d called home distances itself from its own accomplishments on climate action, reconciliation, gender and sexual rights and progressive drug policy.

He says the realignment of other notable figures — like Diamond Isinger and Mark Marissen — reflects broader seismic shifts in B.C.’s political landscape and raises tough, important questions for the parties and voters.

Allam says he’s not necessarily going to be an immediate or long-term contributor to the NDP.

“I’m just lending my voice and my support and my vote, and I’ll go door knock and make some calls,” Allam said. “The one thing I would probably say on the inverse is the centre right’s lost a very talented organizer permanently.”

Allam spoke to The Tyee about his decision. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Tyee: You were instrumental in Kevin Falcon’s leadership campaign. How do you feel about BC United’s trajectory since then and Kevin Falcon throwing in the towel?

Kareem Allam: I felt there was some inevitability around defeat for the party. Just from a tactical perspective, the rebranding was mishandled. But the party really struggled with its identity. It really struggled with renewal. The caucus has very bright, committed people, but also there’s been very little turnover in caucus. There wasn’t a lot of new energy or new blood. And as time goes by, the province changed, and the party didn’t. The caucus was not reflective of the diversity of the province, and you could define diversity on a whole bunch of cross-sections.

I felt a lot of younger people in the party really didn’t know where they fit in. They would find things that they would agree with, but they would find things that they didn’t. There was a lot of conflict with some of the older members in the party and some of the younger members in the party around things like the carbon tax, particularly when the revenue neutrality moved away, and as the federal Conservatives started to run on “axing the tax.”

It’s not a knock on the MLAs, but we had MLAs that had been there for 15, 20 years, and we had staff that were 20 years old. All they had ever known were these MLAs, and things changed a lot, and things in society change very quickly nowadays. So it wasn’t reflective and there weren’t really debates of new ideas and new approaches, and there was a sense of stagnation that was occurring around that.

Rustad’s Conservatives are an insurgent conservative party. What was it about this party and campaign that pushed you away?

When John Rustad was expelled from the BC Liberal caucus and started at the Conservative party, he did come up and bring up a lot of new ideas and came up with a lot of energy. The centre-right, free-enterprise coalition, whatever you want to call it, the house that Gordon Campbell built, that’s where the new ideas were coming from. I just didn’t align with them. And I didn't align with the people that it was attracting.

It didn’t feel like home, and it didn’t feel that the issues they were wrestling with were really particularly relevant to me. I care about the economy, and I care about generating wealth to pay for world-class social programs. And I could put an emphasis in my career on my passion for a vibrant, strong, healthy economy, because generally, on the social progress, things were happening within the context of my movement to make me feel like, “OK, we’re still moving in the right direction on the social side.” The carbon tax was a good example, the New Relationship Trust that Gordon started. After the painful, brutal referendum he had in 2002 on the Nisga’a treaty, the trajectory changed to a path more focused on reconciliation. I wouldn’t say it was reconciliation, but it was probably the early starts of trying to readjust the dialogue.

But clearly with the Conservatives, they’re going in the opposite direction. There were social gains or social justice gains in the tenure of the BC Liberal Party, and they weren’t many, but there were some — SOGI, climate change. People forget that Kevin Falcon and Gordon Campbell took Stephen Harper to the Supreme Court of Canada to get Insite licensed legally. The BC Conservatives come along and they now want to roll all of that back. So we’re not talking about taking the province back three or four years, we’re talking taking the province back 20, 25 years.

Why the BC NDP?

I felt they have picked up the mantle on those issues that a lot of ex-BC Liberals fought for. SOGI, climate change, supervised consumption — they are the party that I think champions those issues that we care about. Do I agree with 100 per cent of everything? No.

The decision really was about two parts. One was leaving the coalition that’s now being headed by John Rustad, and the other one was joining the NDP. The leaving part was just really more a feeling around the broad social tensions that are building up North America-wide. Trump politics is now here in B.C., and it’s terrible. It’s embedded. It’s entrenched. And we have a decision to make of whether we’re going to normalize this or we’re going to expel it permanently.

Yes, a strong economy is important to me, but it cannot come at the expense of our democratic institutions, and it cannot come at the expense of social cohesion. The idea that people are trying to normalize demagoguery in this province, and people are justifying being part of that movement so they can get a two or three per cent tax decrease, is outrageous to me. Nothing is more important than our democratic institutions and nothing is more important than our social cohesion.

I was born here. I was treated extremely well. I had every opportunity in my life to achieve all the things that I’ve been able to and be welcomed and accepted and give back. That’s now all threatened. I recently met a couple of new friends. Both are recent refugees from the Middle East. They came to this country, and their kids are not going to have the opportunity to grow up in the open and welcoming province that I grew up in. Their kids are going to grow up in a society that’s on the cusp of potentially being quite hateful. And to me, that’s devastating. I love this place. I really, really care about it. And the idea that things are going to be worse for kids today than they were for me really, really is beyond the pale.

