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BC Election Aftermath
May 13, 2009 - 5:40pm
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This is a thread for general discussion of the aftermath of the BC election, since there is currently no thread created specifically for this purpose. I hope the mods don't consider this to be thread proliferation.
Here's the election results, for those who still don't know (subject to change after the official count)
49 Liberal
36 NDP
Here's why I think Carole James lost the election:
Carole James failed to take on Campbell on the economy, apart from a few half-efforts here and there. Carole also failed to construct a set of policies and programs which could tie into an economic plan significantly different from Campbell's approach of leaving it to the market. She completely failed to challenge Gordon Campbell's "Keep BC Strong" campaign theme, which was used to sell the BC Liberal's failed economic policy to BC voters.
The "Axe the Tax" policy may have driven some potential NDP votes to the Green Party. Moreover, it was simply brainless. It framed the opposition to the Carbon Tax in the most conservative way possible, and the voters to whom such a slogan would appeal (apart from NDP partisans who will love whatever the NDP does), are not voters who will consider voting NDP in the first place. It also gave the environmental movement a big stick with which to hit the NDP over the head, and when they did at the outset of the campaign, it forced the NDP onto the defensive for a week. On top of all this, Carole James invested so much in "Axe the Tax", that when the Metro Vancouver Mayors came out with the brilliant proposal to apply the carbon tax to transit, Carole James could not support said proposal.
The NDP's silence on the *@#! bridge and highway expansion known as "Gateway" was also brainless. For starters, said bridge and highway expansion will, if they get built, nullify any other initiatives the provincial government takes to reduces BC's greenhouse gas emissions. It's obvious that anyone who is serious about addressing BC's carbon emissions must oppose the bridge and highway expansion. On top of which, not opposing the bridge and highway expansion further alienates the environmental movement. Opposition to the bridge and highway expansion as a central campaign theme, would have helped the NDP in Burnaby, where residents clearly don't want the Trans-Canada highway widened to eight lanes. Maybe they would have won three or four seats in Burnaby, instead of just two.
I'm really dissapointed that BC-STV lost. I think the outright lies of the NO SVT campaign, the fear-based response of many British Columbians to the recession, and less voter desire for change after a less skewed election result in 2005, were factors that helped to sink the voting reform initiative.
The one silver lining is the election of Kathy Corrigan in Burnaby-Deer Lake, who thankfully has the good position on the bridge and the carbon tax.
The gas tax and carbon tax are 2 completely different things, we have both!
And again I dio not think people were willling to pay for a new electoral system that would cost 10's of millions, at best, during a recession.
My bad, I meant carbon tax, and have changed this in my above post.
I'm almost inclined to view the election as a backhanded kind of "protest vote", i.e. voters rolling their eyes and deciding a pox on all houses, best to just vote whatever stay-the-governing/opposition-course status quo and get it all over with.
Thus the high incumbent and incumbent-party reelection rate.
"The "Axe the Tax" policy may have driven some potential NDP votes to the Green Party."
I don't think so. The Green Party got a humiliatingly low 8% of the vote. Less than they got in 2001 or 2005. That is their floor - the 8% of people who want a third option - they think that the BC Liberals are controlled by big business and the NDP is controlled by unions and they want "none of the above". When you consider that 60% of Green supporters OPPOSE the carbon tax speaks volumes. Honestly, the BC NDP could make David Suzuki its leader, promise to shut down the entire forest industry and propose a carbon tax that is twice as big as the green party - and they will never get the green vote any lower than the 8% they got (OK maybe they can drive it down to 7%...) because there will always be about 7-8% of people in BC who are "Tories with composters", "young techies in condos", "dentists wives who care about spotted owls" or "none of the above folk" who will always vote for whoever is on the ballot with the word "green" under their name and who will NEVER vote NDP - ever! There is no point even trying.
The NDP is controlled by the unions, specifically the public sector unions, and that is why it loses over and over again.
Since the NDP became the main opposition party in 1952 (61 years by 2013) it will have held power for 13 years with 3 election victories.
This was the most left wing NDP campaign I've ever seen: everything public sector is good, everything private sector is bad.
As Keith Baldrey said on the CTV election coverage last night "the problem isn't Carole James, the problem is that the NDP just hits a wall in support below that of the Liberals (and you could basically go back to the 1979 election and replace Liberal with 'anti NDP coalition' and that will have been true for 24 of 34 years).
Even during a recession with a government mired in scandal and an unpopular premier, the NDP couldn't win.
It's time to replace the NDP with a broad based center left coalition that isn't dominated by unions and isn't intrisinically hostile to the private sector (and that doesn't mean I think everything should be privatized).
