The Daily Twigg May 15, 2013
Stunning election win for Clark Liberals
raises tough questions for Dix and NDP
By John Twigg
Wow! What a shocker, what an amazing turnabout in the direction of B.C. politics.
In defiance of opinion polls, media predictions and even of analysts in
her own ranks, Premier Christy Clark won a shocking majority in
Tuesday's election - somewhere around 50 seats for the B.C. Liberals, 33
seats for the B.C. New Democratic Party, 1 breakthrough seat for the
Green Party of B.C. (Andrew Weaver in Oak Bay - Gordon Head) and one
seat for Independent Vicki Huntington (an unprecedented re-election).
It was a result the leading media rightly called stunning - because it
was the polar opposite of what the experts had almost universally
expected, as well as regrettably what I expected too as documented in
the previous edition of this blog: that the Adrian Dix New Democrats
with their deliberately modest platform would almost by acclamation
replace the tired and scandal-plagued and mistake-prone Liberals with a
comfortable majority but when most of the polls had been counted it was
clearly a Liberal win, even an increased majority, though at time of
writing the outcome of Clark's own constituency battle in Vancouver -
Point Grey was still uncertain, she being behind by a few hundred votes
with a few polls yet to be counted. She will remain Premier even if she
does lose her seat, and there are several options for her procedurally,
such as running in a manufactured vacancy.
Though recounts probably will be needed in some constituencies the
margin was 17 seats, up 3 from the previous election and in no danger
from recounts; the popular vote was about 44% Liberal (up 1.8%), 39% NDP
(down 3%) Greens 8% (unchanged) and Conservatives 5% (up 2).
Clark was gracious in victory, and the shape and look of her new caucus
is quite interesting: a blend of broad regional interests and genders
and rookie and returning MLAs and quite a few re-elected cabinet
ministers for continuity; she pledged to work for all interests, balance
the environment and the economy and share the proceeds with people. And
probably there won't be many inquiries into the previous regime's many
scandals....
As much as the win was a personal victory for Clark and Deputy Premier
and campaign chair Rich Coleman it also must be seen as a huge personal
loss for Dix and a clear sign that the B.C. New Democrats will have to
do some soul-searching and face-lifting if they hope to compete better
in 2017, such as whether to out-green the Greens or try to out-do the
Liberals on economic development and job creation.
What went wrong for the Dix campaign? Many factors will need to be
explored, especially the party's decision to avoid any negative
campaigning and its milquetoast platform that blatantly failed to
include an full array of direct and indirect job creation and
public/private industrial and economic developments, no creative
financial or public-service instruments and overall nothing to
symbollically grasp the imaginations of voters; their pro-tem budget
cynically used Liberal numbers that they knew were phoney, for example.
Dix's poor performance in the leaders' debate was unhelpful but not
fatal and his campaign tour and media systems seemed fine so critics are
led to look for other problems and soon one finds plenty, especially
his ill-fated flip-flop against the Kinder Morgan pipeline proposal even
before it had been presented, which was done on Earth Day in the
release of the NDP platform and apparently under pressure from
environmental activists who were threatening to jump to the Green Party.
The Kinder Morgan move may have kept some Greens inside the NDP tent but
it also may have cost the NDP the election because up until then they
had a 20-point lead but soon that dwindled to only 8 points and on
voting day it vanished, albeit aided by some other policy and
politicking issues.
Dix's flip-flop on Kinder Morgan was identified as the key turning point
by Liberal strategist Colin Hansen in an interview with Global's Jas
Johal and that analysis was echoed by several other analysts who
explained that it re-awakened fears in the business community and others
about the 1990s New Democrats coming back, and it was reinforced by a
Liberal TV ad that portrayed Dix as a weathervane being blown around in
the winds of change.
"People wanted the economy to be the government's foremost concern,"
said Hansen, which was reflected in the Liberal campaign slogan "Strong
Economy - Secure Future".
Similarly Phil Hochstein, one of the most outspoken business
representatives against the NDP, said Clark was able to connect the
government to jobs while Dix miscalculated, ran a bad rope-a-dope
campaign and sent a terrible signal when he said no to the Kinder Morgan
project before even hearing its proposal.
While Dix has explained that he made up his mind when he heard that
Kinder Morgan was enlarging its proposal in a way that would greatly
enlarge its tanker traffic, the election results show now that that was a
terrible and fatal blunder by Dix.
But it would be wrong to blame the loss on only one big mistake because
there were numerous other flaws apparent in the NDP's campaign
packaging, including such things as the continued use of gender bias and
other quotas in candidate selections and party officer elections, the
continuing heavy influence of union money in party management decisions
(such as the pay for president Moe Sihota) and a general predominance of
single-issue activists versus community-based generalists as well as a
complete lack of support for province-building industrial developments
and economic strategies.
While the Dix and party-insiders' platform did contain tweaks for the
wine and farm industries and promises of a level playing field for the
film industry etc., what it did not contain was a grand vision for the
province in a national and global context, such as reviving the Bank of
B.C. and creating a new currency to help finance a massive job-creation
strategy.
Another key policy challenge for both the NDP and the Greens is how to
handle public concerns about climate change, which to some extent have
been artificially inflated by activists propogating misguided notions
about how much global warming is natural and how much (actually little)
is man-made; the NDP and Green solutions were to pander to those
misconceptions in order to get volunteers and votes but the Clark
Liberals approach was to rise above such debates and go for the gusto -
within reason - on such things as fracking and LNG. The lefty activists
may be horrified but the voters of B.C. have just spoken the last word
on that debate for another four years.
Another issue for the NDP to reconsider is the role of democracy and
governance inside the party, which now is somewhat dominated by a few
insider cliques; but about three years ago a cabal of 13 NDP MLAs and
some other activists more or less rebelled against that system when
Carole James was the leader but it has more or less continued in effect
under Dix, who furthermore didn't seem to go out of his way to campaign
for any of the so-called baker's-dozen rebels and yet almost all of them
who sought re-election were able to get it on their own account as MLAs
who serve constituents first. And of course there should and will be
some personnel questions in the party and caucus too, given that the
result was not even close.
Obviously more analysis will be needed to determine exactly what
happened in yesterday's B.C. election, such as what role Dix's
memo-to-file played and what role gender issues and poll results and
social media played, among other factors we don't yet know of, but
meanwhile it's obvious that the province suddenly turned a sharp corner
and now the focus must shift to what the province should do in
tomorrow's new world.
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
The Daily Twigg May 14, 2013 1 pm
B.C. NDP likely to win solid majority
but result could become a landslide
By John Twigg
As British Columbia voters went to the polls this morning the outcome of a big NDP win in the provincial election was pretty much a foregone conclusion to party insiders and others such as media analysts familiar with the large amounts of near-unanimous polling data.
The last three polls with professional credibility showed the Adrian Dix New Democrats with 45 per cent of the popular vote or maybe a bit more, the B.C. Liberals under stopgap Premier Christy Clark maxed out 38 per cent or likely less, the B.C. Green Party solid at 9 per cent and possibly leading in two or three ridings in southern Vancouver Island, the B.C. Conservatives down at 6 per cent and falling and the Other category quite persistent at 3 per cent, reflecting that at least three Independent candidates and perhaps other non-mainstream candidates are quite competitive - which if all true will probably produce a comfortable majority for the NDP in the 85-seat Legislative Assembly as well as (hopefully) a multi-faceted Opposition.
In terms of seat totals it is harder to say because there are numerous ridings with anomalies and more than a few close contests, which can be deduced from the late-days campaign tours undertaken by Clark and especially Dix who added the novelty of a 12-hour final all-night plane and bus tour from 8 p.m. Monday to 8 a.m. today (Tuesday May 14 when polls opened), - but that said it looks like roughly 50 seats for the NDP, about 30 for the Liberals and maybe a handful for Greens and Others, which also was the consensus of callers to CKNW on Monday afternoon.
However my sense is that the result (after recounts in close contests) could become a landslide for the NDP including especially Premier Clark losing her Vancouver - Point Grey seat to the NDP's formidable David Eby, which is deduced from various subtle factors and especially from Eby's campaign winning the local sign war by about 6 to 1, with the virtual absence of Liberal lawn signs apparently indicating that many people who formerly supported the Liberals as the stop-the-NDP choice are no longer doing so, or if they are voting that way they are too embarrassed to admit it to their neighbours who may simply stay home and not vote.
It seems many other lesser Liberal incumbents will be going down too in swing ridings such as North Vancouver - Lonsdale and others in Burnaby and Surrey as B.C. citizens vote en masse against the devils who sneakily forced in the hated Harmonized Sales Tax and then botched its exit and who mishandled seemingly dozens but perhaps hundreds or even thousands of other policy and governance matters too, especially B.C. Hydro and B.C. Ferries, health and education and social services, the environment and the economy, taxpayer-paid political ads, quick-win ploys by partisan hacks paid for by taxpayers, and on and on, especially public-sector megaprojects tainted by over-runs and kickbacks.
The Liberal regime also became known for misrepresenting situations in numerous ways and places, especially the deficit and job numbers and even the supposed threats allegedly posed by an NDP regime. Their last grasp at a straw was to release an old internal policy paper from the NDP's governing Provincial Council and try to portray it as a dangerous secret plan but it was too little too late, especially when a party spokesman told the media it was merely a compilation of grass-roots wish-lists done before Dix had won the leadership contest more than two years ago to succeed former leader Carole James (who herself had been ousted by an internal revolt against her leadership style and weak politicking).
So the old anti-NDP scare tactics did not work this time, partly because the governing Liberals had morphed into something demonstrably even worse than the NDP and partly because Dix imposed a more disciplined and deliberately moderate policy regime onto the party's sometimes doctrinaire apparatus and then assembled an amazingly large, talented and united campaign team that literally and figuratively drove his bus home.
B.C. NDP likely to win solid majority
but result could become a landslide
By John Twigg
As British Columbia voters went to the polls this morning the outcome of a big NDP win in the provincial election was pretty much a foregone conclusion to party insiders and others such as media analysts familiar with the large amounts of near-unanimous polling data.
The last three polls with professional credibility showed the Adrian Dix New Democrats with 45 per cent of the popular vote or maybe a bit more, the B.C. Liberals under stopgap Premier Christy Clark maxed out 38 per cent or likely less, the B.C. Green Party solid at 9 per cent and possibly leading in two or three ridings in southern Vancouver Island, the B.C. Conservatives down at 6 per cent and falling and the Other category quite persistent at 3 per cent, reflecting that at least three Independent candidates and perhaps other non-mainstream candidates are quite competitive - which if all true will probably produce a comfortable majority for the NDP in the 85-seat Legislative Assembly as well as (hopefully) a multi-faceted Opposition.
In terms of seat totals it is harder to say because there are numerous ridings with anomalies and more than a few close contests, which can be deduced from the late-days campaign tours undertaken by Clark and especially Dix who added the novelty of a 12-hour final all-night plane and bus tour from 8 p.m. Monday to 8 a.m. today (Tuesday May 14 when polls opened), - but that said it looks like roughly 50 seats for the NDP, about 30 for the Liberals and maybe a handful for Greens and Others, which also was the consensus of callers to CKNW on Monday afternoon.
However my sense is that the result (after recounts in close contests) could become a landslide for the NDP including especially Premier Clark losing her Vancouver - Point Grey seat to the NDP's formidable David Eby, which is deduced from various subtle factors and especially from Eby's campaign winning the local sign war by about 6 to 1, with the virtual absence of Liberal lawn signs apparently indicating that many people who formerly supported the Liberals as the stop-the-NDP choice are no longer doing so, or if they are voting that way they are too embarrassed to admit it to their neighbours who may simply stay home and not vote.
It seems many other lesser Liberal incumbents will be going down too in swing ridings such as North Vancouver - Lonsdale and others in Burnaby and Surrey as B.C. citizens vote en masse against the devils who sneakily forced in the hated Harmonized Sales Tax and then botched its exit and who mishandled seemingly dozens but perhaps hundreds or even thousands of other policy and governance matters too, especially B.C. Hydro and B.C. Ferries, health and education and social services, the environment and the economy, taxpayer-paid political ads, quick-win ploys by partisan hacks paid for by taxpayers, and on and on, especially public-sector megaprojects tainted by over-runs and kickbacks.
