November 9, 2020
There are times when those of us who live in BC feel even further from Toronto emotionally than we are geographically.
For me, this was such a day.
Today I had to scroll all the way past voluminous (and admittedly excellent) coverage of the US election and the death of Alex Trebek to Page 6 in Canada’s self-styled “National Newspaper”, the Globe and Mail, to get the only inkling that something rather momentous politically had just happened in the third-largest and most populous province of Confederation.
And what did we get on page 6? We got Ian Bailey’s interview with Christy Clark, in which she gave “advice” to the BCLib deep thinkers on how to regain influence with BC voters.
As if she isn’t the architect of their present misfortunes! As if the compassionate centre she advocates isn’t already occupied by the BCNDP! “To be specific, she cited climate change, addressing the wage gap for women, systemic discrimination, supporting First Nations and the LGBTQ community,” says Bailey.
Well, she’s history, and unless something unexpected happens, so is her party; that “big tent” is open to the elements.
In the meantime, he did devote one paragraph to the final numbers (only one is going to recount) BCNDP 57, BCLiberal 28, Green 2
And so far I haven’t seen anyone outside of Twitter mention that the NDP caucus will have more females than males. I do believe that’s a first in Canada, and more than a little significant!
November 11, 2020
Statistics frequently don’t tell the important parts of an election story, but this one, I believe, is a bit of an exception. For example, NDP candidates have won North Island (exception 2001, in the BCLib near-sweep) forever. But never very comfortably until this election, when the NDP’s Michele Babchuk, running for the first time, got 50.75% of the vote. Another one: Oak Bay-Gordon Head has almost always followed the government, voting Social Credit when it was the dominant party, switching to NDP when it was, switching to BCLiberal when Campbell became Premier, and then beating expectations by going Green with Andrew Weaver in 2013. (Of course he effectively became part of the government when Premier Horgan and he scraped together a working agreement to oust the Clark government in 2017.) Then he retired. Murray Rankin, long an NDP stalwart federally, ran there tis election, and increased the NDP vote 27.5% to 51.1%. And yet another: Ronna-Rae Leonard, in Courtenay-Comox, notoriously won last election in a squeaker of a recount, her victory making the NDP minority possible. This time? Up 13.2%, and 50.6%. Yes, she is a good constituency MLA, but not that good!
I could, of course, cite many more examples: something was definitely happening!
You could tell something was in the air in Campbell River from the beginning. Yes, there was a pandemic happening, and yes, it was a snap election, but still... The Babchuk campaign got signs up during the second week. All the usual lawns had them and then some, and very few in public spaces: textbook NDP sign tactics. It took more than 3 weeks to see the first Green signs (They clearly thought they had a winner in Alexandra Morton, the notorious anti-salmon farm activist; those of us who’ve been on the political salmon file for years were pretty sure that was delusional: wrong candidate, wrong constituency, insufficient funding to make much of a dent. They ran 3rd, as usual) There weren’t very many signs and very few of them were on lawns. They appeared to use exclusively small signs, and this year’s version of green blended too well with the vegetation. Then finally, in the last two weeks, we got a blizzard of BCLib signs. There may have been some on lawns, but certainly most were in public spaces and inefficient: what makes anyone think putting 5 signs in a clump along the road is useful? That just suggests your campaign ordered too many and doesn’t have actual addresses at which to place them!
Of course, there was no door-knocking. Some of us have maintained for several recent elections that that kind of door-to-door campaigning, a city mainstay, is largely irrelevant in constituencies like North Island. Proof? We’ve never before won Campbell River. And the rest of the constituency is far too spread out. This time our candidate was well-known: a city councillor, the chair of the Regional Board, and a former Chair of the School District. Obviously the fact that there was no personal contact didn’t do her campaign any damage.
Her campaign did an adequate job of Facebook ads, but the winner of that file, hands down (apart from the excellent central campaign focusing on premier Horgan) was Murray Rankin in Oak Bay-Gordon Head, who managed a significant posting virtually every day.
I have no proof, but suspect the campaign in Campbell River was pretty typical. In BC, only 52.4% of eligible voters voted, which is the lowest number in 90 years. Why? It was easier than ever to cast a ballot: Sandy and I both ordered a mailed ballot online and sent it in when it arrived in the mail. (Altogether, over 640,000 mailed ballots were cast, another significant record.) There were a full 5 days of advance voting; consequently, by voting day there were almost no lines anywhere. So no one can claim voting was too onerous!
When John Horgan first became leader of the BCNDP the Christy Clark government tried to tar him with an “angry John Horgan” label. That didn’t work at all: Horgan found another gear entirely as Premier, and I suspect BCers were quite satisfied with Premier Horgan’s low-key, non-confrontational approach to governing. He also didn’t hog the spotlight; his Cabinet, particularly his key Ministers (Dix, James, Eby, Simpson, Fleming, Heyman, et al) almost all of whom had been the opposition critics for those same portfolios for years, became very much the public face of their portfolios. Most BC voters, I believe, think that worked.
But the very biggest difference in 2020 was that the party and election financing rules had been changed, with enthusiastic Green cooperation. No longer could corporations pile vast amounts of money in BCLib coffers; no longer could BC trade unions prop up NDP campaigns and constituencies. The result was that everyone was short of money, but the change hit the BCLibs particularly hard. For once they had no aircraft, and no campaign bus. Furthermore, as the campaign progressed, it became clear that they were lousy improvisors.
The other change is that people like us were told we had contributed the maximum, and no number of pleading emails could change that. The implication of that fact is that parties are going to have to really work at expanding their donor bases. That’s good for democracy.
I believe the new rules have changed elections in BC for the better and for good. (unless some future government changes the law again, of course!)
To sum up, I think this election was both an outlier (in that we’ll never again get such numbers and so many seats) and an indicator of a significant cultural shift in the BC electorate.
As you can tell, we’re pretty chuffed by the results!
