British Columbia provincial election 2013

[Foucaulf]

NDP 80%; Green 77%; Liberal 53%; Conservatives 28%. The only question on which I agreed with the Cons was, surprisingly enough, fishing rights for Native peoples.

some real questions:
- Will the Greens or Conservatives win any seats?
- How bad will the Liberals lose?

1) Probably not. Neither party has done the community outreach or donor base at the real parties' level. If the Greens can win one seat it's in Oak Bay-Gordon Head, where they actually have a star candidate in climatologist Andrew Weaver. Conservative leader John Cummins is by no means a star candidate and I'll be very surprised if he wins his riding of Langley. Note as well that the Greens have been consistently overpolled since the 2001 election.

2) I'd say the Liberals lose at least 20 seats, up to 32 or so. They'll be massacred in Vancouver proper, Burnaby and the Tri-city suburbs (Coquitlam, Port Moody) and shut out of Vancouver Island. NDP will win a seat each in North Vancouver, Richmond and Southern Surrey, and a lot more in the Interior. The most solid base remaining for the Liberals is the Fraser Valley, but if the NDP can win again in Chilliwack from a 3-way split then it's time to really panic.

[Foucaulf]

How low is the Liberal floor in this election? I know that in British Columbia there's a significant portion of the electorate that will never under any circumstances vote for the NDP; with the Conservatives looking less and less like a credible threat, this means it's unlikely for the Liberal tally to drop below a certain point.

There are two ways to answer this question:

1) One is to look at polling data during the height of the HST crisis, i.e. October - November 2010. The polls from that period, at least those on Wikipedia, show a Liberal mean of around 25%.

2) WRT the "electorate that will never vote for the NDP" question, a case study could be the 1991 election that saw the collapse of the Social Credit government. 24% of the population voted still for the Socreds, faithful to the Socred-NDP bipartisan system.

I would call the "Liberal floor" at a quarter of regular voters. The proportion of Liberal voters in the last two months' polls - around 29% - should be what they're getting in the election, since every Liberal attempt to wage a PR stunt has failed spectacular (see attack ads on Dix, and using government money to get ethnic voters back in the fold)

[Foucaulf]

Whats with the Conservative revival anyway? Are they effectively a protest party against the Liberals?

Looking at the polls supplant my claim that the Conservatives rose only after the HST referendum campaign finished. From that we have cause #1 of their rise: the mobilization of the anti-HST campaign, headed by former premier and kleptocrat Bill Van der Zalm. For the former Socreds, seeing their former leader in action reminded them the potential of a renewed right.

By late 2011 John Cummins also started to make headlines, since the Liberals were at a loss wrt policy after the HST debacle. But by 2012 the HST movement failed to evolve to a political force, and party infighting only made the Conservatives seem irrelevant.


The Tyee, my BC news site of choice, has a list of riding projections. Their call is 56-18 NDP with 10 undecideds.

[Foucaulf]

Also, is there any website in which a user can set a uniform swing to see what seats would switch (sort of like the one The Australian has for Australian elections)?

Closest I can think of is the UBC Election Forecaster. Related to that is an Intrade-esque outfit on the election results.

With regards to Boundary-Similkameen, I want to point out that it's essentially the federal riding of BC Southern Interior (won last time by the NDP with over 50%) minus the solid NDP provincial riding of Fraser-Nicola. It's always been a competitive riding, and in 2009 the Conservative candidate was the Liberal nominee, but got rescinded.

[Foucaulf]

The Tories got 20% in Boundary-Similkameen in 09. Any chance at a pickup?

This is now impossible, as the Conservative candidate was dropped after one looked through what he wrote in local paper editorials.

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That makes three candidates dropped so far. Fifty-four candidates for the party remain, I think.

[Foucaulf]

If you're really obsessed with this election, the one leaders' debate for the election is happening right now. You can stream it via CBC.

You can also watch it if you want to see John Cummins try very, very hard to be relevant.

[Foucaulf]

The point was that the choice to run the story "Dix the clear debate winner, say CBC Vote Compass users" might well be explained by Vote Compass bias rather than any supposed NDP bias.

I'd rather CBC tether onto the Vote Compass than celebrity ice-skating, for what it's worth...


Liberal campaign hilarity, #85: the party bought a front-page ad on one of Vancouver's free commuter papers. When I say front-page ad, I mean they bought an entire page that appears before the real headlines.

The ad was a pretend article about how Clark won the leadership question in post-debate exit polls. Evidently the other papers reported on the controversy, and now Quebecor (conglomerate which owns the paper) is scrambling a bit too.


And, in fairness, one NDP candidate has resigned so far after making blog posts about them Native peoples and them getting welfare checks. But a new candidate was found.

[Foucaulf]

Excuse me while I run off to cry. What the hell?

If I'm reading some of these figures correctly, the Conservative vote is due more to NDP bleeding than the Liberals... usually I sneer at Hash's mid-election night commentary, but I agree with him on everything so far.

[Foucaulf]

I was planning to do a longer postmortem, but given my procrastination what I've wanted to say ought to have been written already somewhere.


There is a significant divide between Vancouver/Victoria and the rest of the province. In the cities the errors of the Liberals are well remembered: the HST, Enbridge, the scandals, refusal to legalize marijuana and solve the homelessness problem. But these issues evaporate from public concern when one is in Kelowna, even when one is in the Fraser Valley or the outer suburbs of Metro Vancouver.

If Clark is going up North and into the interior and greeting people, the local papers will report on it and people will take notice. Then she announced her plan to excavate Liquefied Natural Gas, saying there is potential for 1-2 trillion in the energy industry. I dismissed it as Pollyanna nonsense, and so do people in Metro Vancouver who work in industries quite removed from resource extraction. But for those outside the big cities resource extraction remains the primary industry, just as it have been decades before. At the very least, supporting the Liberals means guaranteed investment in their communities.

Pair that support outside the cities with immigrants in the cities. These immigrants may not all have been here during the last NDP government, but word of the scandals ring loud and clear through the years. The immigrants have no connections with the unions, and most have some kind of high-skill occupation. They see the NDP and they see a party that does little for them, and yet supports teachers whose strikes inhibit their children's futures. Surely the Liberals have better connections with CEOs and leaders in the ethnic community as well.

The movement of richer immigrants into Surrey and the tri-city area, I think, counts for the losses in Coquitlam-Maillardville, Port Moody-Coquitlam, Delta North and Surrey-Fleetwood. The lack of a NDP response deriding the Liberal economic gamble as claptrap meant they lost the other four interior ridings.

Turnout, in the end, was only a percent higher than in 2009, and that was the most low-key election in a long time. The youth vote probably remains abysmal. If the NDP gets to contest another election, they need to stop blaming the Greens for siphoning their vote. The Greens are hipper, and they wear their social liberalism more proudly. The BCNDP could learn from that.



On where Clark will run - I would have loved to see her defeat as an opportunity for angry cabinet members to backstab her, but barring that she should take a North Vancouver seat.