The Liberal regime also became known for misrepresenting situations in numerous ways and places, especially the deficit and job numbers and even the supposed threats allegedly posed by an NDP regime. Their last grasp at a straw was to release an old internal policy paper from the NDP's governing Provincial Council and try to portray it as a dangerous secret plan but it was too little too late, especially when a party spokesman told the media it was merely a compilation of grass-roots wish-lists done before Dix had won the leadership contest more than two years ago to succeed former leader Carole James (who herself had been ousted by an internal revolt against her leadership style and weak politicking).
So the old anti-NDP scare tactics did not work this time, partly because the governing Liberals had morphed into something demonstrably even worse than the NDP and partly because Dix imposed a more disciplined and deliberately moderate policy regime onto the party's sometimes doctrinaire apparatus and then assembled an amazingly large, talented and united campaign team that literally and figuratively drove his bus home.
NDP could win 60 of 85 seats
Thus we also could see an election result something like 60 NDP, 15 Liberals, 4 Greens, 4 Independents and 2 Conservatives - which if it happened (yes that does include some wishful thinking on my part) would send B.C. politics into uncharted waters and maybe cause a brief tizzy in stock markets, bond-rating agencies, real estate brokerages and resource-company boardrooms, but in the long run (say three years) it could become a marvellous opportunity to remake British Columbia into a shining-light beacon of democracy and enlightened self-interest, of intellectual freedom (including religion!), equality of opportunity and human rights and a bastion of environmental excellence and economic self-sufficiency and stability in a world rapidly decaying towards war and social unrest.
As the Dix New Democrats said twice at the top of their final campaign news release they can grow the economy too and in fact that is probably the most hopeful aspect of all, that a Dix NDP regime can grab hold of the many strong horses in the provincial economy and get them pulling together with a clear purpose to a new and better direction, one practical step at a time.
Overall it was a brilliant, masterful and dogged campaign by the Dix-led New Democrats, certainly one of the best campaigns ever in the history of B.C. politics, while the Clark Liberals ran a rather morally cheap and shallow campaign, the Green campaign was good but only narrowly focussed regionally around leader Jane Sterk in Victoria - Beacon Hill and star candidate Andrew Weaver in Oak Bay - Gordon Head, and the B.C. Conservative Party never overcame its internal divisions and leader John Cummins made only a few ripples in the policy pond as its once-high hopes faded away.
Though Dix didn't win either of the leadership debates he also didn't lose them and nor did he blunder in the debates or elsewhere so he was able to end up winning the war by working overtime and assembling a team able to focus on what needed to be said and done to win.
NDP
news release May 14, 2013
10 Reasons Why BC Voters Will Vote for Change Today
10. Yes to Jobs and Economic Development: The NDP plan invests
in skills training to grow the economy and create jobs, and
takes concrete steps to support mining and natural gas, high-tech, forestry, film, agriculture, tourism and small business.
9. Skilled Workforce: We will invest $40 million in skills training and $100 million in a student grants program annually to grow the economy, create jobs and build a thriving middle class.
8. Honesty About Finances: Our fully-costed plan says exactly what we’ll do and how we’ll pay for it. There will be no income tax increases for 98% of British Columbians and there are no HST-like surprises.
7. Standing up for Ferry Riders: We will keep current ferry fares in place through March 31, 2015, while we clean up the mess the BC Liberals have made at BC Ferries.
6. A New More Positive Approach to Politics: We will ban corporate and union donations, eliminate taxpayer-funded partisan advertising and call a Public Inquiry into the BC Rail Scandal.
5. Helping Children: It’s time for a new government that cares about children, with real help like our new BC Family Bonus, reducing child care costs and opening more child care spaces.
4. Improving Classroom Learning: We will hire new specialist teachers and education assistants, to support special needs kids and to free up teachers so they can focus on giving every child the attention they need and deserve.
3. Better Health Care: Our plan will improve seniors’ care, mental health services for children and youth, and hospital care – especially in targeted rural communities
2. Protecting the Environment: We will take back control of pipeline decisions and protect our coasts from potentially catastrophic oil spills.
1. Change: British Columbians deserve better than more of the same. The HST broke your trust. So did the BC Rail and quick win scandals. It’s time for a change – change for the better.
These are 10 reasons British Columbians will vote for change today.
9. Skilled Workforce: We will invest $40 million in skills training and $100 million in a student grants program annually to grow the economy, create jobs and build a thriving middle class.
8. Honesty About Finances: Our fully-costed plan says exactly what we’ll do and how we’ll pay for it. There will be no income tax increases for 98% of British Columbians and there are no HST-like surprises.
7. Standing up for Ferry Riders: We will keep current ferry fares in place through March 31, 2015, while we clean up the mess the BC Liberals have made at BC Ferries.
6. A New More Positive Approach to Politics: We will ban corporate and union donations, eliminate taxpayer-funded partisan advertising and call a Public Inquiry into the BC Rail Scandal.
5. Helping Children: It’s time for a new government that cares about children, with real help like our new BC Family Bonus, reducing child care costs and opening more child care spaces.
4. Improving Classroom Learning: We will hire new specialist teachers and education assistants, to support special needs kids and to free up teachers so they can focus on giving every child the attention they need and deserve.
3. Better Health Care: Our plan will improve seniors’ care, mental health services for children and youth, and hospital care – especially in targeted rural communities
2. Protecting the Environment: We will take back control of pipeline decisions and protect our coasts from potentially catastrophic oil spills.
1. Change: British Columbians deserve better than more of the same. The HST broke your trust. So did the BC Rail and quick win scandals. It’s time for a change – change for the better.
These are 10 reasons British Columbians will vote for change today.
Thursday, May 9, 2013
The Daily Twigg May 9, 2013
Clark's very poor performance as Premier
provoked Liberal partisans into 801 revolt
By John Twigg
There are many questions lingering about the 801 Movement story broken last night by Global TV B.C., like exactly who the club members are and how many, but one other key question is "why?" - why would anyone revolt against B.C. Liberal Party Premier Christy Clark on the eve of an election?
That is, why would any intelligent partisan person revolt against their own party's leader in a way that would knowingly damage that leader's electoral prospects?
It does seem unthinkable but stuff happens, especially in B.C. politics, and a similar event happened almost simultaneously when a gay man suddenly quit as campaign manager in Langley for B.C. Liberal cabinet minister Mary Polak amidst allegations that he had been bullied and exposed to hatred by some old soldiers in the Liberal party.
Are the two events connected? Some Liberal partisans immediately suspected they were both dirty tricks engineered by New Democrats but what little evidence we have suggests the campaign manager's move was an individual one-of-a-kind thing whereas the 801 Club sounds like a loose cabal of business interests long active in the Liberal backrooms.
So why would seemingly loyal Liberal backroomers suddenly revolt against their leader at a most inopportune time? It could well be that they weren't intending to go public yet but once Global reporter Jas Johal and Victoria bureau chief Keith Baldrey realized they had separately discovered the same hidden story (replete with different button designs) they felt they had enough to turn it into a news item for yesterday's 6 p.m. news, which became a running debate this morning.
But again why? Why would partisans revolt against a sitting Premier? The answer is Clark's performance has been so revolting that she deserves to be revolted against and really the question could be "why did it take so long?".
Clark mishandled almost everything she touched
Partisans may not like this statement but it's a fair comment: Premier Christy Clark has mishandled almost everything she has touched.
From dropping her plans for a quickie provincial election soon after she won the B.C. Liberal leadership about two years ago (a win aided by numerous questionable tactics, as blogger Alex Tsakumis has revealed) to her recent abuses of taxpayer dollars with a dubious budget and taxpayer-paid political ads to support it, she has been a disaster.
Clark did a poor job of defending the Harmonized Sales Tax in the referendum on it and then she did a poor job of exiting from it, aided by more dubious financial shenanigans (backloading the deficit)
Clark's handling of the whole BC Rail scandal has been appalling too, including inconsistent comments about her own role in the sale of BCR and subsequent dubious evasions of a proper investigation of the sale of a very large asset for a very long term to buyers who were also friends and backers of the party, in a process seen to be flawed by rival bidders and with certain players obviously conflicted, most notably lobbyist and Clark backer Patrick Kinsella who was working for two or three participants at once.
Clark's abuse of the B.C. Legislature also was gross: it sat for only a few dozen days in two years, including the blatant cancellation of a Fall sitting apparently to among other things avoid questions from former Liberal John van Dongen about her exact role in the BC Rail sale. The revolving door in cabinet was extreme too as numerous veteran pols decided their lives would be better spent elsewhere.
Clark also alienated other Premiers and federal players, various mayors, many interest groups, virtually all unions and even some businesses (viz Telus and B.C. Place) - to the point that her main plus is being not-the-NDP.
Her budgets were jokes; she ran up the debt and now claims to be fighting against spending and deficits. Her hypocrisy is stunning.
Probably the last straw for more than a few Liberal insiders was the turmoil and revolving doors amongst her own staffers, which crew degenerated into the sort of tawdry partisan posturing that sought "quick wins" by pandering to targeted ethnic groups with promises of apologies over historic wrongs - which was revealed by leaked documents from other disgruntled insiders.
In fact there are probably thousands of reasons why Clark deserves to be ousted, possibly topped by her secretive approach to the huge Site C project (one of its main purposes could be to collect rainwater for use in natural gas fracking, and to produce power for LNG freezing), her duplicity on the Enbridge North Gateway and Kinder Morgan TransMountain pipeline projects, her tolerance of the carbon tax abuses, and on and on.
But surely one of those causes that deserves a lot more mainstream media attention was her role in preserving the coverup of numerous scandals until the possible perps could depart, particularly several lawsuits involving bulk water exports but conceivably other concerns too such as some awkward truths behind the Vanoc 2010 Olympics finances and related projects.
Blogger Laila Yuille has gone so far as to produce a Top 100 list of reasons Clark should be ousted and with reader input that list has grown to about 150 items (see http://lailayuile.com/tag/100-reasons-bc-liberals-need-to-go/ ), but a serious student of political science could conceivably list about 1,000 flaws, or certainly 801 (eg jumping a red light with her son and a newspaper reporter in the car on the eve of an election campaign).
It will be interesting to see what the professional pollsters find were the major causes of voting behaviour in the coming election but it's already obvious that voting against the misdeeds of Premier Christy Clark and Gordon Campbell beforehand is a major factor - even amongst party supporters! - though it may be manifested in stay-home not-voting decisions too.
So we may not learn about the 801 movement until 8:01 p.m. on Tuesday (when polls have closed) but if it didn't exist already it would soon have had to be created.
It's hard to believe but in only about two years Christy Clark has earned the reputation as probably the worst Premier in B.C. history, exceeding even the NDP's Ujjal Dosanjh.
In other words Clark's own poor performance provoked the formation of the 801 movement; it only should have happened sooner.
Dix New Democrats remind voters of Liberal flaws
Meanwhile the B.C. New Democrats under leader Adrian Dix have been running a professionally astute campaign that has them looking ready to govern, perhaps moreso than ever.
That was evident anew this morning when NDP finance critic Bruce Ralston gave a clear and plausible defence of the NDP's fiscal and economic plans on the Bill Good Show in response to a somewhat biased and negative policy analysis by Calgary academic Jack Mintz yesterday in the National Post (which failed to mention that Mintz also has had some business and political interests in B.C. affairs).
Ralston in the past has been a dreadfully boring speaker, with too many umms and aahs and long pauses and wanderings off topic but this morning he was clear and direct and obviously had a good grasp on the issues cited by Mintz like corporate investment and tax climates.
Dix also has maintained his one-a-day policy pronouncements and an effective touring schedule that gets him into lots of swing ridings and garners spots in lots of newscasts.
And best of all the NDP, perhaps mindful of something I wrote here earlier, has shifted their advertising themes from all and only positive stuff about the NDP platform to now a balanced mix including reminding voters why they should turn out to vote against the Liberals too, especially regarding the hated HST.
That's important because voter turnout is always a key factor in B.C. elections, which tend to be close in popular vote regardless of which party wins the most seats.
The early flow of voters to advance polls and other indicators suggest there are lots of people motivated to punish the B.C. Liberals for their many transgressions and it now seems the NDP will be the main beneficiary, though Conservatives and Independents will be the choice for that in a few ridings.
