Alexander Brown: The fix was never in
On a Saturday in British Columbia, Twitter became real life. But was the story that was told any more real than the others?
The road on which internet conjecture starts is broad and easy; it is the Coquihalla Highway of inflated crisis.
Spend enough time in this line of work and you learn to stop caring about mischaracterisations. Any idea, once you hit send, once you hit post, once it hits a newspaper or the airwaves, it no longer belongs to you; it’s someone else’s to spin, aggregate, and relitigate. The same can be said of a name or the names attached to one’s name.
In the case of the final stretch of the B.C. Conservative leadership race, which wrapped up on a sunny Saturday night at the Rocky Mountaineer in East Vancouver, something funny happened along a road that ultimately ended in a railyard’s event space: the Kerry-Lynne Findlay (KLF) campaign stormed forward from the middle of the pack, unbowed by eleventh-hour scandal, emboldened by a strong organising effort on Vancouver Island, the North, and in the Interior, and unabashed in amassing a veritable Twitter army of independent media, journalists, influencers, and sh*t-posters, many of whom were implying that the fix was in against the ‘grassroots’ of the party.
The win was earned on merit. The result is not in question. That unsanctioned—but not discouraged—communications Potemkin village, hastily assembled on supposed grassroots, leaves something to be desired.
71-year-old career politicians, with a decorated track record in federal cabinets and shadow cabinets, and with a sitting MLA for a husband, are not normally pitched to the public as plucky outsiders.
In fact, 40 percent of the supposed ‘establishment’, ‘B.C. Liberal’ vote broke for Findlay down-ballot, after what was also a tremendous showing on the first ballot.
That didn’t and hasn’t stopped all manner of Twitter users from claiming the party was brought back from the brink, stolen back from the elites who tried to steal it from them first. And yet, the B.C. Conservative Party, a party built by young activists and so well served by the leadership of Angelo Isidorou, Phil Dippenaar, Aisha Estey, and others, had just spent the month engaged in the kind of anti-corruption effort a party’s supporters should be proud of.