Grassroots Politicians: Party Activists in British Columbia

Gary Clarkson is a history lecturer at the University of Windsor and a
book reviewer for the Windsor Star.

Politics in our most westerly province continues to attract easterners,
but not to the degree that British Columbia’s problems and particular
political nuances receive the national attention they deserve.

In this book three B.C. political scientists, two from the University
of British Columbia and one from Simon Fraser University, attempt to
decipher the province’s mannerisms in order to prove that the politics
of the centre will continue to elude B.C. and that the polarization of
B.C. politics between the Socred right and the NDP left will persist
despite some recent signs to the contrary.

The reason that centrism will remain an elusive goal (according to the
authors) lies in the party structures. Particularly influential are the
hard-working partisans, whose efforts at election time the politicians
find crucial. Such workers continue to insist on ideological purity of a
sort more or less unknown east of the Rockies. This fanaticism is
reinforced by a native populism that can on occasion favor either the
left or the right.

The point is made that the prevailing orthodoxy among political heavy
thinkers that politics must move to the centre in order to get and
retain great masses of voters does not seem to apply in the far West.

Heavily technical and graph-ridden, this book’s explanations of
British Columbia’s contrariety are still worth reading as an
intelligent introduction to what one native British Columbian called
“the politics of paradise.” This work is, however, in dire need of
anecdotal footnotes or occasional admonitions to the reader to take the
Fantasy Garden episodes with more gravity, for it is hard to stay sombre
while the authors scientifically dissect the doings of former premier
Vander Zalm and what the B.C. press called the “Zalmoids.”