The Green Party of B.C. has run a good campaign too but their strength is focussed in only a few ridings on southern Vancouver Island, their finances are meagre and star candidate Andrew Weaver has becoming a sort of lightning rod for controversy while leader Jane Sterk has struggled for media coverage and may have hurt her cause with a strident position on climate policy and carbon taxes. The party also has become viewed by some as too anti-job and anti-industry to be supported.
Furthermore Dix's Earth-Day flip-flop to a position against added oil-tanker traffic also may have forestalled some environmentalist votes flowing to the Green Party though that position had the downside of also reminding business interests why they should work against the NDP, which seems to have been reflected in tightening opinion polls.
Anyway the outcome next Tuesday will be interesting as usual, and it could even depend on some official recounts in close contests with heavy advance voting.
Clark's very poor performance as Premier
provoked Liberal partisans into 801 revolt
By John Twigg
There are many questions lingering about the 801 Movement story broken last night by Global TV B.C., like exactly who the club members are and how many, but one other key question is "why?" - why would anyone revolt against B.C. Liberal Party Premier Christy Clark on the eve of an election?
That is, why would any intelligent partisan person revolt against their own party's leader in a way that would knowingly damage that leader's electoral prospects?
It does seem unthinkable but stuff happens, especially in B.C. politics, and a similar event happened almost simultaneously when a gay man suddenly quit as campaign manager in Langley for B.C. Liberal cabinet minister Mary Polak amidst allegations that he had been bullied and exposed to hatred by some old soldiers in the Liberal party.
Are the two events connected? Some Liberal partisans immediately suspected they were both dirty tricks engineered by New Democrats but what little evidence we have suggests the campaign manager's move was an individual one-of-a-kind thing whereas the 801 Club sounds like a loose cabal of business interests long active in the Liberal backrooms.
So why would seemingly loyal Liberal backroomers suddenly revolt against their leader at a most inopportune time? It could well be that they weren't intending to go public yet but once Global reporter Jas Johal and Victoria bureau chief Keith Baldrey realized they had separately discovered the same hidden story (replete with different button designs) they felt they had enough to turn it into a news item for yesterday's 6 p.m. news, which became a running debate this morning.
But again why? Why would partisans revolt against a sitting Premier? The answer is Clark's performance has been so revolting that she deserves to be revolted against and really the question could be "why did it take so long?".
Clark mishandled almost everything she touched
Partisans may not like this statement but it's a fair comment: Premier Christy Clark has mishandled almost everything she has touched.
From dropping her plans for a quickie provincial election soon after she won the B.C. Liberal leadership about two years ago (a win aided by numerous questionable tactics, as blogger Alex Tsakumis has revealed) to her recent abuses of taxpayer dollars with a dubious budget and taxpayer-paid political ads to support it, she has been a disaster.
Clark did a poor job of defending the Harmonized Sales Tax in the referendum on it and then she did a poor job of exiting from it, aided by more dubious financial shenanigans (backloading the deficit)
Clark's handling of the whole BC Rail scandal has been appalling too, including inconsistent comments about her own role in the sale of BCR and subsequent dubious evasions of a proper investigation of the sale of a very large asset for a very long term to buyers who were also friends and backers of the party, in a process seen to be flawed by rival bidders and with certain players obviously conflicted, most notably lobbyist and Clark backer Patrick Kinsella who was working for two or three participants at once.
Clark's abuse of the B.C. Legislature also was gross: it sat for only a few dozen days in two years, including the blatant cancellation of a Fall sitting apparently to among other things avoid questions from former Liberal John van Dongen about her exact role in the BC Rail sale. The revolving door in cabinet was extreme too as numerous veteran pols decided their lives would be better spent elsewhere.
Clark also alienated other Premiers and federal players, various mayors, many interest groups, virtually all unions and even some businesses (viz Telus and B.C. Place) - to the point that her main plus is being not-the-NDP.
Her budgets were jokes; she ran up the debt and now claims to be fighting against spending and deficits. Her hypocrisy is stunning.
Probably the last straw for more than a few Liberal insiders was the turmoil and revolving doors amongst her own staffers, which crew degenerated into the sort of tawdry partisan posturing that sought "quick wins" by pandering to targeted ethnic groups with promises of apologies over historic wrongs - which was revealed by leaked documents from other disgruntled insiders.
In fact there are probably thousands of reasons why Clark deserves to be ousted, possibly topped by her secretive approach to the huge Site C project (one of its main purposes could be to collect rainwater for use in natural gas fracking, and to produce power for LNG freezing), her duplicity on the Enbridge North Gateway and Kinder Morgan TransMountain pipeline projects, her tolerance of the carbon tax abuses, and on and on.
But surely one of those causes that deserves a lot more mainstream media attention was her role in preserving the coverup of numerous scandals until the possible perps could depart, particularly several lawsuits involving bulk water exports but conceivably other concerns too such as some awkward truths behind the Vanoc 2010 Olympics finances and related projects.
Blogger Laila Yuille has gone so far as to produce a Top 100 list of reasons Clark should be ousted and with reader input that list has grown to about 150 items (see http://lailayuile.com/tag/100-reasons-bc-liberals-need-to-go/ ), but a serious student of political science could conceivably list about 1,000 flaws, or certainly 801 (eg jumping a red light with her son and a newspaper reporter in the car on the eve of an election campaign).
It will be interesting to see what the professional pollsters find were the major causes of voting behaviour in the coming election but it's already obvious that voting against the misdeeds of Premier Christy Clark and Gordon Campbell beforehand is a major factor - even amongst party supporters! - though it may be manifested in stay-home not-voting decisions too.
So we may not learn about the 801 movement until 8:01 p.m. on Tuesday (when polls have closed) but if it didn't exist already it would soon have had to be created.
It's hard to believe but in only about two years Christy Clark has earned the reputation as probably the worst Premier in B.C. history, exceeding even the NDP's Ujjal Dosanjh.
In other words Clark's own poor performance provoked the formation of the 801 movement; it only should have happened sooner.
Dix New Democrats remind voters of Liberal flaws
Meanwhile the B.C. New Democrats under leader Adrian Dix have been running a professionally astute campaign that has them looking ready to govern, perhaps moreso than ever.
That was evident anew this morning when NDP finance critic Bruce Ralston gave a clear and plausible defence of the NDP's fiscal and economic plans on the Bill Good Show in response to a somewhat biased and negative policy analysis by Calgary academic Jack Mintz yesterday in the National Post (which failed to mention that Mintz also has had some business and political interests in B.C. affairs).
Ralston in the past has been a dreadfully boring speaker, with too many umms and aahs and long pauses and wanderings off topic but this morning he was clear and direct and obviously had a good grasp on the issues cited by Mintz like corporate investment and tax climates.
Dix also has maintained his one-a-day policy pronouncements and an effective touring schedule that gets him into lots of swing ridings and garners spots in lots of newscasts.
And best of all the NDP, perhaps mindful of something I wrote here earlier, has shifted their advertising themes from all and only positive stuff about the NDP platform to now a balanced mix including reminding voters why they should turn out to vote against the Liberals too, especially regarding the hated HST.
That's important because voter turnout is always a key factor in B.C. elections, which tend to be close in popular vote regardless of which party wins the most seats.
The early flow of voters to advance polls and other indicators suggest there are lots of people motivated to punish the B.C. Liberals for their many transgressions and it now seems the NDP will be the main beneficiary, though Conservatives and Independents will be the choice for that in a few ridings.
The Green Party of B.C. has run a good campaign too but their strength is focussed in only a few ridings on southern Vancouver Island, their finances are meagre and star candidate Andrew Weaver has becoming a sort of lightning rod for controversy while leader Jane Sterk has struggled for media coverage and may have hurt her cause with a strident position on climate policy and carbon taxes. The party also has become viewed by some as too anti-job and anti-industry to be supported.
Furthermore Dix's Earth-Day flip-flop to a position against added oil-tanker traffic also may have forestalled some environmentalist votes flowing to the Green Party though that position had the downside of also reminding business interests why they should work against the NDP, which seems to have been reflected in tightening opinion polls.
Anyway the outcome next Tuesday will be interesting as usual, and it could even depend on some official recounts in close contests with heavy advance voting.
Thursday, May 2, 2013
The Daily Twigg May 2, 2013
Could Dix NDP jump to pro-green stance
reinforce fears that NDP is anti-business?
By John Twigg
I was so disappointed by the televised leaders' debate on Monday (Apr 29) that I postponed plans to do a writeup on it and now we're beginning to learn some background to the debate and other issues that may explain some things happening in the B.C. election campaign.
The buzz news this morning was an opinion poll from the eastern-based Forum firm which reportedly found the B.C. NDP support at 39% - which would be a sharp drop from findings in other polls - and the B.C. Liberals at 35%, which if accurate would be a significant jump from previous polls and give them hope to eke out a win on May 14 (which IMO would be a travesty and disaster).
So are those numbers believable? Forum's record is a bit mixed but its methodologies seem sound so the numbers cannot be dismissed, and with a 3% margin of error they are not that far away from Angus Reid and Ipsos Reid, who reportedly have update polls coming out soon.
Some other pollsters of lesser renown also have released poll findings which suggest that the leaders' debate did not change voting intentions very much if at all but still it will be most interesting to see what the big pollsters report.
Several leading pundits are suggesting that the somewhat poor performance in the debate by NDP leader Adrian Dix may have lost some support, because he looked and sounded very nervous at the outset, but the post-debate polls generally found that Dix won the debate anyway because B.C. Liberal Party Premier Christy Clark failed to score a knockout punch while B.C. Green Party leader Jane Sterk and B.C. Conservative Party leader John Cummins both failed to sparkle and rise to the occasion.
Dix flip-flop on K-M seen anti-business
So if it wasn't the wet-firecracker debate that shifted public opinion, what was it? I think it was Dix's shocking flip-flop on the Kinder Morgan pipeline proposal to twin the Trans Mountain line and greatly increase oil exports out of the Burnaby terminal.
That proposal of course has numerous drawbacks, most notably the increased tanker traffic through Vancouver's Inner Harbour which Dix correctly cited, but to nip it in the bud before even giving the proponents a chance to make a formal proposal was in my view - and the view of many others including the mainstream media - a serious mistake because it sent an anti-business message at just the wrong moment in the campaign. And now it may be showing up in the polls.
Dix and the NDP may well still win the election anyway if only by a sort of acclamation because the three alternatives have even worse drawbacks (see the recent Angus Reid poll results on ethics and accountability re Dix vs Clark) but still one wonders why Dix did it in the first place, and if he did that then what would he also do as Premier?
It's all the more curious because Dix's position on Kinder Morgan had long been to withhold judgement until the formal proposal was submitted but when he released the party's official platform on Earth Day April 22 he also announced a new approach to Kinder Morgan, namely that he and the party would henceforth be opposing any major increase in tanker traffic from Burnaby.
NDP energy critic John Horgan quickly tried to argue that a twinned pipeline could still go to a different terminus, such as directly to refineries in Washington State, but the damage was done: Dix had taken an anti-business stance at odds with the historically pro-business sentiments of most B.C. voters.
Why? We still don't know for sure but snippets suggest my initial speculation in the previous issue was accurate, namely that certain environmental activists had pressured Dix to do so or else they would flock to the Green Party, and that probably coincided with internal polling by the NDP finding growing support for the Greens as well as a flurry of coverage by mainstream media about the improving electoral prospects for Green candidates in southern Vancouver Island, notably renowned climatologist Andrew Weaver in Oak Bay - Gordon Head and party leader Jane Sterk in Victoria - Beacon Hill where she is challenging former NDP leader Carole James in a riding that historically has had the highest level of Green support in the province.
Dix responded to pressure from greens
So now we begin to see more clearly that the main reason Dix suddenly veered to a pro-Green anti-business policy stance - at least on the Kinder Morgan issue - was to pander for votes.
We could be generous and pragmatic and acknowledge that that is simply what politicians must do if they want to win elections but the timing and timbre could still backfire against Dix. Yes it probably forestalled some voter shifts to the Greens but on the other hand it gave the Liberals a classic example to use against the NDP's Achilles Heel and claim anew that the NDP cannot be trusted with power because they tend to pander to non-business voters and implement anti-business policies.
Some evidence of that paradigm can be seen in the tweets issued this morning by the NDP campaign focussed on how their platform is pro-industry, especially high-tech and forests and sustainable Green jobs - but who isn't?
