NEW WESTMINSTER — The recent spat between Kerry-Lynne Findlay and Peter Milobar over his wife's part-time work as a receptionist for a British Columbia indigenous group exemplifies everything wrong with political discourse in this province.In the final BC Conservative leadership debate on Saturday, Findlay questioned Milobar’s ability to credibly repeal DRIPA citing his family connections as a potential conflict of interest. Milobar shot back: “Just say it — my wife is indigenous so you think I’m in conflict of interest? I’ve never heard of anything so ridiculous in my life.”.The roughly one minute exchange went viral and became the dominant talking point in a leadership race previously defined by a so-called “violent agreement” amongst its candidates.Findlay was within her rights to probe for a potential conflict of interest. Voters deserve to know where candidates’ strongest personal and family ties lie, especially on a file as fraught as DRIPA and resource development.But the manner of the question felt uncouth.A neutral, polite question along the lines of “Do you see any potential conflict arising from your wife’s past employment with the band?” could have been asked and answered without drama.If Milobar had replied that she worked there part-time years ago and Findlay had accepted it and moved on, this would hardly be a story worth telling.Of course, political debates are not a place typically characterized by their neutrality and politeness. And sadly, the injection of race into politics is the norm here..Only a few weeks ago, the Western Standard itself was called a “racist” publication by BC Premier David Eby after the interim leader of the BC Conservatives praised an article we wrote on pipelines.And if the drama surrounding the minutes-long exchange between Milobar and Findlay offers any indication, it would appear this obsession over race exists far beyond the premier and the governing BC NDP.It's a remarkable, and frankly confounding, element to BC politics that the province with comparatively little historical racial animus or bloodshed is also the province most neurotically obsessed with race..It would be intellectually dishonest of me to say racism doesn't exist in British Columbia. It exists everywhere to some extent. Mercifully, however, British Columbia has largely avoided the sort of large-scale, sustained armed conflicts between indigenous peoples and newcomers that defined so much of the history in the United States, the Canadian Prairies, Australia, and New Zealand.Yes, there was violence. The 1864 Chilcotin War stands out, where Tsilhqot’in warriors killed more than a dozen road workers and packers amid terror over smallpox and encroachment on their lands. Colonial authorities hunted down and hanged six chiefs in response.There were scattered gold-rush clashes in the Fraser Canyon and elsewhere. But there were no equivalents to the decades-long Indian Wars south of the border, the North-West Rebellion, or the frontier massacres seen elsewhere in Canada and around the globe..And yet, for a province that largely escaped the large-scale armed conflicts between indigenous peoples and newcomers seen elsewhere in Canada and around the world, we have become pathologically obsessed with race, ancestry, and family essentialism.That relative restraint should have been an advantage.A province spared the worst of the zero-sum violence ought to be better positioned for pragmatic, forward-looking reconciliation — to secure property rights, economic partnerships, and equal application of the law.Instead, we’ve turned the absence of conquest into a perpetual struggle session..This racially obsessed political lexicon is neurotic, self-defeating, and beneath a province as prosperous and diverse as ours.Not everything has to be about race.
