British Columbia New Democratic Party
The New Democratic Party of British Columbia is a social democratic political party in British Columbia, Canada. The party sits on the centre-left of the political spectrum and is one of the two major parties in British Columbia; since the 1990s, its rival was the centre-right BC United until the Conservative Party of British Columbia reconstituted itself for the 2024 British Columbia general election, with BC United withdrawing its candidates and endorsing the Conservatives. The party is formally affiliated with the federal New Democratic Party and serves as its provincial branch.
The party was established in 1933 as the provincial wing of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation; the party adopted the NDP name in 1961 as part of the national party's re-foundation. The CCF quickly established itself as a major party in BC: for all but five years between 1933 and 1972, the CCF/NDP was the Official Opposition to the Liberal, Conservative and Social Credit governments. The NDP won its first election in 1972 under leader Dave Barrett, who governed until being defeated in the 1975 election. The party returned to office in 1991 and governed until 2001 under a succession of leaders. The NDP lost the 2001 election in a landslide and remained in opposition until the 2017 election, when it formed a minority government under John Horgan. In 2020 election, the party was re-elected with a majority government. In 2022, following health concerns, Horgan stepped down as party leader and premier and was succeeded by David Eby, who led the party to a slim majority victory in the 2024 election.
Seven leaders of the NDP have served as premier of British Columbia: Dave Barrett, Mike Harcourt, Glen Clark, Dan Miller, Ujjal Dosanjh, John Horgan and David Eby. Since 2022, the party leader is David Eby, who is also premier of British Columbia.
History
Foundation and early history: 1933–1951
The party was formed in 1933, during the Great Depression, as the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation — allied to the national CCF — by a coalition of the Socialist Party of Canada, the League for Social Reconstruction, and affiliated organizations. In August 1933, the latter two organizations merged to become the Associated CCF Clubs. The new party won seven seats in the 1933 provincial election, enough to form the official opposition. A further merger with the British Columbia SPC took place in 1935.In 1936, the party split as its moderate leader, Reverend Robert Connell, was expelled over doctrinal differences in what was called the "Connell Affair". Three other CCF members of the Legislative Assembly in what had been a seven-member caucus quit and joined Connell in forming the Social Constructive Party, leaving only Harold Winch, Ernest Winch and Dorothy Steeves as CCF MLAs. The Constructivists nominated candidates in the 1937 election but failed to win a seat. The CCF regained their former contingent of seven MLAs but lost official opposition status to the reconstituted British Columbia Conservative Party.
Harold Winch succeeded Connell as CCF leader and guided the party until the 1950s.
The two-party system in Canada was challenged by the rise of the CCF and the Social Credit movement in western Canada during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The CCF first took power in 1944 in Saskatchewan under Premier Tommy Douglas. It also began to gain wider political support in British Columbia.
In order to block the rise of the CCF in BC, the provincial Liberal and Conservative parties formed a coalition government after the 1941 provincial election. That year neither party had enough seats to form a majority government on its own. For the ten years that the coalition held together, the CCF was the Official Opposition in the legislature.
Solidification as opposition party: 1951–1972
After the coalition fell apart in 1951, the government introduced the alternative vote electoral system, allowing voters to mark alternate preferences to allow the vote to be transferred if necessary. They expected that Conservative voters would list Liberal candidates among their alternates and vice versa. The government hoped to prevent the CCF from winning in a three-party competition, but they did not realize that a new fourth party was on the rise: the BC Social Credit League.In the 1952 election, the Liberals and Conservatives were decimated, receiving 200,000 fewer votes than in the previous election. Social Credit League candidates received 100,000 more votes than in the previous election and also benefited from the vote transfers allowed in the new election system: many Liberal and Conservatives voters chose Social Credit candidates as their alternate choices. Social Credit emerged as the largest party in the Legislature, with one seat more than Winch's CCF. The Social Credit party chose a new leader, W. A. C. Bennett.
When Social Credit lost a motion of no confidence in the legislature in March 1953, Winch argued that the CCF should be allowed to try to form a government rather than the house being immediately dissolved for an election. Liberals, however, refused to support the CCF's bid to form a government, and an election was called.
In the 1953 election, Bennett won a majority government, and both the Liberal and the Conservative parties were reduced to fringe parties. Throughout the 1950s, Bennett's new electoral movement kept the CCF at bay. This period coincided with the height of the Cold War, and Bennett effectively used the scare tactic of the "Red Menace" against the CCF, referring to it as the "socialist hordes".
In 1960, the CCF joined with the Canadian Labour Congress nationally to create the New Party, which then in 1961 became the "New Democratic Party". This reflected the formation of the national party from an alliance of the CCF and unions in the Canadian Labour Congress. Bennett kept the CCF and the NDP out of power throughout the 1960s, winning four general elections. Each time, Bennett used the "Red Menace" tactic as a wedge issue against the NDP and its leaders: Robert Strachan and, in the 1969 general election, Thomas Berger.