"A sustainable diversified economy, new opportunities for good jobs, and a strong middle class is the foundation of the NDP platform," one tweet said (in paraphrase, words not exact).
And just moments ago as I was writing this Dix appeared in a clip on BC1 saying (again in paraphrase) "The NDP is saying Yes to mining, Yes to forestry, Yes to film and television productions, Yes to natural gas - it's not just energy that we're interested in [i.e. opposed to]" - which further suggests that the Dix New Democrats are now in a damage-control mode.
Similarly there was an NDP tweet today announcing that the party in government would accelerate the recognition of credentials of foreign-trained professionals, which no doubt will be of interest to doctors and engineers, etc.
Creative vision still lacking
Meanwhile there is still a cone of silence around my proposals in the previous issue and in previous years for B.C. to get serious about moving towards full employment by reviving a Bank of B.C. and creating a new currency (paper, metal and electronic) to help finance direct job-creation projects (eg removiong scotch broom) and to provide social security and business stability in the event of a global failure of central banks and/or the collapse of the U.S. economy.
Nor has anyone picked up on suggestions to legalize and tax marijuana and industrial hemp, to engage in bulk exports of surplus water and to help all manner of new green renewable projects such as a new sewage-gas-fuelled ferry crossing from YVR-Iona to Gabriola-big island. Etcetera.
So we see that in this election campaign there is still a serious lack of vision and creativity and instead there is merely more of the same-old same-old pandering to vested interests and false but entrenched biases and wrong notions.
That said, we can now sit back and see what the big-boy pollsters are finding.
Could Dix NDP jump to pro-green stance
reinforce fears that NDP is anti-business?
By John Twigg
I was so disappointed by the televised leaders' debate on Monday (Apr 29) that I postponed plans to do a writeup on it and now we're beginning to learn some background to the debate and other issues that may explain some things happening in the B.C. election campaign.
The buzz news this morning was an opinion poll from the eastern-based Forum firm which reportedly found the B.C. NDP support at 39% - which would be a sharp drop from findings in other polls - and the B.C. Liberals at 35%, which if accurate would be a significant jump from previous polls and give them hope to eke out a win on May 14 (which IMO would be a travesty and disaster).
So are those numbers believable? Forum's record is a bit mixed but its methodologies seem sound so the numbers cannot be dismissed, and with a 3% margin of error they are not that far away from Angus Reid and Ipsos Reid, who reportedly have update polls coming out soon.
Some other pollsters of lesser renown also have released poll findings which suggest that the leaders' debate did not change voting intentions very much if at all but still it will be most interesting to see what the big pollsters report.
Several leading pundits are suggesting that the somewhat poor performance in the debate by NDP leader Adrian Dix may have lost some support, because he looked and sounded very nervous at the outset, but the post-debate polls generally found that Dix won the debate anyway because B.C. Liberal Party Premier Christy Clark failed to score a knockout punch while B.C. Green Party leader Jane Sterk and B.C. Conservative Party leader John Cummins both failed to sparkle and rise to the occasion.
Dix flip-flop on K-M seen anti-business
So if it wasn't the wet-firecracker debate that shifted public opinion, what was it? I think it was Dix's shocking flip-flop on the Kinder Morgan pipeline proposal to twin the Trans Mountain line and greatly increase oil exports out of the Burnaby terminal.
That proposal of course has numerous drawbacks, most notably the increased tanker traffic through Vancouver's Inner Harbour which Dix correctly cited, but to nip it in the bud before even giving the proponents a chance to make a formal proposal was in my view - and the view of many others including the mainstream media - a serious mistake because it sent an anti-business message at just the wrong moment in the campaign. And now it may be showing up in the polls.
Dix and the NDP may well still win the election anyway if only by a sort of acclamation because the three alternatives have even worse drawbacks (see the recent Angus Reid poll results on ethics and accountability re Dix vs Clark) but still one wonders why Dix did it in the first place, and if he did that then what would he also do as Premier?
It's all the more curious because Dix's position on Kinder Morgan had long been to withhold judgement until the formal proposal was submitted but when he released the party's official platform on Earth Day April 22 he also announced a new approach to Kinder Morgan, namely that he and the party would henceforth be opposing any major increase in tanker traffic from Burnaby.
NDP energy critic John Horgan quickly tried to argue that a twinned pipeline could still go to a different terminus, such as directly to refineries in Washington State, but the damage was done: Dix had taken an anti-business stance at odds with the historically pro-business sentiments of most B.C. voters.
Why? We still don't know for sure but snippets suggest my initial speculation in the previous issue was accurate, namely that certain environmental activists had pressured Dix to do so or else they would flock to the Green Party, and that probably coincided with internal polling by the NDP finding growing support for the Greens as well as a flurry of coverage by mainstream media about the improving electoral prospects for Green candidates in southern Vancouver Island, notably renowned climatologist Andrew Weaver in Oak Bay - Gordon Head and party leader Jane Sterk in Victoria - Beacon Hill where she is challenging former NDP leader Carole James in a riding that historically has had the highest level of Green support in the province.
Dix responded to pressure from greens
So now we begin to see more clearly that the main reason Dix suddenly veered to a pro-Green anti-business policy stance - at least on the Kinder Morgan issue - was to pander for votes.
We could be generous and pragmatic and acknowledge that that is simply what politicians must do if they want to win elections but the timing and timbre could still backfire against Dix. Yes it probably forestalled some voter shifts to the Greens but on the other hand it gave the Liberals a classic example to use against the NDP's Achilles Heel and claim anew that the NDP cannot be trusted with power because they tend to pander to non-business voters and implement anti-business policies.
Some evidence of that paradigm can be seen in the tweets issued this morning by the NDP campaign focussed on how their platform is pro-industry, especially high-tech and forests and sustainable Green jobs - but who isn't?
"A sustainable diversified economy, new opportunities for good jobs, and a strong middle class is the foundation of the NDP platform," one tweet said (in paraphrase, words not exact).
And just moments ago as I was writing this Dix appeared in a clip on BC1 saying (again in paraphrase) "The NDP is saying Yes to mining, Yes to forestry, Yes to film and television productions, Yes to natural gas - it's not just energy that we're interested in [i.e. opposed to]" - which further suggests that the Dix New Democrats are now in a damage-control mode.
Similarly there was an NDP tweet today announcing that the party in government would accelerate the recognition of credentials of foreign-trained professionals, which no doubt will be of interest to doctors and engineers, etc.
Creative vision still lacking
Meanwhile there is still a cone of silence around my proposals in the previous issue and in previous years for B.C. to get serious about moving towards full employment by reviving a Bank of B.C. and creating a new currency (paper, metal and electronic) to help finance direct job-creation projects (eg removiong scotch broom) and to provide social security and business stability in the event of a global failure of central banks and/or the collapse of the U.S. economy.
Nor has anyone picked up on suggestions to legalize and tax marijuana and industrial hemp, to engage in bulk exports of surplus water and to help all manner of new green renewable projects such as a new sewage-gas-fuelled ferry crossing from YVR-Iona to Gabriola-big island. Etcetera.
So we see that in this election campaign there is still a serious lack of vision and creativity and instead there is merely more of the same-old same-old pandering to vested interests and false but entrenched biases and wrong notions.
That said, we can now sit back and see what the big-boy pollsters are finding.
Monday, April 29, 2013
The Daily Twigg April 29, 2013
So much more could and should be done
to make B.C. the truly best place in the world
By John Twigg (Copyright)
It's a bit rich to suddenly see all the fooferaw around Premier Christy Clark's foolish red-light incident in which leading pundits, the mainstream media and even some of her own B.C. Liberal Party members are now questioning her character.
Yes she was stupid to stop and then go through a red light at a deserted intersection at 5 a.m. with her son on the way to his hockey practise and even moreso with a Vancouver Sun reporter in the back seat preparing a pre-election profile, and she was even more stupid when she mis-spoke about what she claimed she and her son to have said about it before and then gradually changed her story about her story...
Clark's character has long been questionable
We've heard Clark do that many times before about so many issues, from misrepresenting her dubious role as a leaky cabinet minister in the scandal-plagued sale of BCRail to her latest fabrications about the state of B.C.'s finances and economy and what the bond-rating agencies say about it, and what the New Democrats espouse and on and on.
Hey folks where have you been these last three years or so? The same folks now questioning Clark's character sat more or less mute while she pulled off numerous similar peccadilloes on her way to winning - some say stealing - the leadership of the B.C. Liberal Party about two years ago, including the notorious noxious use of bulk sales of new voting membership in the Indo-Canadian communities and then apparently the bulk voting by those memberships too, which numerous party insiders are aware of but so far only the notorious "political blogger" Alex G. Tsakumis has reported in any detail (especially the involvement of a convicted thug).
Whether or not Christy Clark's leadership win was marginally legal or not, it now appears that a cabal of powerful backroomers including lobbyist Patrick Kinsella and senior government lawyer Doug Eastwood among others inserted her into the Premier's Office so she could keep a lid on that and numerous other potential scandals in the wake of former premier Gordon Campbell's unexpected ouster in the wake of the Basi-Virk and Harmonized Sales Tax fiascos. Campbell is now in de facto witness protection serving as Canada's Agent General London while Kinsella reportedly is retiring and moving to a gated community in Palm Springs and Eastwood has been transferred to the B.C. Justice Institute training academy.
Dix shies away from personal attacks
The list of issues Clark has mishandled is too long for this column and sadly you won't find that list on the B.C. New Democratic Party's website either due to an anomaly in this campaign, namely that NDP leader Adrian Dix has decided to only offer positive alternatives, though the NDP did recently (Apr. 28) publish a cutely-worded list of why a dozen of the B.C. Liberal Party candidates could be called upon to step aside (which came soon after pundit Rafe Mair had criticized Dix for being too milquetoast [my word, his concept] against Clark).
NDP MLAs and officers have criticized numerous policy failings by Clark and the Liberals, especially re misrepresenting the size of the deficits and debt, but none have gone so far as to say she is personally flawed even though Christy has run up the debt even more than Campbell did, she has botched numerous projects such as the BC Place naming and the Prince George wooden office tower, and she has alienated many of her party's stalwarts, notably Kevin Falcon and George Abbott who lost the leadership and already have new jobs outside government.
Christy also has continued the chronic underfunding of numerous critical social services, she has allowed very few sittings of the legislature, she has churned through staff like a revolving door for a shoe sale, she has alienated other Premiers and scrambled to field a full slate of candidates, and abused the election process with massive spending on taxpayer-paid advertisements, and on and on like that.
But now the MSM pundits and a few diehard Liberals are now questioning her character because she drove through an empty intersection at 5 a.m.? and then misrepresented it?? It's ludicrous, but if that's what it takes then so be it. It's obviously time overdue for her and her colleagues to go for many many reasons, and perhaps this will be her last straw. We'll see how it plays or if it is even raised in the televised debate tonight at 6:30.
Dix faces new questions after policy flip-flop
However Clark is sheltered somewhat by a strange irony that is curiously typical of B.C.'s often tumultuous topsy-turvy politics and that is that B.C. NDP leader Adrian Dix also is being subjected to renewed questions about his character (which probably is also partly why he eschewed negative campaigning).
Dix of course became notorious for back-dating a memo to file in order to try to protect his then boss Premier Glen Clark from a scandal (a constituent seeking a gaming licence), then Dix getting caught and being forced to resign. Dix managed to admit his mistake and go on to win the B.C. NDP leadership also about two years ago and also won narrowly after some questions arose about his supporters recruiting bulk votes from the Indo-Canadian community, but he seemed well on his way to recovery until he was found to be on SkyTrain without a ticket, which he also managed to live down.
Though Liberal campaign strategists and external supporters launched massive advertising campaigns focussed on Dix's peccadilloes, claiming he thus was unfit to be a Premier, the polls showed repeatedly that voters had forgiven him, with 45% supporting the NDP versus only about 31% for the Clark Liberals and the remainder going to B.C.'s Green and Conservative parties (and about 20% undecided). As well, Dix topped Clark in the "best Premier" question.
So almost everyone was saying and assuming that it was Dix's election to win or lose and all he had to do was avoid mistakes.
As noted by pundit Norman Spector, the B.C. NDP campaign managed by former federal leadership candidate Brian Topp was one of the most astute he had ever seen by the B.C. NDP, and I agree with that as do many others though I would have preferred a more balanced approach including the positives but also lots of negatives about Clark and the Liberals, lots of reasons why people should get out to vote against the incumbents too.
