[jerjon]

New member here, looks like a great site. OK, maybe this is a dumb question but perhaps you all can enlighten me. I usually think of BC as a rather liberal province (yes stereotype I know). I was looking at a map of the 2004 federal elections result and I saw that most of the ridings in BC outside of Vancouver/Victoria and the NW part of BC were won by the Conservatives. Yet I saw in the more recent BC provincial election that the Conservatives did not even seem to be in the running and that the NDP and Liberals took most of the votes. Just struck me as odd. Would be interested to hear the interpretation of this!

Thanks!

[Streaker]

Provincially, the Liberals are (neo)conservatives.

[xerxes]

BC's interior is, for the most part, a haven of Conserative support. There are pockets of resistance of course. A big one is the area around Nelson and the other is in teh NW like you said.

The Nelson area is left-wing becuase it's a hippie retirement community.

[jerjon]

OK, thanks for the info. I can see how I was confused with the BC Liberals being neo-conservative. Looking at their web site I didn't see a lot of that social conservatism that I would expect.

[xerxes]

They are Liberals only in name. If one were to use the label liberal, you would have to call them neo-liberal as they heavily favour deregulated markets, private enterprise and are very anti-union.

[Zeipher]

The Liberal party of British Columbia could much better be described as libertarian. That favour very free markets, and don't have social conservatism as a concern.

The Conservative party in BC is (was?) pretty much a social credit party, and when Social Credit died out, so did it.