In this year of high-stakes elections, the choice facing British Columbian voters on October 19 boils down to a familiar binary: acknowledge reality or embrace denial.
Embodied by the BC NDP and the Conservative Party of BC respectively, that contrast permeates almost every field of public policy. But it is starkest, and most consequential, in questions of the land itself: BC is on the front line of climate disaster, hammered by unprecedented wildfires, heat domes, drought, and atmospheric rivers. The province is also grappling with the collapse of a resource base that sustained its economy for much of the last century: some 80 percent of the province’s primary forest—an area bigger than California—has been logged, and wild salmon populations are at less than a tenth of their pre-industrial abundance, to name two prominent examples. At the same time, BC has exhausted the legal strategy of denying Indigenous rights and title to over 200 First Nations—an approach that cost the province and First Nations alike untold billions in legal fees and squandered development opportunities.
