EDITORIAL W ^%C Studies cannot yet comment on the most recent BC election, which #^took place a few days before this issue went to press"but it can offer M J assessments of the provincial results of last November's federal election and does so in this issue. The two are not unrelated. The right-of-centre populism well evident in November 2000 was even more marked in May 2001. Each of the four political scientists whose commentaries follow attempts to account for this phenomenon, and the result

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... s a set of fascinating reflections. Of the four, the voice that stands most apart from the others is that of Boris DeWiel at the University of Northern British Columbia in Prince George. He argues that western populism grows out of its colonial context and should be seen as the response of colonists (immigrants and settlers) to the imperial project of the colonizer (central Canada-Ottawa) and the reaction of the colonized (Native peoples). The colonists feel themselves pinched between eastern interests that, with little direct stake in the region, are prepared to give too many resources to Native peoples who, in turn, are demanding too much. Without a very clear sense of who, collectively, they are, the colonists are sure who they are not: not Americans, not eastern Canadians, not First Nations. If pushed too hard, they will explore separatist solutions. I suspect that Professor DeWiel has correctly identified a basic axis of cultural-political tension in this province and in many other settler societies. Theorists in the Colonial Office in the 1840s thought that the interests of settlers and of Native peoples were opposed and that unless the Colonial Office interposed itself between the two, Native peoples would be exterminated. Whenever the Colonial Office tried to mediate between the two, the settler response was hostile. The Great Trek of the Boers in South Africa was largely an attempt by settlers to distance themselves from imperial policies (regarding the fairer treatment of the Bantu) that they considered daft. After British Columbia entered Confederation, the federal government became a minimal counterpoise to settler ambitions, a role strengthened in recent years by decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada. The tensions that DeWiel analyzes have a long pedigree. Moreover, settler societies are built on the assumption that the land they appropriated was waste awaiting development. Either Native people were not using it or were using it in unprogressive ways, whereas a modern, civilized people knew how to use land efficiently. As the settler mind combined selfinterest and altruism, such land use was the way of progress and development. These values have long been taken for granted by most immigrant British Columbians and, as Elizabeth Furniss has recently shown (BC Studies 115/ 116), remain exceedingly powerful. However, they are challenged now, and it is not surprising that the challenge generates a political response.