By John Twigg
Though B.C. political history teaches that we should not read too much into B.C. byelections, the results from the two held yesterday (Feb. 2) still provide some important clues to what will play out in the provincial election due to be held in May 2017 - only about a year away if you include the usual busy run-up to the official writ drop in April.
That the B.C. New Democrats handily won both byelection contests and the way they won them are strong indications that the 2017 campaign will be waged much differently and much more aggressively under NDP leader John Horgan than they did under former leaders Adrian Dix and Carole James in 2013 and 2009 respectively.
Horgan New Democrats went negative
During and before the byelection campaigns - in Vancouver-Mount Pleasant and Coquitlam-Burke Mountain - Horgan was telling the media and more importantly telling his party cadres that running "positive" campaigns [my wording throughout] in those campaigns was a grave mistake and that henceforth he and the party would be pointedly critical of the many real and apparent flaws in the policies and performance of B.C. Liberal Party Premier Christy Clark, who took advantage of some inept campaigning by the NDP to win 49 seats in B.C.'s 85-seat Legislature in 2013.
But now it's looking more and more like Clark, 50, will be facing a bit of an uphill climb if she as expected stays to try for what would be her second win as Premier (she won the Liberal Party leadership shortly before the 2013 vote).
Land use deal didn't help Liberals
Clark of course has proven to be a formidable campaigner which was attested to on Monday when she obviously arranged to announce a major or "landmark" new land use agreement in the so-called Great Bear Rainforest which predictably made front-page news and top-billing in hot media reports - just the kind of good news a Premier is able to manufacture in order to curry votes or - perhaps more importantly nowadays - to persuade some of her antagonists to simply stay home rather than show up and vote against her.
But look what it got her this time: a quite resounding repudiation!
Premier Clark was biggest loser
If there were simplistic winners and losers in yesterday's byelections, and there were, then Christy Clark clearly was a big loser. Make that the biggest loser. Like a writing-is-on-the-wall fat-lady-singing loser.
In B.C.'s volatile politics one can never say never but on the other hand the numbers speak volumes, starting with the paltry turnouts, the numbers for which I don't have yet, but what really matter are the proportions.
In Vancouver-Mount Pleasant, which is one of the strongest strongholds in Canadian politics, NDP candidate Melanie Mark polled an eye-popping 61% but then look who finished second: Green Party candidate Pete Fry with a pretty good 26% ! Meanwhile Liberal Gavin Dew, a party minion, drew only 11% and two other candidates drew only 1% each - Libertarian Bonnie Boya Hu and Your Political Party maverick Jeremy Gustafson.
It helped that Mark, a First Nations woman who has worked with the Child and Youth Advocate office, appears to be an MLA able to get right to work, and it's a nice touch that she'll also be the first First Nations woman in the Legislature, though I surmise that some other female MLAs may have been part native and I note that longtime Atlin MLA Frank Calder was First Nations too, and a cabinet minister.
What those numbers show is that voters - at least those caring about the byelection - were not interested in flirting around with boutique alternatives, they were going with the best horse to beat the Liberal - which sentiment also was evoked in the recent federal election against, ahem: Stephen Harper.
Liberal finished third behind Green
And the perhaps-imminent demise of the Liberals in a manner similar to the Vander Zalm Socreds can be seen clearly in the fact that their candidate finished third behind the Green Party candidate! A distant third!!
It's still too early to say "Say goodnight, Christy" but if she or other pro-business apologists are quick to say "Ah but that was only a byelection in Mount Pleasant which the socialists have held since almost forever" then have a look at the debacle in the other seat which has been Liberal or non-CCF/NDP almost since forever too, and certainly since the 1975 election when then-NDP Premier Dave Barrett lost his own seat around there.
In Coquitlam-Burke Mountain the winner was NDP candidate Jodie Wickens with a convincing 46% followed be dedicated Liberal Joan Isaacs at 38% - which is quite a gap in the B.C. milieu though it's also the kind of gap that tightens up a lot when a general election is at issue, as the New Democrats learned the hard out in Chilliwack in 2013.