But as perhaps many readers already know by now Dix may have blown it by suddenly flip-flopping on an important policy question: whether Kinder Morgan should be allowed to double the capacity of the former Trans-Mountain Pipeline from Edmonton to Burnaby to enable new exports of bitumen through Vancouver's inner harbour.
Initially Dix was studiously keeping an open mind on that proposal, withholding comment until KM submitted its official proposal, but then suddenly on Earth Day when he released the party's official platform he came out against adding any new oil tanker shipments through Vancouver harbour.
That reversal sparked a storm of controversy that is still raging and probably will be a central issue in tonight's televised leaders debate and unfortunately for Dix it renewed questions about his character from pundits including Spector this morning on CKNW's Bill Good Show.
So why did Dix flip-flop? So far he hasn't given a solid explanation so we are left to speculate that Topp's in-house polling had discovered a tidal wave of support flowing to the Green Party and so to forestall it he persuaded Dix to try to out-green the Greens, which he did at the expense of Kinder Morgan, refinery workers and B.C. government revenues.
As a person who grew up in West Vancouver I well sympathize with people, especially First Nations with rights to forage for food, who see increased oil tanker traffic as a threat, and I share NDP energy critic John Horgan's view that the terminus of Kinder Morgan's second line could be moved to a place such as Sumas or even go directly to Anacortes in Washington State, but either way the pipeline proposal is not for me a make-or-break vote-determining issue because the environment has co-existed reasonably well with Chevron's refinery in Burnaby for many decades and could continue to do so even if it added one tanker ship per day as now proposed. But it would be good to have a genuine review of the options and their cost-benefits - as Dix originally was promising to do. But now? Who knows. It has become a political football.
Campaign lacks creative ideas to grow jobs
What we have not seen yet from any party is creative ideas on how to grow the economy and to create jobs (they're connected but not the same thing), especially to add lots of low-skilled entry-level jobs which can give marginalized people enough work experience to get and take training to qualify for better jobs and to provide the skilled labour that many major industries in B.C. are now clamoring for - in other words moving towards full employment!
In my opinion the Number One Issue in the present B.C. election is the economy in general (which is what the polls also say) and direct job creation in particular, which the polls do not say and which the pols (politicians) won't even mention maybe for fear of being accused of being profligate wastrels.
In Dix's case we see a leader letting himself be steered by the party factions that elected him leader and the party pros who want to make him Premier, so his 74-page platform is super-cautious, with virtually no new spending nor even any major new directions but lots of positive small steps such as linking B.C. food to B.C. hospitals, and providing good fodder for his one-a-day policy pronouncements.
A prime example is B.C. Ferries, which in Dix's platform will get $40 million and a two-year rate freeze while the new government studies its options, which could be worse but also better.
For example, I have been pushing a radical idea to add a third-crossing from the area near Vancouver International Airport and the Iona sewage outfall over to Gabriola Island and then a short new bridge to the big island. It would be a very short crossing that could easily cater to truck traffic and foot passengers, especially with a link to SkyTrain in Richmond, and here's the kicker: the new ferry could be fuelled by gases extracted from Metro Vancouver's sewage which is soon going to need new treatment plants costing billions of dollars anyway!
B.C. Conservative Party leader John Cummins meanwhile is proposing an innovative tax credit for ferry users which was well-received, and the B.C. Green Party probably has a ferries plank in its massive on-line policy manual but if so they are not yet campaigning on it. And the Clark Liberals? Who knows - don't ask don't tell?
Green Party leader Sterk raising profile
So what we see so far is Clark and the Liberals promising pie in the sky to eliminate debt in decades hence when or really if the liquefied natural gas concept comes to fruition while Cummins and the Conservatives pander to small-c curmudgeons and the Greens offer such a plethora of ideas that so far no one thing stands out.
B.C. Green Party leader Jane Sterk won the radio debate on Friday (according to me and Vaughn Palmer and others) because she raised her profile and credibility, especially when she quickly connected with a caller complaining about the pittance disabled people must live on, but it remains to be seen if the Greens can win more than a few seats.
One problem the Greens have is that too many of their activists are well-meaning zealots who lack common sense about economics, business and government finances, and who accept on blind faith the scare tactics and twisted statistics from groups such as the International Panel on Climate Change who have vested policy interests as conflicted as any business or industry (viz Al Gore).
Thus when they see the level of carbon in the atmosphere approaching 400 parts per million they willingly claim it is some kind of tipping point towards disaster when really it's only one more artificial dot on a long continuum of what is really a relatively tiny component - in other words a bit of nonsense akin to the Y2K panic.
Yes the Green zealots are well-meaning, and yes rising sea level is a problem that some people will need to address (such as by Richmond adding berms akin to Holland), but the causes of the warming (which many claim has already ended) are mainly natural (changes in solar phases) and meanwhile there are many many other issues that are far more urgent and far more important, such as job creation, health funding and skills training, to name three.
Many moves available to improve B.C.
What we are not seeing in this campaign are major new reforms to the structures of our province in ways that will benefit the people living here now and furthermore become a model that other nation-states would do well to emulate.
In particular, B.C. should move quickly to revive the Bank of B.C. and enable it to issue a made-in-B.C. currency which would be instrumental in preserving the province's stability and the people's security if or when the U.S. Federal Reserve and/or other central banks fail or collapse under their mountains of debt. No doubt some readers will immediately become naysayers believing it couldn't possibly work, that it would cause inflation or some other such flaw, but really it's simple: in order for B.C. to survive the tribulations ahead it would help a lot to have recourse to its own money supply operating in parallel with other currencies as now with the U.S. and Canadian dollars. And to keep the B.C. dollar viable the Province would declare it acceptable for the payment of taxes.
The Province also could mandate or legislate or directly create a wide variety of new industries, especially by legalizing marijuana but also encouraging industrial hemp, which is a sort of miracle plant providing food, fibres, energy, oils and medicines all from one renewable and easy-to-grow plant.
It also could enable bulk exports of surplus water, which the province has in abundance and could do through a single-window export agency like Saskatchewan does with potash fertilizer or an auction approach to get around NAFTA, or in other ways even including the NAWAPA proposal which would see the high-altitude Site C dam collecting rain and snow melt and delivering it through canals and lift stations all the way to Arizona. Though many well-meaning people have painted water exports as a devilish trap, in fact it would be a renewable bonanza for B.C. and a boon to people and farmers in many locations including California farms that now send very large volumes of water-laden vegetables into Canada.
Similarly the Province could do better jobs exporting energy, forest and mineral products, it could move towards self-sufficiency in food and other essential products including micro-hydro and other forms of renewable energy, and it could improve its delivery of home care, reform courts and jails, add coastal ferries - it could electrify railways, repurpose ICBC, save the Agricultural Land Reserve and do almost everything in the platforms of all four major parties.
It also could build more rental housing, encourage energy retrofits (good sources of new jobs too), enable more woodlots and tree farms and catch up on reforestation.
It could expand preventive health care to reduce hospital and drug costs, it could invest in social programs and service-providers to reduce crime and limit court and police costs.
There also could be lots of financial reforms, such as finding a better funding formula for municipalities and reopening negotiations with Ottawa to this next time do a better job of designing, selling and then implementing a better harmonized sales tax system (the previous HST had an illegitimate process and too many design flaws). We might also bring back the B.C. Savings Bonds that were killed by Gordon Campbell.
And finally (at least for this list) it could engage in some systemic political, electoral and legislative reforms including more electronic direct democracy (assuming it survives a proper public process beforehand) and removing the system of partisan bullying exposed by journalist Sean Holman in his new film documentary called Whipped.
Indeed all that is still only a short survey of the many good things that could and should be done to make British Columbia into truly the best place in the world and a beacon of light to other nation-states.
We can begin by watching tonight's leaders' debate and then voting accordingly on May 14 (or sooner by advance ballot).
So much more could and should be done
to make B.C. the truly best place in the world
By John Twigg (Copyright)
It's a bit rich to suddenly see all the fooferaw around Premier Christy Clark's foolish red-light incident in which leading pundits, the mainstream media and even some of her own B.C. Liberal Party members are now questioning her character.
Yes she was stupid to stop and then go through a red light at a deserted intersection at 5 a.m. with her son on the way to his hockey practise and even moreso with a Vancouver Sun reporter in the back seat preparing a pre-election profile, and she was even more stupid when she mis-spoke about what she claimed she and her son to have said about it before and then gradually changed her story about her story...
Clark's character has long been questionable
We've heard Clark do that many times before about so many issues, from misrepresenting her dubious role as a leaky cabinet minister in the scandal-plagued sale of BCRail to her latest fabrications about the state of B.C.'s finances and economy and what the bond-rating agencies say about it, and what the New Democrats espouse and on and on.
Hey folks where have you been these last three years or so? The same folks now questioning Clark's character sat more or less mute while she pulled off numerous similar peccadilloes on her way to winning - some say stealing - the leadership of the B.C. Liberal Party about two years ago, including the notorious noxious use of bulk sales of new voting membership in the Indo-Canadian communities and then apparently the bulk voting by those memberships too, which numerous party insiders are aware of but so far only the notorious "political blogger" Alex G. Tsakumis has reported in any detail (especially the involvement of a convicted thug).
Whether or not Christy Clark's leadership win was marginally legal or not, it now appears that a cabal of powerful backroomers including lobbyist Patrick Kinsella and senior government lawyer Doug Eastwood among others inserted her into the Premier's Office so she could keep a lid on that and numerous other potential scandals in the wake of former premier Gordon Campbell's unexpected ouster in the wake of the Basi-Virk and Harmonized Sales Tax fiascos. Campbell is now in de facto witness protection serving as Canada's Agent General London while Kinsella reportedly is retiring and moving to a gated community in Palm Springs and Eastwood has been transferred to the B.C. Justice Institute training academy.
Dix shies away from personal attacks
The list of issues Clark has mishandled is too long for this column and sadly you won't find that list on the B.C. New Democratic Party's website either due to an anomaly in this campaign, namely that NDP leader Adrian Dix has decided to only offer positive alternatives, though the NDP did recently (Apr. 28) publish a cutely-worded list of why a dozen of the B.C. Liberal Party candidates could be called upon to step aside (which came soon after pundit Rafe Mair had criticized Dix for being too milquetoast [my word, his concept] against Clark).
NDP MLAs and officers have criticized numerous policy failings by Clark and the Liberals, especially re misrepresenting the size of the deficits and debt, but none have gone so far as to say she is personally flawed even though Christy has run up the debt even more than Campbell did, she has botched numerous projects such as the BC Place naming and the Prince George wooden office tower, and she has alienated many of her party's stalwarts, notably Kevin Falcon and George Abbott who lost the leadership and already have new jobs outside government.
Christy also has continued the chronic underfunding of numerous critical social services, she has allowed very few sittings of the legislature, she has churned through staff like a revolving door for a shoe sale, she has alienated other Premiers and scrambled to field a full slate of candidates, and abused the election process with massive spending on taxpayer-paid advertisements, and on and on like that.
But now the MSM pundits and a few diehard Liberals are now questioning her character because she drove through an empty intersection at 5 a.m.? and then misrepresented it?? It's ludicrous, but if that's what it takes then so be it. It's obviously time overdue for her and her colleagues to go for many many reasons, and perhaps this will be her last straw. We'll see how it plays or if it is even raised in the televised debate tonight at 6:30.
Dix faces new questions after policy flip-flop
However Clark is sheltered somewhat by a strange irony that is curiously typical of B.C.'s often tumultuous topsy-turvy politics and that is that B.C. NDP leader Adrian Dix also is being subjected to renewed questions about his character (which probably is also partly why he eschewed negative campaigning).
Dix of course became notorious for back-dating a memo to file in order to try to protect his then boss Premier Glen Clark from a scandal (a constituent seeking a gaming licence), then Dix getting caught and being forced to resign. Dix managed to admit his mistake and go on to win the B.C. NDP leadership also about two years ago and also won narrowly after some questions arose about his supporters recruiting bulk votes from the Indo-Canadian community, but he seemed well on his way to recovery until he was found to be on SkyTrain without a ticket, which he also managed to live down.
