Douglas Todd: How the Cariboo-Chilcotin shapes B.C.’s next premier, Lorne Doerkson

For a very long time, a lot of British Columbians have felt like Victoria forgot about them, like the map maybe stopped at Hope.

— B.C. premier-designate Lorne Doerkson on election night

First of two parts

WILLIAMS LAKE — Things are much different in the vast land that is home to the first B.C. premier in more than 40 years who does not come from cosmopolitan Greater Vancouver or Greater Victoria.

B.C. Conservative Leader Lorne Doerkson lives in a rough-tough city of 11,000 people, Williams Lake, the largest centre among the stunning landscape of the riding of Cariboo-Chilcotin, which begins about 200 kilometres north of the town of Hope.

As the signs proudly say, Doerkson’s city is “Home of the Famous Williams Lake Stampede.”

The city’s rodeo fairgrounds, in some ways, form the cultural heart of the cowboy-and-First Nation’s riding, which is as large as Nova Scotia or Denmark but contains only 43,000 people, almost one in five of whom are Indigenous.

The riding Doerkson has held since 2020 revolves around this hub at the intersection of Highway 97 (the Cariboo Highway) and Highway 20 (the Chilcotin Highway). The city’s boundaries also encompass three giant sawmills.

Last month, I visited this new political hot spot mostly by coincidence, since I had been planning a trip north since the summer. That was months before the virtually unknown Doerkson was named B.C. interim Conservative leader on Sept. 21 and the NDP’s David Eby called a snap election, which he lost to Doerkson on Oct. 24.

I wanted as a tourist to experience the grasslands of the Cariboo-Chilcotin riding, which basically stretches from Cache Creek, which is west of the Fraser River, to the edge of the West Coast Mountains at Anahim Lake.

I was blown away by the semi-arid hills, sagebrush, hoodoos, wildlife and turquoise rivers of the Farwell Canyon and elsewhere in the Chilcotin, as well as shocked by the wildfire destruction around Clinton.

The bonus of the trip was that, along the way, I picked up a bit of a sense of what makes people tick in this outdoor-oriented, working-class region of ranching, fishing, hunting, mining and forestry, where it sometimes seems almost everybody drives a truck to handle the ubiquitous gravel roads.

I certainly learned about the respect they held for Doerkson, a newspaper publisher and financial adviser. He is widely appreciated as a kind, honourable person. He won his riding with 70 per cent of the vote, which is almost unheard of.

“I love him. I’ve known him for years. I first met him when he volunteered at the stampede and opened the chutes for the bulls and broncos,” said Connie Engelhart, a motel clerk in Williams Lake.