Why did the largely-unknown Wickens win? It helped that Wickens is a parent activist experienced at organizing for family interests, but the key was that the NDP was able to build a good campaign around her.
So as is always the case now in B.C. politics the 2017 provincial election will again be hard-fought mainly by only two forces - the somewhat mushy polyglot progressives on the left and the business-oriented anybody-but-the-socialists crowd on the centre-right - with a few Greens and other mavericks floating around in a few ridings and occasionally being supported enough to split off a few votes or even win a seat or two.
Keithley ran a poor third for Greens
And that's where the Coquitlam result is most interesting, because high-profile Green candidate Joe Keithley finished a weak third with only 14% and a Libertarian had 2%.
Keithley, who is media savvy and generally well-informed, is more widely known as Joey Shithead, leader of the rock band DOA, and he seemed to have a golden opportunity to score some points in Coquitlam but he failed to do so, and so why? Probably because the voters were determined to "Stop Christy" or at least "send her a message".
For now I'll leave it to pundits, pollsters and other experts to post-mortem precisely which issues were at play on the Coquitlam doorsteps, and you can bet that both the Liberals and New Democrats will be studying that too, but it's pretty clear people want better performance on things like transit and housing and they don't like being gouged by Crown corporations.
And note there were no B.C. Conservative Party candidates in the contests to siphon off a few votes from the Liberals the way the Greens so often do from the New Democrats.
Perhaps the pollsters will learn how many "greenies" went to Christy because she is proving well able to play environment policy cards in her political gamesmanship, such as on (against unless...) pipeline projects, the carbon tax and other examples that in my opinion are largely gimmicks anyway - but she does play the game of getting votes very well.
One could say that Stephen Harper also for a while played that game well, as did Gordon Campbell, but where are they now? More or less gone, though personally they're not hurting much, if at all. But politically they're gone. Done. Finis. Kaput.
Premier Clark surrounded by scandals
Will Christy Clark be the next to join them? Will she pull a Vander Zalm and suddenly resign under the weight of so many scandals (quick-wins, triple-deletes, billion-dollar boondoggles, etc.) and leave her party with too little time to rebuild?
From my perspective there are so many scandals swirling around the Old Christy Liberals (see here and other lists) that her days were already numbered but I'm also aware there are more scandals coming, a few I'm aware of personally and others I only know are there by deducing that they are out there - like the big planet beyond Pluto that astronomers haven't spotted yet but which mathematicians have learned is there.
The economic and fiscal trends are always major drivers of voting behaviour in B.C. politics and for example I'm hearing rumblings from parents that they're not too happy about what's going on in B.C.'s schools, with too many being closed; and likewise in health care where recently the OCLs had to suddenly hire hundreds of nurses to fill vacancies in hospitals; and in yesterday's news a very senior judge in Victoria was excoriating the government for failing to supply enough court clerks - and there's lots more like that, such as in social services (aka children, youth, families, First Nations and other euphemisms that free-enterprisers like to use to cover over the reality that the government must invest in human resources for the public good).
Voters signal dissatisfaction with Clark
Anyway, the B.C. public interest can take some heart from yesterday's byelections because they demonstrate that a majority of B.C. voters are now fed up with the shoddy performance of this latest version of the various free-enterprise regimes that have been running the province with its gamish posturing and billion-dollar sinkholes and tent cities and tawdry ethics and . . . you get the point.
It still remains to be seen whether Horgan can assemble a team of people with enough talent to be able to form a decent cabinet that could actually manage the affairs of state astutely, and the experiment next door in Alberta may inform or color that assessment, but it does look like the Horgan New Democrats now will be given every fair opportunity to do so - because it now seems B.C. voters - judging from the byelections plus opinion polls and media trends - have grown tired of the Clark Liberals.
Though Clark has a few competent ministers in her cabinet, most of them are non-stars unknown to most taxpayers, and Clark herself of late has been getting a little too much dirt on her own hands too as aides around her keep getting mired in peccadilloes and falling like flies, so her days seem now to be numbered.
But ah B.C. politics, you never know when a new storm will float in and blow away all the old assumptions, or if the New Democrat apparatchiks will blunder away another sure win.
No comments:
Post a Comment