Two of our provincial political parties - the Unity Party and the B.C. Conservatives - have announced a merger today. This isn’t a total surprise, but the question is will it make a difference?

Unity ran candidates for the first time in the last provincial election, and failed to win any seats. In fact, the party failed to make any impression on electoral results at all, winning only 3.23% of the popular vote.

The B.C. Conservatives didn’t even do that well, and are lumped into the “other” category.

Which brings us back to our original question: if two weak political forces merge, do they make one weak political force, or does it count as a fresh start?

I seriously doubt if these two parties will gain any additional traction simply as a result of the merger - it’s just not in the cards, after the electoral drubbing that the federal Conservative Party took. With more British Columbians moving to the more moderate federal Liberal party, it’s doubtful that a provincial party made up of former reformers is going to get very far either.

The next government of B.C. will be a Liberal one again, and I’m guessing it’ll be somewhere in the low 50s in number of seats. I haven’t yet predicted who specifically will lose, but I’ll get to it.

In the meantime, the newly merged B.C. Conservatives seem likely to only succeed in splitting off some protest votes and possibly giving the Liberals even more seats by pulling them away from the NDP.

Posted by skooter at 7:04 PM This entry is filed under Politics.