Written just before the BC election
NDP leadership prepares to hand Campbell a third term
"It's time to replace the NDP with a broad based center left coalition that isn't dominated by unions and isn't intrisinically hostile to the private sector (and that doesn't mean I think everything should be privatized)."
Agreed.
I also think its time to leave "Identity Politics" behind. Which party elected both the first physically disabled MLA in decades and the first Japanese MLA ever (both women)? Hint, it wasn't the NDP.
"This was the most left wing NDP campaign I've ever seen: everything public sector is good, everything private sector is bad."
Gee whiz and reading babble I was under the impression that this was the rightwing NDP campaign ever what with all the planks to get tough on crime and to oppose the carbon tax (sic.) - which one is it??
"Even during a recession with a government mired in scandal and an unpopular premier, the NDP couldn't win."
Its not quite that simple. Campbell isn't THAT unpopular. Sure people on the left despise him - but about 50% of British Columbianbs seems to apprive of him - sad but true. There are more rightwing people in BC than we like to admit - in the October federal election, the Tories under Stephen "Mr. Personality" Harper got 44% of the vote in BC - and add to that all the rightwing Liberal votes. The scandals were never really juicy enough to capture peoples imaginatiosn - there was a lot of innuendo, a lot of hearsay - but no smoking gun and all that stuff about BC rail and the Basi-Virk case was far too complex for anyone to get their head around. The recession is much too recent and regarded as being caused by events abroad to be a drag on the BC Liberals. People would have to be convinced that this was a "Made in BC recession" and they don't believe it - yet.
In the end, the election was quite close - 46%-42%, it wouldn't take much for the BC Liberals to shed a few points once they have been there for 12 years and esp. after the horrific years that loom where there will be multibillion dollar deficits and massive cuts in social spending etc...Saying that the NDP can "never" win a BC election unless it jettisons everything it believes in - is as absurd as saying that because Gary Doer has won three times in Manitoba - the Manitoba PCs can ever ever win an election there. I'm not so sure.
Stockholm, I agree, on social issues like crime, the NDP did move to the right with the get tough on crime talk and no more talk of legalizing marijuana.
On economics, as I said, this was clearly the most left wing campaign I've ever seen, with the proposed moratorium on run of the river (which, as the NDP well knows, would kill of the private companies involved and leave all the projects to be bought out by B.C Hydro where they can be run by unionized public sector employees) and their talk of 'take back your province'.
It may not have been left wing enough for a lot of the people here, but that isn't really surprising and doesn't really mean anything.
I expect a lot of flak over my position, I don't care. I think the results just speak for themselves: the NDP/CCF has been in government for 13 of 61 years, and for 5 of those years, they governed despite getting a lesser share of the vote.
The NDP wins occasionaly whenever the natural governing party, the coalition of 'free enterprisers' screws up bad enough, but clearly B.C isn't all that far off from Alberta in terms of being a one party governing province (yes, the elections are a lot closer).
BTW, I was one of those people who voted Green to protest the NDP opposing the carbon tax. I voted NDP in 2005.
You know I am so glad agenda's have been exposed, this election and the last federal one, puts a lot of things in perspective for me, and for others I am sure too.
The CCF/NDP has been in power in Saskatchewan for about 50 of the last 65 years. The Ontario Tories ruled for 42 straight years. Rules are made to be broken.
I don;t know why you don't vote for Campbell and the BC Liberals they seem to offer exactly what you seem to want the NDP to be - pro-free enterprise, pro-privatization, to hell with the poor - while making a phony gestures about land claims and global warming so that upper middle class Vancouver people don't feel guilty about voting for them.
"and being left to fight an election without any real forces on the ground. In the past, the NDP’s strength has been its organization of rank and file activists that bring the vote out on election day.:
On election day there were 10 polling stations at the location where I was working in Vancouver False Creek - there was NOT ONE NDP scrutineer there at anytime during the day and apparently none at the Roundhouse for the advance poll.
In fact one voter asked me an Elections BC official for the day why there were no NDP'ers supervising the voting. I didn't answer but someone else suggested she phone the NDP and ask them.
It looks like while the NDP popular vote is up a bit that the number of people voting for the NDP is down so perhaps some of there supporters saw the writing on the wall and stayed home.
" the first Japanese MLA ever"
She was featured on both of the major newscasts here tonight - quite a story - her Canadian born father interned during the Second World War in the Interior and getting elected 60 years to the day that the Japanese Canadians got the right to vote.
Also the Liberals elected at least 2 Chinese Canadians - three Indo-Canadians
The election was close, so was the election in 1979, 1983, 1986 and 2005 and the NDP lost every one of them.
