Are they as bad as MAGA? Probably not, but not miles away. Their to-do list includes things like repealing the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, increasing liquid natural gas production, reducing restrictions on logging, etc. They’ve talked about ICBC (public auto insurance) a lot, so probably that’s in their sights too, maybe try to punish it in order to pave the way for privatization. Oh, and rent control is probably on the chopping block. We’ll see what social policy they try to pursue… they’ve talked about fully repealing the BC Human Rights code in the past though.
Why did BC do this? Canada has a history of voting out people they dislike more than paying attention to who the alternative is. Our own federal MAGA wannabe was leading in polls against Trudeau for the last Canadian election which is partly why Trudeau was finally forced into stepping down. People were angry (rightly so, honestly) at Eby pulling a very early snap election to try to power grab, so a lot of it probably came from that. Only it’s all of us paying for it, not just Eby.
For anyone seeing this not from BC, it probably bears being aware that the “in nearly a century” line could do with some context, because it’s not true that it’s the first small-c conservative government in that long, just the first one by a party called Conservatives.
A very short version of the history is that for a long time the BC Liberals were our right wing party (despite the name). I don’t mean that in a “both sides” or “they aren’t left enough for me” sense, I mean they were basically fully aligned with the federal Conservative party in Canada, and they just had the Liberal name for whatever historical reason. Everyone here kinda knew that the Liberals were our right wing. They tried a while back to rebrand to BC United and then not long after kind of imploded and threw their support behind the BC Conservatives a couple elections ago, and a bunch of the former Liberal MPs joined that party (while others went independent, third parties, or just lost jobs).
The Liberals ran things from 2001-2017ish. So we’ve had small-c conservatives a lot in BC in recent history, the only difference is that we have capital-C conservatives now. I guess we’re all about to find out whether that’s more of the same from them or something worse.