The Daily Twigg Vol. 1 No. 30 March 21, 2012
NDP likely to get huge win in next B.C. election
according to latest poll from Forum Research
By John Twigg
In politics as in baseball you can never say the game is over until it is over but based on the latest Forum Research opinion poll of B.C. voting intentions you couldn't blame the New Democrats if they told an apparatchik to book a fat lady to sing the final refrains of this political soap opera.
The next provincial election won't happen until May 14, 2013, and before that those two pending byelections will take place on April 19 this year, but it is now obvious from the latest Forum poll results and from other recent polls that the B.C. New Democrats have built up such a large lead that it would take some kind of political earthquake to stop them from winning a comfortable majority or maybe even a huge majority.
In a survey reportedly done Monday this week, the NDP emerged with an astounding 47% support, which compares with 44% in the Ipsos-Reid poll in February, 42% in the Angus Reid poll in February and 39% in a Forum poll in January.
If that pattern held until voting day it would produce 75 seats for the New Democrats and only 10 seats for others, according to Forum president Lorne Bozinoff in a release posted on Forum's website.
The political implications of that are massive because the New Democrats under Premier Adrian Dix would have such a huge majority that it would be a mandate for them to do virtually anything and everything they wished, virtually unchecked except by the news media and public opinion.
That is even moreso the case when one considers that the other two main alternative parties, the B.C. Liberals and B.C. Conservatives, both came in at 21%, which means the Liberal support continues to plunge sharply while the Tory support seems to have solidified and perhaps hit a ceiling, but Bozinoff claimed that the Liberals would emerge with 9 seats, the Conservatives with 0 seats and Independent MLA Vicki Huntington would be re-elected in Delta for 1 seat.
Bozinoff further noted that the Liberal supporters are preponderately male, the Conservative supporters tend to be older and residents of the Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island (which reflects the Conservatives' recent recruitment of ex-Liberal Rick Peterson in Vancouver-Quilchena) and the Green Party supporters tend to be young, but left unsaid was that the New Democrats enjoy the support of a large and growing preponderance of women and close to a majority of men too.
"The B.C. provincial NDP have gone from strength to strength since December, and, with these seat projections they run the risk of dominating the province the way the Liberals did in New Brunswick in the 1980s," Bozinoff said in a statement, adding that while the teachers’ dispute has been very divisive it is currently playing in the NDP’s favour.
My analysis is that the final election result will not be so lopsided, especially after the voters remember the downside debacles that ensued from former Liberal premier Gordon Campbell's crazy 77 seats to 2 seats win in 2001, which enabled what became arguably the most corrupt and damaging regime in the history of the province, or at least certainly the most controversial.
I also doubt that the Conservatives will be shut out because they have been attracting some credible candidates, but the Liberals - known by some in the blogosphere as the Lieberals - could well be shut out, especially if current Premier Christy Clark continues in her combative and overly-partisan ways (such as clinging to the leadership and continuing to deny she used dirty tricks and questionable tactics to win the party leadership in 2011 as revealed by blogger Alex Tsakumis, and refusing to allow inquiries into obvious cases of wrongdoing such as events brhind the sale of BC Rail).
Indeed next month's byelections in Port Moody - Coquitlam and Chilliwack - Hope could radically change that outlook too because it sounds and appears as if the New Democrats will win easily with popular ex-mayor Joe Trasolini in Port Moody and the Conservatives probably will win narrowly with popular academic/columnist John Martin in Chilliwack but furthermore it's quite possible that the remarkably unpopular Liberals could finish third in both races, which if so could send the dogs of doom howling for Christy Clark's immediate ouster.
Clark's approval plunges to 26%
The Forum poll had new information in that regard too, because Clark's favorability rating has fallen in three consecutive polls, from a weak 34% in January to a weaker 31% in February to now an abysmal 26% in March; the poll apparently was of a usual size and with usual variances (aka margins of error) though those details were not immediately available.
Dix meanwhile had an approval of 39%, supposedly down 4 points from February, but that could be a statistical variation because the trend for both him and his party is clearly upward.
B.C. Conservative Party leader John Cummins had a favorability of only 23%, more or less unchanged from previous months and still reflecting that he is an unknown quantity to most voters.
Some questions on education and the job action by public-sector teachers suggest that current education issues may have influenced party support trends too because 52% of respondents disapproved of the Clark regime's heavy-handed Bill 22, the misnamed Education Improvement Act, and only 35% supported it. Even 20% of Liberal supporters and 31% of Conservative supporters disapproved of Bill 22, while 80% of New Democrats disapproved of it.
A question about support for teachers was less edifying, with the teachers earning 45% support but the B.C. Teachers Federation being supported by only 16%; and 50% of respondents disapproved of further job action by teachers.
That little paradigm provides a glimmer of hope for the Clark Liberals because it raises the possibility that they could regain some support if the radical minority of teachers now in control of the BCTF following its recent convention in Vancouver would become able to trigger a wildcat or illegal province-wide strike during preparations for final exams that would so anger voters that they would want punish the pro-teacher NDP too, which seemed to be Clark's strategy from the outset (or more likely a strategy cooked up by her increasingly-desperate backroom advisers which they persuaded her to try, namely to provoke the teachers into actions that would fuel a voter backlash against the NDP).
The timing of that could be important too because if the BCTF does decide to try to take some job action in defiance of Bill 22's draconian penalties they would do so in a vote tentatively scheduled for April 18 and 19, which means the results would not be known until after the byelections.
Another interesting quirk is that the Good Friday and Easter Monday statutory holidays mean the B.C. Legislature will be taking a two-week break in the middle of the byelection, leaving only four sitting days in the first week of the campaign and only four sitting days in the last week, which will tend to shield Clark from questions from the NDP about the many policy areas her regime is mismanaging (e.g. possible technical problems with the so-called smart meters, unanswered questions behind the resignation of Harry Bloy as minister for multiculturalism, etc.) as well as about problems specific to Port Moody and Chilliwack.
Anyway, this latest poll result from Forum Research adds fuel to what appears to be a slowly-building movement to oust Clark before she can do any more damage to the province, and before it becomes impossible for someone such as Finance Minister Kevin Falcon to reverse the flow of Liberal supporters to the Cummins Conservatives and possibly save the B.C. Liberals from being completely wiped out.
As for whether those nasty personal attack ads against Dix have had any affect, they may have slightly trimmed his personal approval rating but meanwhile the support for the NDP as a party still appears to be soaring towards record levels.
For the NDP to lose such a lead would require them to make some really serious blunders of their own but so far there is no evidence they might do so.
Clark in the Legislature has been hectoring the New Democrats to release the provisional platform and budget they had quickly prepared last year in case Clark called a snap election in the Fall but NDP finance critic Bruce Ralston as well as Dix have recently given plausible explanations why that would not be appropriate now, mainly because financial and economic circumstances have changed.
But so too, it seems, have political circumstances changed; not merely a sea change but a radical turnabout.
Does the phrase "Premier Adrian Dix" ring a bell or sound discordant? That may depend on the partisan orientations of the listeners but in any case it now seems everyone will soon have to get used to it.
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