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.