As you yourself said, there are a lot of rightwingers here as well. The 'anti NDP coalition' has no problems winning elections by narrow margins, this is the 6th time.
Again, I think 48 years to 13 years says about all anybody needs to know about the provincial NDP. ( think the NDP may have become the largest opposition party prior to 1952, there was the Coalition prior to Social Credit), but I'm not all that familiar with that part of B.C history. So, the numbers could be even more lopsided than 48 to 13.
They weren't the only party to get less votes. The BC NDP got 83,843 less votes in 2009 than they did in 2005. That's a massive amount of voters to alienate for a party that wasn't even in power.
It was interesting watching David Schreck on CBC beaming with glee about STV being defeated and then asked whether Carol James should step down. He replied that it was absolutely normal for the BC NDP to be out of power and a perfectly acceptable result. That Gordon Cambell was getting to govern with complete unimpeded power for 12 years with less than a 50% mandate was the system working as it should in his opinion. That's the impression I get of the BC NDP, they are more interested in finding a niche for themselves than they are in making our province more democratic or socialist. The BC NDP will continue to alienate voters and bleed support for the forseeable future, I don't see a lot of evidence that they have any intention or strategy to reverse this process if it has even dawned on them that it is a problem.
I suspect that any other non-governing party in the world that lost that amount of votes from one election to the next would be troubled by the result and engage in some introspection and perhaps reform. I believe this comfort with defeat is a uniquely Canadian social democratic phenomenon.
I think the problem exists primarily with the executive of the party and I have a lot of sympathy for the membership and their continual efforts, it can't be easy.
1.The Ontario Tories were the centrist party there with the Liberals mostly a right wing rural party. With the exception of the 5 years of the NDP and the 8 years of the Harris Tories, the center parties have held power pretty much continuously.
2.Had I lived in a riding with a Liberal candidate I liked, I would have considered voting for them. I'm not happy with their bullshit on the Patrick Kinsella stuff and other things they've done that have weakened oversight of the government, so, all in all, I was very happy casting a protest vote with the Greens.
The Greens are also correct on legalizing drugs, so I was pleased to back them up on that.
You do seem to need to demonize your opponents for some reason. The Liberals, especially in the second term, were a much more centrist party than that. The N.D.P promised to fix all the problems in health care while increasing spending on it by 3%. That's the sort of overpromising lies that turn so many people off of politics and is another reason why I'm glad the NDP didn't win.
The 'gestures' on land claims are certainly not phony as anybody who voted Conservative will tell you.
As to global warming, we've established that you have zero understanding of economics and I don't wish to redebate this with you.
To repeat: this wasn't an election so much about reelecting the BCLiberals. It was an election about reelecting the status quo--from both ends. By recent BC standards, the lack of raw seat turnover is astonishing: there hasn't been anything even approaching such stasis since the Bennett vs Barrett years, if not the WAC Bennett years.
And again, there's a bit of a "pox on all houses" undercurrent. And when it comes to "might as well stick to the status quo", the STV result is the icing on the cake.
The Saskatchewan P.C and most of the Liberals did rebrand themselves by becoming the so called 'Sask' Party.
So, that's actually an example in my favor, not in yours.
So, you are basically saying that for the BC NDP to ever win an election they need to take a giant step to the right and essentially become a clone of the BC Liberals.
I don't know what you mean about the NDP being against "anything being public" I don't see ANYTHING in the NDP platform that cakls for mass nationalization of all major industries and instituting a socialist state. They do want to stop these fraudulent crooked P3 schemes and contracting out. Some of us don't like seeing thousand of hospitals workers fired en masse and then re-hired at half the wages after a BC Liberal privatization scheme. If you think the NDP is being too extreme, because they oppose stuff like that - then I say "guilty as charged and proud of it"!!
If you think that this Fraser institute inspired greenwash called the "carbon tax" (that will do NOTHING about global warming and I mean NOTHING) - then the only one who knows nothing about economics is you - unless you actually support the carbon tax for the right reasons - because you believe in neocon economics and you like the idea of taking from the poor and giving to the rich.
Well, I see you are having to demonize everybody you disagree with as usual, and I've argued with you enough for today. So, have a good day.
I could rebut all your nonsense, but hopefully there will be less extreme people personality wise disagreeing with my comments with whom I can have a rational conversation.
In elections past, myself along with many of my relatives used to do that stuff for the NDP. I've done every kind of NDP volunteer work on E-Day: Poll Captain, ran Zone Houses, inside and outside scruntineer, runner, driver, you name it I've done it. That was a different time. The NDP machine isn't what it used to be, hence the fall in actual number of NDP votes across the Province. A large part of the overall decline in voting can be blamed on the decline of the NDP volunteer base.
