British Columbia's fickle political romance

theglobeandmail.com
Sept. 20, 2015
By Ian Bailey and John Ibbitson

Andrew Saxton is doggedly courting rush-hour commuters at the North Vancouver SeaBus terminal. “I hope I can count on your support!” the Conservative candidate for North Vancouver says as he attracts the attention of some of those rushing onto and off of the ferry. But it’s hard.

“You guys are wishful thinking,” says a woman who gives the exuberant Mr. Saxton a withering look as she passes by. “Liberals!” a man yells - virtually a declaration of loyalty. One man is happy to chat, though he lives - and votes - in Surrey. And a woman offers a heartening “Sure” as she shakes Mr. Saxton’s hand, barely stopping as she runs for a bus.

Trying to forecast the outcome of the fight for British Columbia’s 42 seats - up six from 2011 due to redistribution - is as chaotic an exercise as trying to make a connection with voters in the SeaBus terminal. But things seem challenging for both the Tories and the Liberals in the province, barring some game-changing development in the campaign ahead of Oct. 19.

Conservatives are fighting to preserve the high-water mark of 21 of 36 seats that they scored in B.C. in 2011. They are almost certain to lose some of those seats - a few, perhaps, to the Liberals. “I know this is a target riding of the Liberals because they did hold it from 2004 until 2008,” Mr. Saxton said in an interview, adding the Liberals have a “decent candidate” in businessman Jonathan Wilkinson.

But, broadly speaking, the threat to most Tories is actually the New Democrats. “The NDP are likely to come out with a majority of the seats in the province,” said Richard Johnston, a political scientist at the University of British Columbia. “The question is how big a majority. Every seat that the Conservatives retain, in what could be a swing against them, could be important.”

Prof. Johnston may be overstating the case. Stephen Harper’s Conservatives might continue to hold a plurality of B.C. seats on election night. But most observers predict the Tories will suffer losses in B.C - an outcome that could help trim the Tories towards a minority or bolster the NDP towards government, depending on results elsewhere in Canada.

B.C. can be divided into four political regions. There is the resource-producing economy of the Interior, a blue bastion since the days of Reform. There is Vancouver Island, divided between a more rugged and Conservative-leaning north and the more leftish capital of Victoria. There is downtown Vancouver, where the Liberals and the NDP fight it out. And there are the suburbs and exurbs of the Lower Mainland, where all three parties battle for power, with the inner suburbs trending progressive and the outer suburbs trending Conservative.

In the last election, that resulted in 21 Conservative seats, 12 NDP, two Liberals and one Green; one of the Conservatives has since become Independent.

But underlying all of this is an ethos, which permeates the political culture today just as it has since the province was created more than a century ago. David Black, a political scientist at University of Victoria, calls it “the political romance that is B.C.”

“You see more political variety in a smaller geographical footprint than anywhere I know of in Canada,” he said. “There's a waywardness, a fickleness, a curiosity about politics...that moves people to take educated bets on new things.”

He attributes this waywardness to the province’s historic isolation from the rest of the country, which has produced a place “where people are incredibly passionate about politics,” and quite indifferent to what anyone in the rest of the country is thinking.

It creates ridings where there are three-way, even four-way races - for this is the base of Green Party Leader Elizabeth May, who won the riding of Saanich-Gulf Islands in the last election. (The Greens are hoping, at the least, to add Victoria to that roster this time; in a 2012 by-election, the Greens came within 1,118 votes of winning the riding over the NDP’s Murray Rankin.)

It creates people who vote NDP in one election and Conservative in the next - people who, in the 1990s, voted for both NDP premier Glen Clark and Reform leader Preston Manning. And, both historically and today, it creates a bipolar mentality that makes it hard for Liberals to find purchase.

Provincially, Liberals and Conservatives coalesce against the NDP in the B.C. Liberal Party. (Stockwell Day, a former Canadian Alliance leader and cabinet minister in the Harper government, campaigned for the B.C. Liberals in the last election.) Federally, it’s mostly a Conservative-NDP fight.

“It has always been harder for the federal Liberal Party of Canada in British Columbia,” said one senior Liberal organizer speaking on background. “The one thing you can say about us is we’re tolerant to suffering. We’re the underdogs.”

