Shed no tears for those who worry about vote splitting

Call me cold, but I’m having a tough time getting teary eyed with sympathy over all this sniveling by mainstream political parties about splitting the vote.

Terry Lake is worried the upsurge in support for the upstart Conservative party (upstart in that they haven’t been a factor in B.C. politics since the 1940s) will translate into an NDP victory next year.

“If you want an NDP government, voting B.C. Conservative will certainly guarantee that,” Lake fretted this week.

Theory is that the free-enterprise vote will be divided between the Liberals and the Conservatives, allowing the socialist horde to storm the legislature once again. Oh, the calamity.

Out in the other end of the universe, Ottawa, the concern is not about keeping the lefties in the wilderness, but about getting the Harper Conservatives out of power. There, the talk is all about how the Liberals and NDP will have to link up to stop splitting the non-Conservative vote if they ever hope to unseat Harper.

Liberal strategist and columnist Warren Kinsella, who writes for this newspaper among others, is in mourning over it. The Grits and Dippers, as he calls them, who can’t see the imperatives of merging to get rid of Darth Harper, as he calls him, are “too goddamn stupid.”

You would think, to listen to them, that there is actually a chance the Liberals will win the next election in B.C., and that there is a similar chance the Tories will lose the next one in Ottawa.

For anyone within provincial Liberal ranks who hasn’t been paying attention, your problems started long before the latest public opinion survey, and long before John Van Dongen gave up on the government.

You would, no doubt, prefer a U.S.-style two-party system wherein voters have a choice only between right and left, while the other 100 or so parties are never heard from, but that’s not the way Canadians work.

As the federal scene illustrates, it’s not always about forming a coalition of the right to keep out the left, but when the right-moderate vote is divided there’s no guarantee the lefties will take power anyway.

During the 1940s, the B.C. Conservatives and the Liberals formed a two-party coalition and held on to power for a short time as the enemy milled around at the gate. But the real enemy wasn’t the then-CCF socialists; it was an ex-Conservative named W.A.C. Bennett and his adopted Social Credit party.

The Socreds beat the coalition and the CCF and ruled B.C. for 36 of the next 39 years. When the Socreds were finally defeated, it was because they were a tired old party with tired old blood and a heap of public resentment against them, not because of free-enterprise challengers. The NDP happened to be the only alternative.

And when the “Dippers” were done ravaging the B.C. economy, the Liberals were waiting.

So let us not waste much time and space for the crocodile tears of the B.C. Liberals, or those federal Liberals and NDP who proclaim the death of everything from free enterprise to free expression if we don’t reduce our political system to a one-or-the-other choice.

As Richard Armour (you might have to look him up; I did) used to say, “Politics, it seems to me, for years, or all too long, has been concerned with right or left instead of right or wrong.”