The Post-Mortem: #Elxn40 Shake

An exuberant (unelected) Premier Christy Clark was making the rounds of the media today, with a start on the Jeff O'Neill morning show on 99.3 CFOX where she was given bad champagne to toast her victory until she was onto the next media hit. The foremost question on everyone's mind is who is going to step aside so she can try and win a "sure thing" riding.



Meanwhile, the obligatory gnashing of teeth, hand wringing and the like are carrying on as people try to figure this $hit out. In no particular order:

• Adrian Dix is tarnished and a sitting target because of the stuff that happened a long time ago in a galaxy far away. It made great ads to bash him, but it was what Stephen Colbert would call "truthiness." He was not, at the end of the day, a criminal. He made a mistake and he resigned. That is a helluva lot more than some of the deviants, Machiavellians and their ilk that are running around the BC public sector under the last 12 years. I guess we get 4 more now. Bully for us!
• It scared the $^*! out of people when the NDP talked about raising the debt with new spending in a time of economic insecurity and high personal debt. 
• Dix is no match to Clark's charismatic leadership. She's a good debater, presented as confident, well spoken  on many occasions. When she can't dazzle them with her speaking points, she will baffle them with BS that means nothing. To those managed to get off their couches to vote, she seems like more of a confident, go-getter leader than Mr. Policy. It isn't that Dix isn't up to the job. He just can't compete with her carefully crafted image and the spin machine behind her. 
• Negative campaigning and advertising blitzes work. This campaign proved this to me in spades. You couldn't turn around without seeing, hearing, being exposed to a negative ad about Dix, contrasted by warm and fuzzy ones with Clark sitting around the table in soft light. I'm surprised they didn't rig up a halo. 
• People who did not vote strategically in swing ridings helped elect a BC Liberal majority. If voters strategically swung votes from independents, or Greens to the NDP to prevent a Liberal majority we would have had different outcomes in many ridings. In saying that, I think it is exciting that Andrew Weaver, the first Green Party member was elected. And I think it is great Vicki Huntington is back too as an Independent. 

A bit of a round up:

Eby and Heyman offer answers to NDP heartbreak

By Michael Stewart, May 15, 2013. Rabble.ca

I'm devastated that this province can look forward to four more years of unfettered neoliberal policies. This election result is a disaster for labour, for students, for teachers, for the environment, for First Nations rights, for poverty and for affordable housing.

There are already rumblings of what went wrong: vote splitting, the success of negative campaigning, the lack of killer instinct by Dix and his party.

First, Eby has called his campaign a referendum against Christy Clark's leadership. If that's true, and she lost her seat, then all the negative campaigning in the world shouldn't have made a difference. True, Point Grey is not representative of the province as a whole, but it does indicate that the electorate harbours serious questions over Clark's record and leadership. Combine this with the 20-point lead Dix enjoyed only a few weeks ago and it's clear that Clark didn't win this election, Dix lost it.

If the NDP wants to form government, they need to stop relying the belief that the Liberals will simply play themselves out of power in British Columbia and find their nerve. Offer clear policies which promise change in and of themselves by addressing the concrete needs of British Columbians; not vague promises that someday, things will be better.

Otherwise, progressives in this province better get used to disappointment.

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BC NDP flailed instead of fighting back against vicious BC Liberal attack - and lost the election during the campaign

Bill Tieleman's 24 Hours Vancouver/The Tyee column, May 15, 2013.

Tuesday night’s victory by Premier Christy Clark and the BC Liberals will go down in British Columbia political history as one of the biggest upset victories ever.

Unfortunately, it will also go into the books as a triumph of fear over hope, of choosing incredibly negative, personal attack ads over policy and vision, and a revolting example that using taxpayer dollars to advertise your own party cause works.

Clark’s team ran the most right-wing, Republican-style campaign Canada has ever seen.

The BC Liberals were relentlessly nasty, using wealthy allies to air slurs against BC NDP Leader Adrian Dix, while spending voters’ own money to promote the party with a collection of demonstrably false claims about B.C.’s budget, job creation and debt.

And yet, it worked.

For that, the BC NDP must bear its own share of the blame. It allowed a 20-point lead to disappear in a failed campaign that flailed instead of fighting back.

Despite the Harmonized Sales Tax betrayal, the BC Rail scandal and Clark being one of the most unpopular premiers in Canada, the NDP blew it.

And now B.C. will suffer the consequences of electing a leader who is more vicious than visionary.

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Pete McMartin: Absent voters should be ashamed

Excuses cited for not participating in Tuesday’s provincial election, as well as suggestions to making voting easier, are a load of crap

By Pete McMartin, Vancouver Sun columnist May 15, 2013.

During her two days at the polling station, she talked to a Filipino woman who came in, voted, and who then registered her dismay with the apathetic B.C. electorate. Did they not appreciate the privilege of voting? Were they aware that, around the world today, people were dying for the right to vote — not figuratively, but literally — and that in countries nowhere near as wealthy as ours, voter turnouts were much higher?

The answers to both those questions, as evidenced by Tuesday’s experience, would be, no. Neither do many of us appreciate the privilege, nor do we care. More than half of all eligible voters in B.C. have now voluntarily disenfranchised themselves.

Here are the numbers:

• As of Jan. 1, Elections BC reported exactly 3,315,040 eligible voters for the May 14 election. Of those, 3,116,626 registered to vote. (That total will rise somewhat due to citizens who registered at polling stations, the exact number of which won’t be known until early June.)
• As of Wednesday morning, exactly 1,628,524 votes had been cast and counted. (That number, too, will rise, due to late counting of mail-in and absentee ballots.)
• That works out to a voter turnout of registered voters of 52.25 per cent, a fall from the 2009 voter turnout for registered voters of 55.14 per cent.
• But when you use the number of eligible voters to determine voter turnout for this election, the number falls further, to just over 49 per cent.
• And when you consider the total number of votes that the winning Liberals received — 723,133 — the result is even more anemic.
• The governing party of this province for the next four years attracted just 21.8 per cent of all eligible votes. I repeat, 21.8 per cent. That’s not a mandate. It’s a palace coup.

Voting is a bequeathment, not a birthright, and it shouldn’t be seen as an inconvenience to be rectified by iPhone.

It needs defending, not diluting. It needs to be celebrated — not in the flag-waving way of government flackery, but in the hard-eyed way that reminds us how rare and privileged a thing it is.

As for those who were either too lazy, too busy, too complacent or too dissatisfied with the process, or who were so sophomorically cynical about politicians and politics that they couldn’t or wouldn’t get themselves down to a polling station, they should be ashamed of themselves.

There’s a problem with our voting system, all right. It’s them.

pmcmartin@vancouversun.com

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