Rustad has not publicly addressed concerns about social media activity from his party's spokesperson and said he would not remove Brent Chapman, a party candidate, for past Islamophobic social media comments. What do you make of that?

I felt that if I’m going to try and create some space to make it safe for people who have not been part of the NDP to vote NDP, then I needed to put my foot down and lead by example, regardless of what those consequences are for me, my business, my family. I really felt quite strongly I needed to take a stand. It was obviously very emotional. These are people that I’ve grown up with for the last 25 years; they’re friends. And there’ll be some social consequences as well to this.

It wasn’t any one thing. It wasn’t just Brent Chapman’s comments. It was the totality. These are not isolated incidences of people misspeaking. This is systemic and deep and wide within who this party has attracted. And it’s not just the comments about the Muslim community, it’s the comments about all the other ones as well too. You saw the Moose Hide Campaign letter. You saw the letter from the National Council of Canadian Muslims and the World Sikh Organization of Canada. The chorus is deafening. The din from groups that have been maligned and who are concerned about the trajectory of society is beyond anything I’ve ever seen in my life. And these are not groups that are historically politically active, and the fact that they’re stepping up. The Moose Hide Campaign is not a political entity. It’s the totality of everything we’ve experienced, rather than a single individual comment, that compelled me.

But certainly, yeah, the Chapman comment was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I’m not a leader in the community, probably not the best example of a Muslim out there. I did feel some pressure to speak up on it, but the pressure was the right thing to do.

So it was the chorus, it was the breadth of the number of complaints that happened, rather than just one. But the comments specifically about my community, both from the spokesperson and Chapman, were deeply, deeply upsetting and hurting, particularly as I think about all the people in my life who wear hijabs, who travel and have to endure the extra level of searches that we go through when you go through the airport. This stuff is not going to make things better at all.

What does all of this say about this campaign? Is there no longer a B.C. centre right?

There’s no centre right, it is just hard right and centre left. That’s all that there is to choose from now. Will there be an attempt to revive the BC Liberal Party after this election? Perhaps. I don’t know. Will progressives and centrists in the former BC Liberal Party join the NDP? I don’t know. But I think there’s a massive political realignment happening in the province, and our politics are forever changed and reframed. People are really going to spend a lot of time looking at their values and how they feel about things, and I don’t expect that I’ll be the last person to make this move.

As a veteran campaign manager, just taking stock of the campaigns as they’re coming to a close, how did the parties do?

I think that the Conservatives have run a campaign that has really been the opposite of inspiring. It’s been demotivating, demoralizing and depressing. It’s not been an aspirational campaign. It’s not been a campaign that is plotting out a future British Columbia that we can all be proud of. It’s plotting out taking us back into history, far back into history, to a time when people like me might not have been as welcome.

On the NDP campaign, it has been a campaign on values. It’s been a campaign on ideas. It’s been a campaign that is firmly grounded and rooted in reality, not fantasy. And it’s been a campaign that has been about taking the province forward. And it’s been an inspiring campaign to watch.

Of course, me, I like the pizzazz and, you know, a little bit more. But the campaign lands and is authentic to the values of the leader and this campaign. The best asset the party has this election is the leader, and he is the premier that we need now. And I think over the course of the campaign, he’s proved that he is the person we need in this moment.

Rustad’s “demotivating, demoralizing and depressing” campaign, it seems to be working for them, right? How do you kind of explain that?

Demagoguery works. Othering people works as a strategy. It is disgusting, despicable strategy, but it works. We know it works. We know that people once campaigned on a Chinese head tax, and it got them elected. And we know people once campaigned on or took political credit for Japanese internment. It worked. And the demagoguery and the othering of people, it’s working. Beating up on poor people or riling people up in the suburbs. They’re beating up on racialized groups... they're beating up on Indigenous people.

They’re beating up on everybody, and they’re firing up the rhetoric in a pretty hateful and spiteful way. And they know what they’re doing. This works. History has proven that demagoguery works, and that is what we’re fighting against this campaign. This is what we’re fighting in this election. It is beyond the pale that someone is trying to normalize this type of political tactic after all the evidence of history showing us how devastating the consequences of this tactic can be.

Is there any advice or expertise you'd like to lend to any of the parties or candidates running this election?

This late, the only thing I could do is get in the way. I intend to be the best foot soldier I can be in the next eight days, knock on doors. I’m going to get on phones. And I’m a very, very good phoner. Yes, I am a very good campaign manager but I’m also an all-star phoner, and that’s how I will be looking to contribute to this campaign.


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