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It’s forgivable on some level. The press needs a firm party of the right fighting a firm party of the left to create compelling political drama. If you’re a partisan of the NDP — B.C.’s provincial opposition — it’s similarly in your interests to portray Liberals and Conservatives as interchangeable oppressors of the proletariat, as NDPers have been doing since Tommy Douglas first yarned about mice voting for cats.

Yet to call the B.C. Liberals “conservatives” because they’ve experienced occasional bouts of fiscal responsibility, appeased business interests, or annoyed unions — the sole evidence proponents of this theory point to — requires broadening the philosophy of “conservatism” to the point of uselessness. The Saskatchewan NDP closed schools and hospitals across the province during the 1990s. Were they right-wing? The Alberta Conservatives ran six deficit budgets in a row. Was that centre-left? Is Dalton McGuinty “a small-c conservative” because a teachers’ strike occurred during his reign?

As Stephen Harper himself put it in a 2003 speech on ideology — “if conservatives accept all legislated social liberalism with balanced budgets and corporate grants … then there really are no differences between a conservative and a Paul Martin.”

The B.C. Liberals, for their part, have never fully played along with the right-wing role they’ve been assigned. When I interviewed Christy Clark back in 2004 she called herself “a middle-of-the-road Liberal,” emphasizing she’d been a provincial Liberal “when we used to get 5 per cent of the vote” (there’s a popular urban legend that the B.C. Liberals are a “new” party or even the “renamed” B.C. Social Credit Party — in reality, they’ve been contesting elections since the 19th century).



That said, Clark’s Liberals are savvy enough to grasp a good thing when they see it. In their propaganda, they refer to themselves as a “free market coalition” welcoming anyone anti-NDP. The party uses the four colours of the B.C. flag — red, white, blue and yellow — in their branding, rather than one traditionally partisan colour, to push the notion that they transcend classification.