These days, they are lucky to get my vote.
melovesproles, theLiberals lost votes too.
They got 807,118 in 2005 and this time they only got around 712,000 which means they lost almost 100,000 votes.
I think the NDP got a higher popular vote percentage than they would have got if the election had been confined to Babble posters.
That's interesting. I was a "poll captain" at a voting place in the heart of the westend which had 8 polls and not one single Liberal scrutineer bothered to show up. Some of our scrutineers, as well as election officials, were asking where the Liberals were. I told them that I suspected that since it wasn't exactly a Liberal friendly poll, that they would show up at the end for the vote count (which I have seen happen numerous times), but low and behold no Liberals.
"On election day there were 10 polling stations at the location where I was working in Vancouver False Creek - there was NOT ONE NDP scrutineer there at anytime during the day and apparently none at the Roundhouse for the advance poll."
That's good news. I'm relieved that the NDP isn't wasting valuable volunteer resources in a no hope riding like Vancouver-False Creek.
Unfortunately, its a fact of life that much fewer people these days want to volunteer and knock on doors for any party. Society has changed. Back in the 1960s when the NDP perfected the "Riverdale model" where every single door in every single poll would be contacted 4 times during a campaign - are long gone. Back then, there were vast numbers of housewives etc... who were willing to do that legwork. Nowadays, much, much, much fewer people have the time or the desire to do volunteer work for ANY cause - political or otherwise. I suppose that the BC Liberals - with their vast amounts of $$ can make up for this by simply paying people to campaign for them. The NDP has to rely 100% on volunteers and the number of people who are willing to endure the abuse of knocking on doors is falling with the evry year.
Every single poll in our riding was covered by NDP scrutineers for the whole day as well as for the count, etc.
Some truth about both parties not covering all polling stations because they are in a hard to win riding but my polling station was in that part of False Creek that was only a couple of blocks from Davie and Burrard and had a fairly strong NDP turnout - haven't seen all the poll numbers from there but the one I helped count was won by McNeil by one vote.
Yes the days of knocking on doors is becoming a thing of the past - too many people freakout when some stranger comes to the door.
"Every single poll in our riding was covered by NDP scrutineers for the whole day as well as for the count, etc."
Mind telling us which riding that was.
Thanks
http://www.cicnews.com/2009/04/canada-maintain-immigration-levels-2009-r...
http://www.canadavisa.com/about-british-columbia.html
It's a monopolized media and the message it was sending was of fear and of ignorance as the majority of voters are clueless unlike the many that search out informative spots on the net. Campbell didn't have a superior anything but he has the media, the only real media with TV, Print and Radio to its credit and the only real voice for many. As there are many new in this country that don't even understand our politics much less speak the language along with a great deal of ignorance of how the system actually works as public apathy at all time high.
And a Strong economy is that why BC has record numbers of immigrants arriving while records numbers are losing their jobs? Are immigrants creating new jobs? Or are they taking existing jobs while driving down wages while greatly reducing services they did not contribute to as immigrants use up programs more than natives while government makes serious cuts to necessary services? And despite the steady decline of jobs and small business said to crumble under additional costs of $4000 for the year. Is that why after 8 years of prosperity BC in the hole and services are left in dire want? While those who fought for this country find themselves dying on Vancouver streets as it's a Stronger Canada than ever before or so the Media Giant's employees say as they prepare to host the Olympics as Campbell's pictures graces their pages more than any other face out there. Except Robertson but he is something to look at least as when Campbell was on everyone wanted to turn him off and here he is going strong. How does that work?
I'd expect the incumbent government to lose votes especially when the Premier is going for a threepeat and is mired in scandal. An opposition party which wants to gain power but gets 85,000 less votes than the last election is a pretty good indication of a failed campaign. I was going to say I agree with the John Kerry/Carol James analogies being made but didn't Kerry increase the Democrat's vote tally? There really isn't another party in the world that is as comfortable with losing as the NDP.
That definitely wouldn't have been true in 2005. The loss of interest in the NDP by activists and the politically obsessed and the correlation with the massive decline in votes for the party isn't a coincidence. The partisans on here happily write off progressive voters as too high maintenance, they aren't worrying a tad about the drop in voter turnout for they are once again where they and Dave Schreck feel comfortable-in opposition with an electoral system that might once ever twenty years or so produce a wonky enough result to vault their milquetoast, flavourless brand into power.
The only upside I can see out of Carol James remaining leader of the NDP is that let's face it, her replacement would probably be even worse-some good ol boy asshole like Farnworth.
The clear winner of this election was the Not Bother Voting party-they increased their vote share and their future looks bright!
Who are you and what have you done with the real Stockholm?