Barrett government: 1972–1975
The NDP first won election in 1972 under Dave Barrett, who served as premier for three years. The NDP passed a considerable amount of legislation in a short time, including establishing the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia and the Agricultural Land Reserve. A Question Period was added to the legislative process.The NDP drove the small BC Liberal caucus to abandon their leader David Anderson for the Social Credit Party, as did one of the two Tories elected in 1972. The NDP introduced capital taxes and slashed funding to universities. It suffered for bringing clarity to the accounting by Social Credit, and revealing that BC was significantly in debt.
In the 1975 election, the Social Credit party, under W. A. C. Bennett's son Bill Bennett, won a snap election called by Barrett. The Barrett government had initiated a number of reforms in the areas of labour relations, the public service, and social programs. Most of these endured until the restraint budget of 1983.
Return to opposition: 1975–1991
The NDP hit a then-high in popular support in the 1979 election with 46 percent of the vote. And after a minor decline in the party's vote share in 1983, Barrett retired as leader.Riding high in the polls, the NDP appeared poised to win the 1986 election against the unpopular Social Credit government, but its new leader Bob Skelly stumbled in a verbal gaffe during the campaign, and the Socreds' new leader William Vander Zalm attracted votes with his charisma and telegenic performance. The party failed to score its anticipated breakthrough.
Harcourt government: 1991–1996
The New Democratic Party governed BC for nine and a half years, winning two back-to-back general elections in 1991 and 1996 before being defeated in 2001. Although the party's majority was reduced in 1996, it triumphed over the divided remnants of the Social Credit Party. In 1991, due in part to Social Credit's scandals under Premier William Vander Zalm and in part to the stellar performance of British Columbia Liberal Party leader Gordon Wilson in debate, the old Social Credit vote split between the BC Liberals, which garnered 33 percent of the vote, and the Social Credit Party with 25 percent. The NDP, under the leadership of former Vancouver mayor Mike Harcourt, won with 41 percent of the popular vote, which was one percentage point lower than the share the party had lost with in 1986.Harcourt's first two years in government were characterized by a notably social democratic policy agenda, which included increases in welfare spending and rates. The voting age was lowered from 19 to 18 in 1992. In 1993, his government took a dramatic turn to the right with his televised address in which he lashed out against "welfare cheats, deadbeats and varmints". Broadcast province-wide, his speech inaugurated a set of welfare reforms enacted between 1993 and 1995; these were similar to those adopted by new Progressive Conservative provincial governments elected in Alberta and Ontario in the same time period.
The cutbacks were, in part, a reaction to a dramatic reduction in federal transfer payments by the federal Liberal government of Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. Parliament had repealed the Canada Assistance Plan bill of rights, which had included a right to food and a right to shelter. Unlike the reforms of the Harris and Klein governments in the other two provinces noted, the BC Benefits package of cutbacks and restrictions in social assistance eligibility was bundled with a childcare bonus paid to low- and medium-income families. The changes were unpopular with the province's anti-poverty movement and the BC Green Party; they were condemned by a motion at the NDP's 1997 convention.
Three months before BC Benefits was introduced by the Harcourt government, his government came into a protracted conflict with elements of the province's environmental movement. Harcourt's "Peace in the Woods" pact, which brought together traditionally warring environmental groups and forest workers' unions, began to collapse when Harcourt's cabinet exempted an environmentally sensitive area of Vancouver Island, Clayoquot Sound, from its province-wide mediation process for land-use conflicts, the Commission on Resources and the Environment. First Nations peoples led protests, including logging road blockades, which resulted in the arrests of more than 800 people. Some key environmental leaders, such as David Suzuki and Colleen McCrory, became alienated from the NDP and shifted their support to the Green Party in the 1996 provincial election.
Although low in the polls for much of his term in office, Harcourt and his newly appointed attorney general, Ujjal Dosanjh, succeeded in regaining substantial public support by taking a hard line against an aboriginal group's occupation of a farmer's field in the Cariboo region of the province. In what became known as the Gustafsen Lake standoff, Dosanjh led the largest-scale police operation in British Columbia history as the government tried to regain control. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police used armoured vehicles provided by the Canadian military for protection. The military strongly rejected attempts by the RCMP to have them take over control of the situation, and ultimately it remained a police operation. The RCMP used anti-vehicle mines and shot thousands of rounds of ammunition at protesters.
With less than 72 hours before a planned election call, and with the NDP high in the polls for its hard line against welfare recipients and aboriginal and environmental radicals, the party's provincial office was raided by RCMP officers as part of an ongoing investigation of illegal use of charity bingo money by former provincial cabinet minister and MP Dave Stupich. Media called the scandal "Bingogate". Although Harcourt was not implicated in either the raid or the probe, he resigned; he was later fully exonerated. The NDP was led into the 1996 provincial general election by Glen Clark.