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Interim leader of the Conservative Party of British Columbia Lorne Doerkson before a meeting with The Globe and Mail editorial board on Oct. 7.Jimmy Jeong/The Globe and Mail
Of the last five premiers of British Columbia, two were lawyers and three were political staffers before running for office.
If BC Conservative Party interim leader Lorne Doerkson pushes his party to power, his CV before entering politics will look vastly different. The 58-year-old would also become the first premier from outside the South Coast since Dan Miller spent six months shepherding the New Democrats into the current century.
Mr. Doerkson was elected six years ago with the now-defunct BC Liberals as an MLA in the rural Interior. Before that, he said he tried his hand at bareback rodeo riding, and at selling advertisements for community newspapers across the region before becoming a publisher. He then ran a Chevrolet dealership and a “glass shop that didn’t go as perfect as I had hoped,” he told The Globe and Mail during a recent editorial board meeting. He then briefly ended up in the financial-services industry.
Now, the affable Williams Lake resident, who prioritized good relations with all colleagues as deputy speaker in the last legislature, is sharpening his attacks on the NDP.
Most polls are showing the Conservatives with a narrow lead over the NDP. Leading a party in chaos into an early election and finding himself in the position of potentially becoming premier wasn’t something he had planned.
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Mr. Doerkson said he, like everyone else, had heard concerning allegations about his predecessor Kerry-Lynne Findlay’s leadership. But he had been staying out of the fray – amid a push by business leaders and conservative operatives to install a new leader – and had no designs on taking over the party that was clearly heading into a snap election two years ahead of schedule.
“I didn’t know that she was about to quit and it was a surprise to me too,” he said.
Angelo Isidorou, the BC Conservatives’ former executive director and current adviser, said Mr. Doerkson was unanimously voted to become leader last month, likely because he offered a clean break from the recrimination and defections that characterized Ms. Findlay’s mere four months as leader.
“The calculation they had made was who is the guy in this room who everybody can always point to and say … ‘That’s a good guy and I trust him because I think he’s a good person,’ ” he said.
Mr. Doerkson himself is so uncontroversial he was not mentioned in a 200-page dossier of internal “oppo research” into the views and conduct of BC Conservatives that was compiled by BC United staffers before the two parties merged in a bid to unseat the NDP last election.
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The night Mr. Doerkson learned he’d been tapped to lead, he called a handful of people for advice.
High on that list was Donna Barnett, his long-time mentor who plucked him from relative political obscurity and set him on the path to replace her as Cariboo-Chilcotin MLA.
Speaking from 100 Mile House, where Ms. Barnett has served in municipal politics for years, she said she was not surprised that Conservative party insiders chose Mr. Doerkson to step into the breach.
“He’s a real public person. He likes people. He likes helping. So it was not difficult, believe you me. He’s the right guy for the job,” she said.
At the outset of the campaign, Global TV re-aired footage it captured five summers ago, showing Mr. Doerkson, face smudged with soot, holding a hose and helping fight a wildfire on a neighbour’s property.
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Ms. Barnett said that’s as apt an encapsulation of him as one could find.
“He’s just a real down-to-earth person who believes in helping,” she said.
Mr. Doerkson’s diplomacy skills have been tested this campaign by the NDP, which has trained its sights on portraying the BC Conservatives as intolerant or worse. He’s also had to spend time taming his own teammates, tempering them from promoting views on the fringes of modern conservative thought.
Mr. Doerkson has said his number-one priority if his party forms government is to repeal the province’s reconciliation act with First Nations. That goal and his comments about it on the campaign trail has him running afoul of an important neighbour: the Xeni Gwet’in First Nation.
Xeni Gwet’in Chief Roger William said Mr. Doerkson has often attended ceremonial gatherings and events, and that “wherever he sees you, he says hello, so in that way he’s good.”
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But, Mr. Doerkson’s commitment to repealing the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People Act, or DRIPA, is deeply worrying to Mr. William.
In 2014, Xeni Gwet’in, as part of the larger Tsilhqot’in Nation, won a landmark Supreme Court case against the B.C. government that – for the first time in Canadian history – declared the existence of aboriginal rights and title over 1,750 square kilometres of Crown land in the Nemaiah Valley.
One of the outcomes of that ruling is to negotiate and manage relationships with tenure and private land holders within the Xeni Gwet’in title lands, something Mr. William said he’s spent years doing alongside the B.C. government.
“There is private land within the title lands. There are tenure holders within title land. There are even B.C. Parks within title land,” Mr. William said. “We’re still working together with B.C. We’re working with tenure holders.”
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But since becoming MLA in 2020, Mr. William said Mr. Doerkson has not shown up to help in that work.
“If anything, he seemed to be the cheerleader on the other side,” he said.
Mr. William said Mr. Doerkson has participated in and continues to spread fear among British Columbians that their private property needs to be protected from Indigenous claims.
“He says he wants to work with First Nations … but in the time that he’s been in, he hasn’t done that,” Mr. William said.
Mr. Doerkson definitely has the attention of his main opponent, even if Mr. Eby didn’t see him coming before this snap election of his choosing.
“I would have gone down a list of a lot of Conservative MLAs before I ended on Mr. Doerkson,” Mr. Eby said during his recent editorial board meeting with The Globe. “No shade, he just wasn’t a person that was very prominent in the legislature. He obviously was respected by his colleagues sufficiently to be chosen leader, but he wasn’t someone that I noticed.”