RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO . TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 2024. [UPDATED SEP 26]. The October 2024 just waiting in the wings could be called provincial election month in Canada.

Voters in three provinces will choose new (or re-elect old) provincial governments : BC (5.6 million people) on Saturday, October 19 ; New Brunswick (846,000) on Monday, October 21, and Saskatchewan (1.2 million) on Monday, October 28.

The most interesting of these contests is bound to be in the rising Pacific province of BC. (Which, like others, I casually translate as “British California” for various good reasons.) And not just because BC (officially British Columbia) is the current third most populous province in Canada — and probably the most geographically blessed for the long future.

1

A year ago it seemed likely that Premier David Eby’s progressive and increasingly experienced New Democratic government in BC would be re-elected handily enough, in the fixed-date election on Saturday, October 19, 2024.

A Leger poll in the middle of September 2023 showed 42% New Democrats (NDP), 25% Conservatives, 19% BC United (formerly BC Liberals), 10% Green Party. (And in Canada’s current “Westminster” parliamentary democracy 42% of the popular vote — or considerably less — can be enough to give the leading party a working majority of seats in parliament : see also Doug Ford in Ontario, eg, or even Keir Starmer still further east in the United Kingdom!)

Now, on the surface at least, one year later all this has somewhat dramatically changed! A Leger poll taken in the middle of September 2024 showed 44% NDP, 42% Conservatives, and 11% Green Party. The 338Canada poll aggregation “Latest update: September 21, 2024” suggested a still closer race : 44% NDP, 44% Conservatives, and 11% Green Party.

2

Even with this latest outright-tie update in the popular vote, 338Canada is still projecting the Eby New Democrats will win a majority government of 49 seats, in a 93-member Legislative Assembly, where 47 seats is a bare majority. The Conservatives on this projection (with a less geographically efficient popular vote) will win 43 seats, and the Green Party one.

As the polling looks right now, however, there remains a quite serious chance that the results on October 19 will reverse this final outcome, and give the Conservatives a majority government — an altogether dramatically different proposition from what looked like the future a year ago. (And note a late September 2024 Leger poll update shows CON 45%, NDP 43%, GRN 10%!)

Does this reflect some growing Conservative surge in Canada’s Pacific Province, and the country at large — even ultimately playing into the Canadian federal political scene? In at least an initial short word, no … (well, for the moment …).

3

If you look at the `two Leger polls for September 2023 and September 2024, for instance, the main difference is just that BC United (formerly the BC Liberals) has now bowed out of at least the race for the October 19, 2024 election. And most of its vote has gone to a reviving provincial Conservative party, currently led by “Nechako Lakes MLA John Rustad, who was originally elected as a BC Liberal.”

(At the same time, the combined Conservative/BC United vote in the 2023 Leger poll was 44%, compared with the NDP’s 42%. In the 2024 Leger poll the Conservatives have only 42% while the NDP has at least risen slightly to 44%. And this suggests that some small part of the earlier BC United/Liberal vote has moved to the New Democrats!)

Yet however you see Liberals and Conservatives in BC today, the current October 2024 general picture of a very tight race between the progressive (or left-wing populist) New Democrats and the (right-wing populist) Conservatives, in Canada’s Pacific Province, does bear a striking resemblance to the much larger and more crucial November 5, 2024 contest between progressive Kamala Harris Democrats and conservative Donald Trump Republicans in the USA next door.

4

Elsewhere in Canadian provincial politics in October 2024 there is a somewhat similar close contest between Liberals on the left and Conservatives on the right in New Brunswick, on Canada’s Atlantic coast. The September 23, 2024 email from Eric Grenier’s The Writ predicts the “narrowest of victories for David Eby [BC New Democrat] and Susan Holt [NB Liberal] if the election were held today.”

(In the Saskatchewan that was once home to “the first socialist government in North America” under the old CCF ancestors of today’s NDP — and that lived under CCF-NDP provincial governments 1944–1964, 1971–1982, 1991–2007 — Premier Scott Moe’s right-wing conservative Saskatchewan Party seems most likely to continue its more recent domination of provincial politics, on Monday, October 28, 2024.)

It would be foolish to suggest outright that close and hard-fought October 2024 victories for David Eby’s New Democrats and Susan Holt’s Liberals in Canadian provincial elections in BC and New Brunswick could be good news for Kamala Harris’s Democrats, on November 5 in the USA. But in at least the most northern regions of North America today it is impossible to altogether escape such thoughts.

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On the other hand again, only slightly surprising Conservative victories in both BC and New Brunswick in October 2024 would remind Canadians that opinion polls right now suggest a Conservative majority government led by the implausible Pierre Poilievre is almost inevitable (maybe) in the next Canadian federal election (whenever that may actually happen?).

And as US talk-show host Stephen Colbert apologized for suggesting in his engaging interview with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in New York last night, Pierre Poilievre can seem quite a lot like Donald Trump!