Though Liberal campaign strategists and external supporters launched massive advertising campaigns focussed on Dix's peccadilloes, claiming he thus was unfit to be a Premier, the polls showed repeatedly that voters had forgiven him, with 45% supporting the NDP versus only about 31% for the Clark Liberals and the remainder going to B.C.'s Green and Conservative parties (and about 20% undecided). As well, Dix topped Clark in the "best Premier" question.
So almost everyone was saying and assuming that it was Dix's election to win or lose and all he had to do was avoid mistakes.
As noted by pundit Norman Spector, the B.C. NDP campaign managed by former federal leadership candidate Brian Topp was one of the most astute he had ever seen by the B.C. NDP, and I agree with that as do many others though I would have preferred a more balanced approach including the positives but also lots of negatives about Clark and the Liberals, lots of reasons why people should get out to vote against the incumbents too.
But as perhaps many readers already know by now Dix may have blown it by suddenly flip-flopping on an important policy question: whether Kinder Morgan should be allowed to double the capacity of the former Trans-Mountain Pipeline from Edmonton to Burnaby to enable new exports of bitumen through Vancouver's inner harbour.
Initially Dix was studiously keeping an open mind on that proposal, withholding comment until KM submitted its official proposal, but then suddenly on Earth Day when he released the party's official platform he came out against adding any new oil tanker shipments through Vancouver harbour.
That reversal sparked a storm of controversy that is still raging and probably will be a central issue in tonight's televised leaders debate and unfortunately for Dix it renewed questions about his character from pundits including Spector this morning on CKNW's Bill Good Show.
So why did Dix flip-flop? So far he hasn't given a solid explanation so we are left to speculate that Topp's in-house polling had discovered a tidal wave of support flowing to the Green Party and so to forestall it he persuaded Dix to try to out-green the Greens, which he did at the expense of Kinder Morgan, refinery workers and B.C. government revenues.
As a person who grew up in West Vancouver I well sympathize with people, especially First Nations with rights to forage for food, who see increased oil tanker traffic as a threat, and I share NDP energy critic John Horgan's view that the terminus of Kinder Morgan's second line could be moved to a place such as Sumas or even go directly to Anacortes in Washington State, but either way the pipeline proposal is not for me a make-or-break vote-determining issue because the environment has co-existed reasonably well with Chevron's refinery in Burnaby for many decades and could continue to do so even if it added one tanker ship per day as now proposed. But it would be good to have a genuine review of the options and their cost-benefits - as Dix originally was promising to do. But now? Who knows. It has become a political football.
Campaign lacks creative ideas to grow jobs
What we have not seen yet from any party is creative ideas on how to grow the economy and to create jobs (they're connected but not the same thing), especially to add lots of low-skilled entry-level jobs which can give marginalized people enough work experience to get and take training to qualify for better jobs and to provide the skilled labour that many major industries in B.C. are now clamoring for - in other words moving towards full employment!
In my opinion the Number One Issue in the present B.C. election is the economy in general (which is what the polls also say) and direct job creation in particular, which the polls do not say and which the pols (politicians) won't even mention maybe for fear of being accused of being profligate wastrels.
In Dix's case we see a leader letting himself be steered by the party factions that elected him leader and the party pros who want to make him Premier, so his 74-page platform is super-cautious, with virtually no new spending nor even any major new directions but lots of positive small steps such as linking B.C. food to B.C. hospitals, and providing good fodder for his one-a-day policy pronouncements.
A prime example is B.C. Ferries, which in Dix's platform will get $40 million and a two-year rate freeze while the new government studies its options, which could be worse but also better.
For example, I have been pushing a radical idea to add a third-crossing from the area near Vancouver International Airport and the Iona sewage outfall over to Gabriola Island and then a short new bridge to the big island. It would be a very short crossing that could easily cater to truck traffic and foot passengers, especially with a link to SkyTrain in Richmond, and here's the kicker: the new ferry could be fuelled by gases extracted from Metro Vancouver's sewage which is soon going to need new treatment plants costing billions of dollars anyway!
B.C. Conservative Party leader John Cummins meanwhile is proposing an innovative tax credit for ferry users which was well-received, and the B.C. Green Party probably has a ferries plank in its massive on-line policy manual but if so they are not yet campaigning on it. And the Clark Liberals? Who knows - don't ask don't tell?
Green Party leader Sterk raising profile
So what we see so far is Clark and the Liberals promising pie in the sky to eliminate debt in decades hence when or really if the liquefied natural gas concept comes to fruition while Cummins and the Conservatives pander to small-c curmudgeons and the Greens offer such a plethora of ideas that so far no one thing stands out.
B.C. Green Party leader Jane Sterk won the radio debate on Friday (according to me and Vaughn Palmer and others) because she raised her profile and credibility, especially when she quickly connected with a caller complaining about the pittance disabled people must live on, but it remains to be seen if the Greens can win more than a few seats.
One problem the Greens have is that too many of their activists are well-meaning zealots who lack common sense about economics, business and government finances, and who accept on blind faith the scare tactics and twisted statistics from groups such as the International Panel on Climate Change who have vested policy interests as conflicted as any business or industry (viz Al Gore).
Thus when they see the level of carbon in the atmosphere approaching 400 parts per million they willingly claim it is some kind of tipping point towards disaster when really it's only one more artificial dot on a long continuum of what is really a relatively tiny component - in other words a bit of nonsense akin to the Y2K panic.
Yes the Green zealots are well-meaning, and yes rising sea level is a problem that some people will need to address (such as by Richmond adding berms akin to Holland), but the causes of the warming (which many claim has already ended) are mainly natural (changes in solar phases) and meanwhile there are many many other issues that are far more urgent and far more important, such as job creation, health funding and skills training, to name three.
Many moves available to improve B.C.
What we are not seeing in this campaign are major new reforms to the structures of our province in ways that will benefit the people living here now and furthermore become a model that other nation-states would do well to emulate.
In particular, B.C. should move quickly to revive the Bank of B.C. and enable it to issue a made-in-B.C. currency which would be instrumental in preserving the province's stability and the people's security if or when the U.S. Federal Reserve and/or other central banks fail or collapse under their mountains of debt. No doubt some readers will immediately become naysayers believing it couldn't possibly work, that it would cause inflation or some other such flaw, but really it's simple: in order for B.C. to survive the tribulations ahead it would help a lot to have recourse to its own money supply operating in parallel with other currencies as now with the U.S. and Canadian dollars. And to keep the B.C. dollar viable the Province would declare it acceptable for the payment of taxes.
The Province also could mandate or legislate or directly create a wide variety of new industries, especially by legalizing marijuana but also encouraging industrial hemp, which is a sort of miracle plant providing food, fibres, energy, oils and medicines all from one renewable and easy-to-grow plant.
It also could enable bulk exports of surplus water, which the province has in abundance and could do through a single-window export agency like Saskatchewan does with potash fertilizer or an auction approach to get around NAFTA, or in other ways even including the NAWAPA proposal which would see the high-altitude Site C dam collecting rain and snow melt and delivering it through canals and lift stations all the way to Arizona. Though many well-meaning people have painted water exports as a devilish trap, in fact it would be a renewable bonanza for B.C. and a boon to people and farmers in many locations including California farms that now send very large volumes of water-laden vegetables into Canada.
Similarly the Province could do better jobs exporting energy, forest and mineral products, it could move towards self-sufficiency in food and other essential products including micro-hydro and other forms of renewable energy, and it could improve its delivery of home care, reform courts and jails, add coastal ferries - it could electrify railways, repurpose ICBC, save the Agricultural Land Reserve and do almost everything in the platforms of all four major parties.
It also could build more rental housing, encourage energy retrofits (good sources of new jobs too), enable more woodlots and tree farms and catch up on reforestation.
It could expand preventive health care to reduce hospital and drug costs, it could invest in social programs and service-providers to reduce crime and limit court and police costs.
There also could be lots of financial reforms, such as finding a better funding formula for municipalities and reopening negotiations with Ottawa to this next time do a better job of designing, selling and then implementing a better harmonized sales tax system (the previous HST had an illegitimate process and too many design flaws). We might also bring back the B.C. Savings Bonds that were killed by Gordon Campbell.
And finally (at least for this list) it could engage in some systemic political, electoral and legislative reforms including more electronic direct democracy (assuming it survives a proper public process beforehand) and removing the system of partisan bullying exposed by journalist Sean Holman in his new film documentary called Whipped.
Indeed all that is still only a short survey of the many good things that could and should be done to make British Columbia into truly the best place in the world and a beacon of light to other nation-states.
We can begin by watching tonight's leaders' debate and then voting accordingly on May 14 (or sooner by advance ballot).
Friday, April 19, 2013
B.C.'s election campaign
returns to some normalcy
By John Twigg
April 19
British Columbia's oftentimes turbulent election campaigns were seen again on Day One of this year's opus but since then things seemed to have settled down.
The B.C. Liberals scored a surprising win on Day One when they revealed that a nominated candidate had made some ill-worded remarks in an online chat forum a few years ago which forced NDP leader Adrian Dix to immediately remove her and he looked nervous for the rest of the day.
But Wednesday and yesterday Dix seemed to be back in a groove, visiting possible swing ridings held by cabinet ministers and announcing policy planks in their policy areas (finance and education) and holding well-attended rallies and generally coming off well in media coverage.
Indeed it is telling that some of the media have been carping at Dix's cautious and measured stances, which reflects that Dix and his advisers know they still have a large lead and so now the trick is simply to not blow it.
A telling example was Dix's promise to freeze ferry fares for two years while an audit is done and presumably debates happen about how the ferry system could or should be reformed (more on that another day), which Liberal finance minister Mike de Jong and others exclaimed would be a horrendous hit to the treasury, much like Dix's promise yesterday in Comox (home of education minister Don McRae) that he would spend $100 million a year more on classrooms.
That's cautious because Dix also could have promised to roll back ferry fares and spend even more on education but in any case the voters voted through opinion polls by Global TV through Ipsos Reid which found that the B.C. public is strongly supportive of Dix's ideas on those questions.
Meanwhile what the Liberals failed to do was find something new to attack the New Democrats with, which left Premier Christy Clark using the same old rhetoric in a tour through key swing ridings in Chilliwack, Merritt, Kamloops and on to Peace River, then today to Terrace and Prince Rupert (while Dix works the Lower Mainland).
One expects that the B.C. Liberals do have more "dirt" waiting to be thrown at New Democrats that perhaps won't be used until nominations close and more towards the end when momentum will be most needed, however right now it seems time is running out on the Campbell Liberal regime now led by Christy Clark.
The B.C. Liberals of course will still fight hard and they start with a core of about 35% of voters who will vote for any party even regardless of scandals that has the best chance of defeating the NDP, and the Green and Conservative parties and the Independents have been campaigning quite well too, but if an election was held today the NDP would win at least 50 of the 85 seats.
returns to some normalcy
By John Twigg
April 19
British Columbia's oftentimes turbulent election campaigns were seen again on Day One of this year's opus but since then things seemed to have settled down.
The B.C. Liberals scored a surprising win on Day One when they revealed that a nominated candidate had made some ill-worded remarks in an online chat forum a few years ago which forced NDP leader Adrian Dix to immediately remove her and he looked nervous for the rest of the day.
But Wednesday and yesterday Dix seemed to be back in a groove, visiting possible swing ridings held by cabinet ministers and announcing policy planks in their policy areas (finance and education) and holding well-attended rallies and generally coming off well in media coverage.
Indeed it is telling that some of the media have been carping at Dix's cautious and measured stances, which reflects that Dix and his advisers know they still have a large lead and so now the trick is simply to not blow it.
A telling example was Dix's promise to freeze ferry fares for two years while an audit is done and presumably debates happen about how the ferry system could or should be reformed (more on that another day), which Liberal finance minister Mike de Jong and others exclaimed would be a horrendous hit to the treasury, much like Dix's promise yesterday in Comox (home of education minister Don McRae) that he would spend $100 million a year more on classrooms.
That's cautious because Dix also could have promised to roll back ferry fares and spend even more on education but in any case the voters voted through opinion polls by Global TV through Ipsos Reid which found that the B.C. public is strongly supportive of Dix's ideas on those questions.
Meanwhile what the Liberals failed to do was find something new to attack the New Democrats with, which left Premier Christy Clark using the same old rhetoric in a tour through key swing ridings in Chilliwack, Merritt, Kamloops and on to Peace River, then today to Terrace and Prince Rupert (while Dix works the Lower Mainland).
