British Columbia Unity Party

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

British Columbia Unity Party




Active Provincial Party
Founded	2001

Leader	Daniel Stelmacker (interim)
President	Tom Landers
Headquarters	Box 36022 Riverside RPO, Surrey, BC V3R 1S4, phone/fax 604-585-1023, email headoffice-bcunity@telus.net

Political ideology	Conservatism, Populism
International alignment	None
Colours	Blue and Green

Seats	None
Website	http://www.bcunity.ca

The British Columbia Unity Party is a political party in British Columbia, Canada. The party was founded as an attempted union of five conservative parties: the Reform Party of British Columbia, the British Columbia Social Credit Party, the British Columbia Conservative Party, the British Columbia Party, and the Family Coalition Party of British Columbia. Members from the first four parties joined with the Family Coalition Party to form the BC Unity Party on January 10, 2001. The party was formed to present a united conservative option to voters in opposition to the BC Liberals and the New Democratic Party (NDP).

Five months after the party was founded, it nominated 56 candidates across the province for the May 16, 2001 provincial elections. During the election campaign, BC Unity positioned itself as a solidly conservative party, in contrast to the BC Liberals. However, the unpopularity of the NDP government of Ujjal Dosanjh was so great that most conservative-minded voters chose to vote for the BC Liberals, rather than split the right-of-centre vote once again. The party received only 3.2% of the vote (51,426).

On September 1, 2004, BC Unity and the British Columbia Conservative Party announced an agreement-in-principle for the two parties to merge under the Conservative Party name. The deal, however, fell through after BC Conservative Leader Barry Chilton withdrew. Later it was revealed that the Conservative Party negotiators did not have the confidence of their board. At the Unity annual general meeting held on September 24 and 25, 2004 in Coquitlam, the BC Unity Party was presented with another proposal of merger by the Conservatives. The Unity delegates did not accept this proposal and instead, affirmed the original agreement-in-principle. This action was not accepted by the BC Conservatives and the merger failed. BC Unity leader Chris Delaney blamed himself for the failure of the merger and resigned.

Many BC Unity members left the party prior to the September 2004 annual general meeting in order to join the Conservatives and to influence them into accepting the agreement-in-principle. When the merger failed, these former members did not return to the Unity party.

In 2005, BC Unity named Daniel Stelmacker as its interim leader. Stelmacker had been a party candidate for the Nanaimo-Parksville electoral district in the 2001 election. In 2005, Stelmacker was the party's sole nominated candidate for the 2005 provincial election, running in the Skeena riding. He won 224 votes, 1.74% of the total for the riding.

The party held its most recent annual general meeting on Saturday, October 29, 2005, in Maple Ridge, British Columbia.