Canadian progressives have a tendency to lob specious accusations of racism whenever other political talking points have been exhausted, regardless if minority communities actually agree with them. This long-standing habit is now playing out again in B.C., where Premier David Eby and his NDP government are importing American-style culture wars to distract from their own policy failures.
With an election just weeks away, the B.C. NDP and their allies are claiming that the B.C. Conservatives are white supremacists, which is simply partisan nonsense. Not only do both parties have an equally diverse roster of candidates, recent polling data suggests that non-white voters actually prefer the Conservatives over the current government.
Two weeks ago, Government House Leader Ravi Kahlon shared a post on X insinuating that Angelo Isidorou, campaign manager for the B.C. Conservatives, is a white supremacist. The evidence behind this claim amounted to a 2017 photo of Isidorou, taken during his first year of university, wherein he wore a MAGA hat and made an “OK” hand gesture associated with the alt-right.
Kahlon’s message was quickly amplified by Sarbjit Kaur, a panelist from CBC Power and Politics, who said that the B.C. Conservatives are, as a party, defined by white supremacy.
Isodorou, who is biracial and half-Romani, publicly rebuked these accusations as “disgusting,” and wrote that his family consists of “immigrants who were all almost wiped out in the Greco-Armenian genocide” perpetrated by Turks in the 1910s.
The Tyee, an influential left-wing publication based in B.C., followed up with a hit piece on Isidorou wherein it insinuated that he was racist because far-right influencer Lauren Southern was among the hundreds of people he had interacted with on X. None of the interactions shared by The Tyee contained any indication of racist views from Isidorou. Guilt by association was sufficient, apparently. In one case, the outlet even misrepresented a post written by Southern to give the impression that Isidorou is Islamophobic.
The Tyee then published an article accusing B.C. Conservative Leader John Rustad of “stoking fear” towards Indigenous communities through “racist grievance politics.” His sin, it seems, was his milquetoast stance on land title rights and economic development. Rustad wants to ensure, among other things, that the province has final say on Crown land use — as was the case less than 10 years ago, when he was minister of aboriginal relations and reconciliation under the previous B.C. Liberal government.
While The Tyee may reasonably disagree with Rustad’s approach — both sides have compelling arguments here — its eagerness to smear him as racist, on such thin grounds, suggests that the province’s progressives are scraping the barrel this election.
Amid these controversies, Tim Thielmann, another B.C. Conservative candidate, noted on X that “our party is full of Brown, Black and Indigenous candidates” and that “if we were a ‘white nationalist’ party, it’d be the most counterproductive one in history.”
He is undeniably right in this respect.
After reviewing each party’s election roster, I found that both the B.C. Conservatives and B.C. NDP appear to be running 26 candidates who can be considered racial minorities (this may be an undercount, though, as diversity is not always readily apparent by face or last name). That’s equal to 28 per cent of the total candidate pool, which means that both rosters are slightly less diverse than the province’s general population (according to the 2021 census, 34 per cent of British Columbians are non-white).
I personally think that this diversity gap is narrow enough to dispel Eby’s narratives about conservative racism. Some might disagree, but they would then have to concede that, in this respect, the B.C. NDP is apparently festering with white supremacy as well.
But what of voters? Most Canadian pollsters don’t provide ethnic breakdowns of their survey data vis-à-vis voting intentions, but Mainstreet Research is an exception. The company conducted five B.C. polls this year — in March, April, July, August and September — and uncovered only a weak correlation between partisan affiliation and race.
Mainstreet provides breakdowns for specific ethnicities — i.e. Black, East Asian, First Nations — but, as each ethnic group is only a sliver of the total population, their sample sizes are too small to draw meaningful conclusions from (you need at least 100 respondents per group, but no ethnicity meets that threshold). Amalgamating non-white voters into one category, however, creates large-enough samples for analysis.
In March, the B.C. Conservatives seemed slightly more popular with non-white voters (34 per cent) than white ones (32.1 per cent), but then the party’s base apparently tilted over the ensuing months. By August, white support had risen to 36.4 per cent, while non-white support declined slightly to 33.6 per cent. Notably, these differences were all so small that they fell well within these polls’ margin of error, making them almost meaningless.
Then September’s polling data changed everything.
While white support for the Conservatives surged to 44.2 per cent (+7.8 from August), non-white support skyrocketed to an astonishing 50.4 per cent (+16.8). It now seems that the Conservatives are considerably more popular among non-white voters than white ones, having benefited from a late-hour surge in minority support.
In fact, if only white voters counted, then the B.C. NDP would win the next election with a 1.6 point lead. But if this data is to be believed, then the main reason the B.C. Conservatives have a shot at forming government is because non-white voters support them by a huge margin (12.3 points in this poll).
Who would have thought that non-white British Columbians could be such raging white supremacists? Perhaps they should ask Eby and his friends to educate them about the perils of racism. Or maybe — just maybe — the B.C. NDP isn’t actually listening to the minority communities it so ardently claims to represent.
National Post