One expects that the B.C. Liberals do have more "dirt" waiting to be thrown at New Democrats that perhaps won't be used until nominations close and more towards the end when momentum will be most needed, however right now it seems time is running out on the Campbell Liberal regime now led by Christy Clark.
The B.C. Liberals of course will still fight hard and they start with a core of about 35% of voters who will vote for any party even regardless of scandals that has the best chance of defeating the NDP, and the Green and Conservative parties and the Independents have been campaigning quite well too, but if an election was held today the NDP would win at least 50 of the 85 seats.
Wednesday, April 17, 2013
Rough ride for NDP's Dix on Day One
suggests election result still uncertain
By John Twigg
The first official day of campaigning for B.C.'s election on May 14 proved that the outcome is not a foregone conclusion even though the New Democratic Party has a large lead.
A new poll from Ipsos Reid showed the NDP at 48 per cent of decided voters, with the governing B.C. Liberals trailing at 29 per cent, the B.C. Conservatives at 11 per cent and the Green Party at 9 per cent, which pattern was very close to recent findings by Angus Reid and EKOS polls (though Conservative and Green support probably is a bit higher than that).
With such a lead one would assume that all NDP leader Adrian Dix has to do is avoid making blunders, be cautious and let Liberal Premier Christy Clark continue to self-destruct, but the news events of Tuesday showed that is not true because the Liberals found a way to quickly put pressure on Dix.
Dix forced to fire a candidate
The Liberals dug up and revealed some embarrassing comments made several years ago in an online chat site by the NDP candidate in Kelowna-Mission, Dayleen Van Ryswyk, regarding aboriginals and francophones which forced Dix to remove Van Ryswyk as a candidate but he looked and sounded nervous and uncomfortable when he told reporters he had done so.
Dix has been saying for months that he expects a tough campaign and for the gaps to narrow by voting day and that is to be expected if only because the Liberals surely will launch a barrage of vicious attack ads against him and his party's checkered records in power, but now we see there could be more.
One wonders if the Liberals will have a one-a-day agenda of items like the Van Ryswyk quotes and if they do - especially if they attack Dix personally with new embarrassments - then the momentum could change radically.
Interest up in BCCP, Greens
Meanwhile the three opinion polls and other factors such as news coverage suggest that voter interest in the Conservative and Green parties is increasing, which suggests that the hordes of voters leaving the Liberals because of their tawdry record in power will not be going en masse to the NDP.
The key may be whether Clark and the Liberals can succeed in persuading enough people that a vote for the NDP would jeopardize the province's economy, which of course has become Clark's mantra in campaign speeches and media interviews. Their website is securetomorrow.ca, for example.
That's probably also behind Clark's frequent speech references to values, subtly reminding voters that she is (or tries to appear to be) a church-going Christian with conservative moralities while Dix and the New Democrats tend to be more non-Christian with alternative orientations and small-l liberal morals.
"B.C. is at a crossroads with two very different choices," Clark told reporters after visiting the Lieutenant-Governor Tuesday morning to officially trigger the election writ and that of course was yet another of Clark's many notorious deceits because there are four major parties and even more choices (notably numerous strong Independent candidates this time) but that IS what Clark needs to convey to stop the NDP from waltzing to an easy win.
Dix meanwhile began with a native-themed event at University of B.C.'s Museum of Anthropology in Clark's home riding and he announced that the NDP's full campaign platform will be revealed over the next eight days, with emphasis on the economy, skills training, environment, health and First Nations, but notably missing was a promise and coherent plan to grow the B.C. economy.
Instead Dix is focussing on reducing expectations and costing his meagre promises so as to not expand the province's troubling deficits and debt, which some could see as smart and prudent and others (like me) could see as overly cautious and lacking creativity (there are many things that could be done to grow the economy but Dix so far is not going near any of them, such as investing in direct job creation, enabling bulk water exports, starting a new made-in-B.C. currency, etc.).
Earlier today Clark lashed back at Dix's promise to freeze fares on B.C. Ferries while an audit is done, which I believe is a good idea because rising fares tend to limit commerce in general and an audit probably would pay dividends as well as hopefully open a door to new ideas such as special new crossing between (near to not at) Vancouver's Iona sewage outfall and Gabriola Island (with a small new bridge to the big island), and the passenger and truck-oriented ferries using sewage gases for fuel). Nonetheless Clark linked the fares freeze to her claims that an NDP government would drive up deficits and debt.
Will that kind of ammunition be enough for the Liberals to pull the NDP down far enough to enable say a minority Liberal win? They may, depending on whether they have more and better substance than that, and they may have it because a new scandal is building around NDP campaign manager Brian Topp, the former candidate for the leadership of the federal NDP who has since become a lobbyist based in Vancouver and now there are questions about his role in Dix's recent policy pronouncement of new tax measures to assist the B.C. film industry, apparently one of Topp's new clients. (Topp says he recused himself from party discussions on that issue but one suspects more media coverage will ensue nonetheless.)
So Day One is done and what we see is that the leading New Democrats are already on the defensive. What will Day Two bring? Stay tuned.
New role for new media
In fact the role of the media is a special factor in this campaign, especially with the recent addition of Global TV's BC-1 all-news channel and with the somewhat pro-Liberal stances of a few show hosts on audience-leading CKNW.
As Liberal cabinet minister Bill Bennett noted on Twitter, Dix looked like a deer in the headlights when grilled by CTV's Rob Brown on the Van Ryswyk matter, and when CKNW's Bill Good hosted an excellent panel of top candidates from all four parties he let the Liberal, Peter Fassbender, dominate and even bully the proceedings.
Though many criticisms can be fairly made against the Clark Liberals' record, notably their run-up of deficits and debt for dubious business schemes, Dix so far isn't making them, apparently because he's hoping his avoidance of going negative against them will prevent the Liberals from succeeding with attacks against his own record.
If we see 27 more days like that we could be in for some surprise results on May 14.
Meanwhile it will be interesting to watch not only the new TV news coverage but also how social media plays into it, and which party will have the best facebook and YouTube content, the most user-friendly website and especially the best word warriors on Twitter.
As they say in horse-racing, "They're off!"
--
If you would like to receive a special email alert service from me for only $20, send an email to john@johntwigg.com. You'll receive a quick advisory if or when there are any game-changing developments.
suggests election result still uncertain
By John Twigg
The first official day of campaigning for B.C.'s election on May 14 proved that the outcome is not a foregone conclusion even though the New Democratic Party has a large lead.
A new poll from Ipsos Reid showed the NDP at 48 per cent of decided voters, with the governing B.C. Liberals trailing at 29 per cent, the B.C. Conservatives at 11 per cent and the Green Party at 9 per cent, which pattern was very close to recent findings by Angus Reid and EKOS polls (though Conservative and Green support probably is a bit higher than that).
With such a lead one would assume that all NDP leader Adrian Dix has to do is avoid making blunders, be cautious and let Liberal Premier Christy Clark continue to self-destruct, but the news events of Tuesday showed that is not true because the Liberals found a way to quickly put pressure on Dix.
Dix forced to fire a candidate
The Liberals dug up and revealed some embarrassing comments made several years ago in an online chat site by the NDP candidate in Kelowna-Mission, Dayleen Van Ryswyk, regarding aboriginals and francophones which forced Dix to remove Van Ryswyk as a candidate but he looked and sounded nervous and uncomfortable when he told reporters he had done so.
Dix has been saying for months that he expects a tough campaign and for the gaps to narrow by voting day and that is to be expected if only because the Liberals surely will launch a barrage of vicious attack ads against him and his party's checkered records in power, but now we see there could be more.
One wonders if the Liberals will have a one-a-day agenda of items like the Van Ryswyk quotes and if they do - especially if they attack Dix personally with new embarrassments - then the momentum could change radically.
Interest up in BCCP, Greens
Meanwhile the three opinion polls and other factors such as news coverage suggest that voter interest in the Conservative and Green parties is increasing, which suggests that the hordes of voters leaving the Liberals because of their tawdry record in power will not be going en masse to the NDP.
The key may be whether Clark and the Liberals can succeed in persuading enough people that a vote for the NDP would jeopardize the province's economy, which of course has become Clark's mantra in campaign speeches and media interviews. Their website is securetomorrow.ca, for example.
That's probably also behind Clark's frequent speech references to values, subtly reminding voters that she is (or tries to appear to be) a church-going Christian with conservative moralities while Dix and the New Democrats tend to be more non-Christian with alternative orientations and small-l liberal morals.
"B.C. is at a crossroads with two very different choices," Clark told reporters after visiting the Lieutenant-Governor Tuesday morning to officially trigger the election writ and that of course was yet another of Clark's many notorious deceits because there are four major parties and even more choices (notably numerous strong Independent candidates this time) but that IS what Clark needs to convey to stop the NDP from waltzing to an easy win.
Dix meanwhile began with a native-themed event at University of B.C.'s Museum of Anthropology in Clark's home riding and he announced that the NDP's full campaign platform will be revealed over the next eight days, with emphasis on the economy, skills training, environment, health and First Nations, but notably missing was a promise and coherent plan to grow the B.C. economy.
Instead Dix is focussing on reducing expectations and costing his meagre promises so as to not expand the province's troubling deficits and debt, which some could see as smart and prudent and others (like me) could see as overly cautious and lacking creativity (there are many things that could be done to grow the economy but Dix so far is not going near any of them, such as investing in direct job creation, enabling bulk water exports, starting a new made-in-B.C. currency, etc.).
Earlier today Clark lashed back at Dix's promise to freeze fares on B.C. Ferries while an audit is done, which I believe is a good idea because rising fares tend to limit commerce in general and an audit probably would pay dividends as well as hopefully open a door to new ideas such as special new crossing between (near to not at) Vancouver's Iona sewage outfall and Gabriola Island (with a small new bridge to the big island), and the passenger and truck-oriented ferries using sewage gases for fuel). Nonetheless Clark linked the fares freeze to her claims that an NDP government would drive up deficits and debt.
Will that kind of ammunition be enough for the Liberals to pull the NDP down far enough to enable say a minority Liberal win? They may, depending on whether they have more and better substance than that, and they may have it because a new scandal is building around NDP campaign manager Brian Topp, the former candidate for the leadership of the federal NDP who has since become a lobbyist based in Vancouver and now there are questions about his role in Dix's recent policy pronouncement of new tax measures to assist the B.C. film industry, apparently one of Topp's new clients. (Topp says he recused himself from party discussions on that issue but one suspects more media coverage will ensue nonetheless.)
So Day One is done and what we see is that the leading New Democrats are already on the defensive. What will Day Two bring? Stay tuned.
New role for new media
In fact the role of the media is a special factor in this campaign, especially with the recent addition of Global TV's BC-1 all-news channel and with the somewhat pro-Liberal stances of a few show hosts on audience-leading CKNW.
As Liberal cabinet minister Bill Bennett noted on Twitter, Dix looked like a deer in the headlights when grilled by CTV's Rob Brown on the Van Ryswyk matter, and when CKNW's Bill Good hosted an excellent panel of top candidates from all four parties he let the Liberal, Peter Fassbender, dominate and even bully the proceedings.
Though many criticisms can be fairly made against the Clark Liberals' record, notably their run-up of deficits and debt for dubious business schemes, Dix so far isn't making them, apparently because he's hoping his avoidance of going negative against them will prevent the Liberals from succeeding with attacks against his own record.
If we see 27 more days like that we could be in for some surprise results on May 14.
Meanwhile it will be interesting to watch not only the new TV news coverage but also how social media plays into it, and which party will have the best facebook and YouTube content, the most user-friendly website and especially the best word warriors on Twitter.
As they say in horse-racing, "They're off!"
--
If you would like to receive a special email alert service from me for only $20, send an email to john@johntwigg.com. You'll receive a quick advisory if or when there are any game-changing developments.
Monday, April 15, 2013
The Daily Twigg April 15
Justin Trudeau blitzes Ottawa, Dix plays it safe,
Christy bores B.C. - is Brad Bennett ready to take over?
By John Twigg
It's been an unusually busy time in B.C. and Canadian politics with lots of smoke and mirrors but not many truly earthshaking events.
