Caroline Elliott's theory of culture war: persuasion, not anger - National Post

“You can’t just focus on the economic issues because the economic issues are cultural issues and cultural issues are economic issues,” says former B.C. Conservative leadership candidate Caroline Elliott. Photo by Handout/Courtesy Caroline ElliottArticle contentA week is a long time in politics. This one in British Columbia produced a party rupture and reconsolidation, a leadership resignation, and a snap election.

When I talked with Caroline Elliott last week, the official opposition B.C. Conservative Party was already fracturing. By Friday, more MLAs were peeling away and the upstart CentreBC was stocking itself with the defectors. On Sunday, Kerry-Lynne Findlay resigned as leader, four months after her narrow win over Elliott. On Tuesday, Premier David Eby dropped the writ for an Oct. 24 election, casting it as a firebreak against Donald Trump — and seven of CentreBC’s eight legislators, including Peter Milobar, walked back to the Conservative fold. One stayed behind.

So much has changed since I first spoke to Elliott that the interview has aged in dog years.

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Among other things, Elliott’s own situation has changed. She is no longer just the well-respected but recently failed runner-up for the leadership; she appears likely to run as a B.C. Conservative candidate on Oct. 24 (more later on that), and who knows what happens after that. The party is being led by an interim leader; the party is saying he gets to keep the job if the Conservatives win the election.

Amid all this, Elliott has been making a sharp case for her worldview in Without Diminishment, the publication she co-founded: any party promising “free enterprise and nothing else” will not fix British Columbia.

In that way, our original conversation is only more relevant.

“In British Columbia,” she told me, “we have people saying, ‘We can’t fight the culture wars, we have to stick to free enterprise.’”

She knows that strategy’s lineage. Gordon Campbell, premier from 2001 to 2011 and her mentor, built the B.C. Liberals as the province’s “free-enterprise alternative” to the NDP.

Elliott can recite the free-enterprise catechism without notes: “Grow the economy. Control government spending. Develop our resources. Deal with affordability. That’s it. Nothing else.”