Despite that stark assessment, Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau has abundant ties to the province. His mother’s family is from B.C. - his maternal grandfather was an MP and federal fisheries minister. Mr. Trudeau studied in B.C. and taught in Vancouver schools.

But Hamish Telford, head of the political science department at the University of the Fraser Valley, says those ties probably won’t matter to most voters - though they may subtly help Mr. Trudeau on the campaign trail. “He can just speak more naturally to the needs and desires of the province, speak with greater familiarity about Vancouver, a city he probably knows reasonably well. He doesn’t have to look at his teleprompter to get his neighborhood and street names right.”

Mr. Wilkinson, the Liberal seeking to replace Mr. Saxton as North Vancouver’s MP, is hoping to connect with progressive voters in the riding, including some Red Tories who might be ill-at-ease with current Conservatives.

“It’s an anybody-but-Harper versus Conservative fight in B.C. right now, and the struggle between the NDP and Liberals is who is best placed to represent the folks who want to see change,” Mr. Wilkinson said.

Another senior Liberal quietly agrees the party is unlikely to take seats in areas where the NDP is strong. But in areas where the NDP is weak, such as Surrey, Delta and North Vancouver - Mr. Saxton’s riding - that opens up the possibility of Liberal gains against Conservatives.

A good night for the Liberals would see them increase their count from two to six of B.C.’s 42 seats. A fantastic night would bump that number up to a dozen.

But the more likely scenario on election night is for New Democrats to defeat Conservatives. The question is: Will it be a tide, a wave or a tsunami?

Pollster Dimitri Pantazopoulos suspects that support for the NDP in recent polls is real but may be overstated. “I would hesitate to say it’s as strong as some of the polls are suggesting, but I do think it’s there, and it’s there for a couple of reasons,” he said in an interview.

Mr. Pantazopoulos believes that Conservatives in B.C. are suffering from voter fatigue: After a decade in power, a lot of people want to see the back of Stephen Harper, including some who voted for him in the past. In B.C., that rejection manifests itself in increased support for the NDP, because the party is already strong provincially as well as federally.

And something else could be in play. Mr. Harper continues to focus his attack on Justin Trudeau, because in most parts of Canada the Tories are trying to woo soft Liberal supporters back to the Tory fold. But because the Liberals are weaker than the NDP in B.C., the national Tory campaign leaves the NDP in B.C. largely unscathed.

That said, Mr. Pantazopoulos expects to see support for the NDP weaken as election day approaches. After all, in this polarized province, the anti-NDP vote remains very powerful. Just ask Adrian Dix, the provincial NDP leader who lost to the Liberals’ Christy Clark in 2013 in an upset that Mr. Pantazopoulos, who polled for the BC Liberals, had predicted.

Also, B.C. has received six of the 30 new seats that will expand the House of Commons to 338 seats. All of those are in Vancouver or the Lower Mainland, and many are ridings where the Conservatives have done well in the past.

“I don’t think it’s going to be a sweep for the NDP by any stretch,” Mr. Pantazopoulos predicted. Nonetheless, he added, the Conservatives “have to accept that the high-water mark was the 2011 election. From there it’s just holding on or minimizing losses.”

The Harper government’s pro-pipeline stance, the alleged botched cleanup of an oil spill in Vancouver harbour, and the party’s foot-dragging on global warming add fuel to the tanks of those committed to voting Anyone But Harper. Also, more than 300 people turned out at Vancouver City Hall one weeknight for a public-information session convened by the mayor on refugee issues, and the gathering seemed skeptical about Mr. Harper’s approach. But Bill C-51, the controversial anti-terrorism legislation, may have done the Tories more harm, and the fact that the NDP opposed the bill and the Liberals supported it only helps NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair’s cause.

That said, a senior NDP official speaking on background talked of the Conservatives’ “incredible machinery” and “sophisticated” ground game. “It would be a terrible mistake to underestimate them,” the official said. In close races, the Tories GOTV (Get Out the Vote) machine could prove decisive.

So a good night for the Conservatives would be only a few losses. A good night for the Liberals would be a few gains, while a good night for the NDP would be to replace the Conservatives as the dominant federal party in B.C.

Whatever happens, it will doubtless reflect the Left Coast’s idiosyncratic political culture. “It is tied to the fact that it is so far removed from everything that it has attracted a lot of very interesting, odd people,” Prof. Black said. “And that romance has never quite gone away.”