Probably the biggest story was the massive 80% mandate given by the Liberal Party of Canada to new leader Justin Trudeau and then even moreso the brilliant speech he gave in accepting the job of trying to lift the former "Natural Governing Party" from third place and back into contention.
Actually the party is only in third place by seats in Parliament but in the latest opinion polls the 41-year-old Trudeau is slightly ahead of Conservative Party Prime Minister Stephen Harper (about 32% to 31%) and that explains why the Harper hatcheteers waited only minutes after the results Sunday to begin hitting him with missives.
Young Justin has good looks, charisma, a beautiful family and a real talent for speechifying plus he now obviously can organize a network of strong volunteers and fund it too but the Tories claim he lacks judgement, he's in over his head and he has no substantive policies - which is all hogwash.
Trudeau of course now has about two years to develop such things but he already wins big on one top priority: the growing need to get rid of a Harper Tory regime that with its long-sought majority has quickly become arrogant, insensitive, dictatorial and increasingly out of touch with public opinion such as regarding the environment, marijuana decriminalization, foreign workers and other major voting triggers (religion, gender etc.).
Trudeau also scored big in and with the media, with front page photos in most major daily papers, and he may even have received an endorsement from God because on the day he took over the Liberal caucus there was a small earthquake near the Ontario-Quebec border - so it WAS an earthshaking event in Canadian politics!
The federal New Democrats under new leader Thomas Mulcair also met for a major policy convention in Montreal on the weekend and though the party took some steps to popularize its positioning (switching from "socialism" to "social democrats") it still is dominated by minority single-issue activists (eg MP Libby Davies pushing through a new policy to liberalize the treatment of sex-trade workers).
While Mulcair himself is smart, debonair and charming - as I posted on Twitter - the federal New Democrats really need to expand their populist bases if they hope to do well in the next election, let alone maybe win it, and while several NDP MPs insisted on Twitter that they ARE succeeding in popularizing the party the proof remains to be seen on the TV screens and in the streets.
Perhaps it will come down to policy and for me the big big question is job creation, namely what will governments of all levels and orientations do to greatly and radically grow the economy for the benefit of not only deep-pocket interests but also under-employed low-skilled and middle-class Canadians.
It was noted that interestingly both the Liberals and the NDP are now openly appealing to the middle class and to the Idle-no-more First Nations movement and those are good thing but IMO what's really needed is a focus even lower on society's totem pole, to marginalized people needing jobs they are not trained for or able to do. So we need a major massive job-creation and make-work initiative and there ARE ways to do that without exploding inflation and debt (eg by B.C. issuing a new currency through a revived Bank of B.C.) but do you hear anyone advocating such things? No.
The B.C. New Democrats under new leader Adrian Dix have begun dishing out new policies on a so-far one-a-day basis but so far there is no sign of anything truly major, truly creative. It seems he and his large and well-financed team of organizers are deliberately being cautious, more concerned to avoid making mistakes than making waves.
Though we may have hopes for better things that probably is a smart strategy given the pictures in recent opinion polls, such as the new Ekos poll via Tyee in which the key numbers "among likely voters" are#BCNDP 45% #LPBC 28 #GPBC 11 #BCCP 13 - which sound about right to me
though others may focus on other slices of stats.
Premier Christy Clark meanwhile used a provincewide television address (B.C. Liberal Party purchased 7 - 7:30 pm on Global) to attack Dix and try to portray herself as tough as nails and eager to fight to protect jobs and cut debt - all of which served mainly to remind people why they now revile her and her party: vacuous hypocrisy wasting tax dollars.
Few people bothered to watch her show and those who did found it either slick (her supporters) or boring, desperate, misleading, hypocritical and cynically trying to turn the May 14 election into not merely a two-party contest but a two-person fight for a presidency, which to me is appalling and disgusting when there are four parties with near-to-full slates, at least a handful of electable Independents and numerous small-party candidates in an election for a British-style Parliament.
Brad Bennett on hand to help Christy campaign
One point of noteworthy interest from her TV show was the prominent presence of Brad Bennett, a Kelowna-based businessman who is the son of former premier Bill Bennett and the grandson of former premier W.A.C. Bennett, two of the longest-serving Premiers in B.C. history.
On Twitter someone wondered why Brad isn't the leader instead of Christy but I noted it sounds like Brad Bennett is positioning himself to pick up the Liberal Party's pieces after a likely debacle loss much like his father did in 1973 for the Social Credit Party! So you can remember you read that here first!
Election Alert Email Service only $20
If you would like to receive my new Election Alert email service, please send an email to me at john@johntwigg.com and follow it with a cheque for $20 (no taxes) to John Twigg, P.O. Box 101 Postal Stn A, Campbell River B.C. V9W 4Z9
Justin Trudeau blitzes Ottawa, Dix plays it safe,
Christy bores B.C. - is Brad Bennett ready to take over?
By John Twigg
It's been an unusually busy time in B.C. and Canadian politics with lots of smoke and mirrors but not many truly earthshaking events.
Probably the biggest story was the massive 80% mandate given by the Liberal Party of Canada to new leader Justin Trudeau and then even moreso the brilliant speech he gave in accepting the job of trying to lift the former "Natural Governing Party" from third place and back into contention.
Actually the party is only in third place by seats in Parliament but in the latest opinion polls the 41-year-old Trudeau is slightly ahead of Conservative Party Prime Minister Stephen Harper (about 32% to 31%) and that explains why the Harper hatcheteers waited only minutes after the results Sunday to begin hitting him with missives.
Young Justin has good looks, charisma, a beautiful family and a real talent for speechifying plus he now obviously can organize a network of strong volunteers and fund it too but the Tories claim he lacks judgement, he's in over his head and he has no substantive policies - which is all hogwash.
Trudeau of course now has about two years to develop such things but he already wins big on one top priority: the growing need to get rid of a Harper Tory regime that with its long-sought majority has quickly become arrogant, insensitive, dictatorial and increasingly out of touch with public opinion such as regarding the environment, marijuana decriminalization, foreign workers and other major voting triggers (religion, gender etc.).
Trudeau also scored big in and with the media, with front page photos in most major daily papers, and he may even have received an endorsement from God because on the day he took over the Liberal caucus there was a small earthquake near the Ontario-Quebec border - so it WAS an earthshaking event in Canadian politics!
The federal New Democrats under new leader Thomas Mulcair also met for a major policy convention in Montreal on the weekend and though the party took some steps to popularize its positioning (switching from "socialism" to "social democrats") it still is dominated by minority single-issue activists (eg MP Libby Davies pushing through a new policy to liberalize the treatment of sex-trade workers).
While Mulcair himself is smart, debonair and charming - as I posted on Twitter - the federal New Democrats really need to expand their populist bases if they hope to do well in the next election, let alone maybe win it, and while several NDP MPs insisted on Twitter that they ARE succeeding in popularizing the party the proof remains to be seen on the TV screens and in the streets.
Perhaps it will come down to policy and for me the big big question is job creation, namely what will governments of all levels and orientations do to greatly and radically grow the economy for the benefit of not only deep-pocket interests but also under-employed low-skilled and middle-class Canadians.
It was noted that interestingly both the Liberals and the NDP are now openly appealing to the middle class and to the Idle-no-more First Nations movement and those are good thing but IMO what's really needed is a focus even lower on society's totem pole, to marginalized people needing jobs they are not trained for or able to do. So we need a major massive job-creation and make-work initiative and there ARE ways to do that without exploding inflation and debt (eg by B.C. issuing a new currency through a revived Bank of B.C.) but do you hear anyone advocating such things? No.
The B.C. New Democrats under new leader Adrian Dix have begun dishing out new policies on a so-far one-a-day basis but so far there is no sign of anything truly major, truly creative. It seems he and his large and well-financed team of organizers are deliberately being cautious, more concerned to avoid making mistakes than making waves.
Though we may have hopes for better things that probably is a smart strategy given the pictures in recent opinion polls, such as the new Ekos poll via Tyee in which the key numbers "among likely voters" are
Premier Christy Clark meanwhile used a provincewide television address (B.C. Liberal Party purchased 7 - 7:30 pm on Global) to attack Dix and try to portray herself as tough as nails and eager to fight to protect jobs and cut debt - all of which served mainly to remind people why they now revile her and her party: vacuous hypocrisy wasting tax dollars.
Few people bothered to watch her show and those who did found it either slick (her supporters) or boring, desperate, misleading, hypocritical and cynically trying to turn the May 14 election into not merely a two-party contest but a two-person fight for a presidency, which to me is appalling and disgusting when there are four parties with near-to-full slates, at least a handful of electable Independents and numerous small-party candidates in an election for a British-style Parliament.
Brad Bennett on hand to help Christy campaign
One point of noteworthy interest from her TV show was the prominent presence of Brad Bennett, a Kelowna-based businessman who is the son of former premier Bill Bennett and the grandson of former premier W.A.C. Bennett, two of the longest-serving Premiers in B.C. history.
On Twitter someone wondered why Brad isn't the leader instead of Christy but I noted it sounds like Brad Bennett is positioning himself to pick up the Liberal Party's pieces after a likely debacle loss much like his father did in 1973 for the Social Credit Party! So you can remember you read that here first!
Election Alert Email Service only $20
If you would like to receive my new Election Alert email service, please send an email to me at john@johntwigg.com and follow it with a cheque for $20 (no taxes) to John Twigg, P.O. Box 101 Postal Stn A, Campbell River B.C. V9W 4Z9
Sunday, April 14, 2013
Twigg revives blog, adds email alert service
as campaign begins for B.C. election May 14
Voters in British Columbia will go to the polls on May 14 and are likely to make significant changes in the governance of the province, though exactly what changes of course remain to be seen.
It is almost a foregone conclusion that the B.C. New Democrats now led by Adrian Dix will win a majority of seats - unless he or a colleague makes a horrendous blunder or some other unforeseen fluke happens - but there are still major uncertainties about the size and shape of seats to be won or lost by the three main opposition parties (as the governing B.C. Liberals soon should be) and numerous credible independent candidates.
I have lots of thoughts to contribute about those and many other relevant questions and policy issues and since they don't fit easily into Twitter posts - where I have been very active of late - I have now taken the step of reviving my Daily Twigg blog - and its comments section!
I won't promise that I'll have something new to post every day but I will have lots to say - especially as voting day nears - and I will use Twitter to alert people when new comments are posted.
Also, I have decided to launch an emailed B.C. Election Alerts News Service which will broadcast reports on any major events as soon as they happen.
For example, how will Premier Christy Clark's performance be in tonight's televised launch? Will she be surprisingly strong? Or will she be same-old-same-old, or even blunder? If something game-changing does arise you'll be among the first to hear about it.
If you would like to receive my B.C. Election Alerts News Service please let me know by email to john@johntwigg.com and follow it with a cheque or cash for only $20 (no tax) to:
John Twigg
P.O. Box 101 Postal Stn. A
Campbell River B.C.
V9W 4Z9
Your feedback is welcome as always.
as campaign begins for B.C. election May 14
Voters in British Columbia will go to the polls on May 14 and are likely to make significant changes in the governance of the province, though exactly what changes of course remain to be seen.
It is almost a foregone conclusion that the B.C. New Democrats now led by Adrian Dix will win a majority of seats - unless he or a colleague makes a horrendous blunder or some other unforeseen fluke happens - but there are still major uncertainties about the size and shape of seats to be won or lost by the three main opposition parties (as the governing B.C. Liberals soon should be) and numerous credible independent candidates.
I have lots of thoughts to contribute about those and many other relevant questions and policy issues and since they don't fit easily into Twitter posts - where I have been very active of late - I have now taken the step of reviving my Daily Twigg blog - and its comments section!
I won't promise that I'll have something new to post every day but I will have lots to say - especially as voting day nears - and I will use Twitter to alert people when new comments are posted.
Also, I have decided to launch an emailed B.C. Election Alerts News Service which will broadcast reports on any major events as soon as they happen.
For example, how will Premier Christy Clark's performance be in tonight's televised launch? Will she be surprisingly strong? Or will she be same-old-same-old, or even blunder? If something game-changing does arise you'll be among the first to hear about it.
If you would like to receive my B.C. Election Alerts News Service please let me know by email to john@johntwigg.com and follow it with a cheque or cash for only $20 (no tax) to:
John Twigg
P.O. Box 101 Postal Stn. A
Campbell River B.C.
V9W 4Z9
Your feedback is welcome as always.
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