Canadian by-elections, 2015

[Citizen Hats]

That's funny, I've just been reading several opinion pieces about how well the BC NDP has been doing of late drawing blood from Christy Clark on various scandals and policies flubs and how John Horgan has been really hitting his stride and how the BC NDP is now leading the BC Liberals in polls and would win an election if it were held today...meanwhile if Andrew Weaver is supposed to be an opposition leader he sure has a strange way of showing it what with voting in favour of Christy Clark's latest rightwing budget.

Vancouver-Mount Pleasant is a very very very bad fit for the Green Party - they tend to do well among very wealthy people who have solar panels on their roofs and who shop at Whole Foods - that's how they won Oak Bay - working class folk tend to have no time for them whatsoever...and now that the BC NDP has a leader in Horgan who resonates really well with working class people, its hard to imagine why anyone would be attracted to an upper class twit with a posh British accent like QWeaver in an inner city poor seat like Mount Pleasant

Conceptions of who lives in East Van are becoming rapidly out of date. Hell, I live in East Van.  There's a gluten free bakery on my block, and an olive oil tasting room three blocks east. 

[Citizen Hats]

Two byelections in British Columbia yet to be called. They must be called by end of January, I believe

Vancouver--Mount Pleasant - the last stronghold of Canadian Socialism and one of the poorest areas in the country.  Also a few blocks from where I live.  The byelection was triggered by Jenny Kwan's "trip to ride the rides in Ottawa," in the words of Christy Clark

First place will probably be Melanie Mark, NDP, a youngish Nisga activist who works with the office of Children and Families.  Second place will plausibly be Peter Fry, Green, son of Hedy Fry, a prominent community activist from Strathcona who ran for the municipal Greens last year.  To my knowledge, the Liberals do not yet have a candidate, though 2001 Candidate and former Musqueam Chief Gail Sparrow has considered running.

The other is Coquitlam--Burke Mountain, where Liberal Doug Horne resigned to take up the Conservative nomination for Coquitlam--Port Coquitlam, where he was defeated by the Federal Liberals.  I don't know if anyone has been nominated here. 

[Citizen Hats]

The demographics of Chilliwack-Hope skew even more right wing, yet it still went NDP in the 2012 by-election.

We're not talking about the general election here, we're talking about a by-election. It's a very different scenario.

There's no pulse at the BC Conservative Party to make that sort of result plausible at this time

[Citizen Hats]

OTOH to everyone else: just a warning.  When you overplay the "BC Liberals = Nouveau Socred" argument, you just play into lotuslander's hands.  "It's more complicated"--and you don't even have to be a native BCer to recognize the fact. 

It has been more complicated than 'Nouveau Socred' the B.C Liberals are obviously much more of an urban based party than Social Credit was, especially obviously the Social Credit government of WAC Bennett from 1952-1972.

That said, the B.C Liberals are a continuation of the 'anti NDP coalition' that started with 'The Coalition' and then continued with Social Credit.  Even the B.C Liberals say that.

So, if people use "Social Credit" as a shorthand for 'anti NDP coalition' I don't have a problem with that.

The BC Liberal Coalition really only dates back to 1972, when the remaining Tories and the Liberals finally abandoned their parties and joined Social Credit and Bill Bennett.  WACky's SoCreds were more of a stand-alone political force of populist-conservatives, and about a fifth of the electorate continued to vote for the Liberals during those years.  The Post '72 SoCreds were rather explicitly of the coalition mindset

[Citizen Hats]

I don't think it's really a matter of unpopularity at this point, though they were towards the end.  The Social Credit party was a long time ago. 

But it's usually associated with assorted slurs and misunderstandings (the BC Liberals are just Harperites!) or 'Socred-retred' ,rather than any attempt to use the term as shorthand.  Certainly enough ol' socreds out there who might not object to the term at all.
 

[Citizen Hats]

On social issues.  The Liberals are much more to the left.  This gets back to what I said about the Liberal coalition being much more urban and suburban than the heavily rurally based Social Credit.

It's really difficult to make a meaningful statement about relative social policy over this time-scale, since everything and everyone had more socially conservative views than today. Vander Zalm was certainly a religious conservative, but social policy was never a priority during either Bennett Era.  This gets back to the broader British Columbia trend of politics being almost entirely about the getting and dolling out of money above all things. It has always been this way, and it always will be. 

I think Adam T is overstating the rural-urban cleavage.  While the WAC Bennett era party certainly had something of a more country flair, often depicted by the cartoonist Len Norris as uptight old fashioned preachers, Social Credit was really a party of small businessmen- of car dealers and hardware store owners - the petty bourgeoisie as the Marxists might call them, for whom the fundamental concern was that the government produce an environment conducive to business.  The geographic divides reflected much more about how people saw their place in this economy than it did urban-rural cultural attitudes.  Particularly after the consolidations of 1972,

While I haven't run the numbers, there were a number of urban seats which Social Credit rather consistently held, such as Vancouver South, Vancouver - Little Mountain,  Vancouver - Point Grey (post 1972, Liberal prior) Victoria, Vancouver Centre, and Vancouver Burrard usually returned Social Credit members prior to 1972 as well.  Vancouver during the Social Credit Era was mostly governed by their municipal allies the NPA, including rather avowedly pro-SoCred figures like Tom Campbell.  Studies prior to the 1980's Malapportionment cases indicated that the rural bias of seat distributions actually generally benefited the NDP