Fringe Report - BC Refed and BC First

I thought I would quickly through out some of the news from some of the fringe parties in BC.   Because we have so many political parties in BC there is a large selection of fringe parties to choose from.   It also means there are numerous people out there now have a political party platform to espouse their views, many of which are entertainingly stupid.   Their true believer faith in their ideas is amusing.

First, here is a video from BCRef leader Ingrid Voight giving out awards to others in politics, the quality of the video sucks, but it is an entertaining to watch.


Refed BC seems to be barely ticking over, I am not getting any sense of energy for expansion of the party.   Mike Summers did a good job in 2009 in managing to get the party to 22 candidates, but the vote for the party was pathetically low, only 3748 total for all the candidates.

Meanwhile the new Chris Delaney vehicle, BC First Party, are holding their founding AGM in Kamloops on April 9th.  At this AGM they are supposed to be setting the date for a leadership vote.

In general it is hard to get an handle on them.   Their politics are all over the map as far as I can tell from their policies.   They certainly are not a traditional right wing party, but then they are not a centrist party. They sound like a lot of the teaparty movement in the States, anger at the powers that be being the primary focus and an agenda to get citizen control over government.

Over the last 25 years any party that has had Bill Vander Zalm, Chris Delaney or Wilf Hanni involved has tended to be a mess and fall apart.   In reading through their stuff they seem to have more than 100 members, but is hard to say if they have many more than that.   The names I can find on the website are not people that have ever managed to work towards any success in politics.

The person with the most elected experience I can find is Gerry Taft, the mayor of Invermere.   He is interesting because he was elected in 2002 to council at age 20.  They also have Arthur Hadland on board, he did well as an Independent in the Peace in the last election.  The party might be relevant to something if either one of them becomes the leader though still likely the number 5 party in BC at best.

I do not know what the party is doing to dump wing nuts and crazies, there certainly seem to be some people out their in wingnutland that are talking up BC First.

I find it interesting that a number of people have left the BC Conservatives to join BC First just as the BC Conservatives were getting serious long time politicians to join the party.  It is almost as if they were afraid of success and had to jump ship when it looked like the BC Conservatives could elect people in 2013.  How long till people leave BC First if it actually manages to do anything?