The 2013 British Columbia election is now over and the BC Liberal Party has grabbed a sizable victory from the much anticipated jaws of defeat. Most every pollster and talking head was absolutely wrong with their predictions. It is interesting to reflect back on this April 25th column from Thomas Walkom, warning that the polls may be very misleading. The only “poll” that mattered was the one that took place yesterday at the ballot box.
What is beyond disgusting though is the false spin from Christy Clark’s Praetorian Guard in the Media Party that this was a great victory thanks to her. This being uttered by the same folks who were entirely wrong in the lead-up to May 14th. In the same way that politicians rarely seem to learn from their mistakes, “journalists” seem impervious to their own.
In the past 24 hours, almost every single person I’ve spoken with who voted for the BC Liberals commented how much they loathed and distrusted Christy Clark but were simply voting that way because they were legitimately frightened about the pro-wacky-environmental / anti-business rhetoric of Comrade Dix of the NDP. From his very own pronouncements during the campaign, he was very much setting the stage to borrow & spend the province into oblivion once again, like every single one of the past NDP regimes in this province has done before.
As for Ms. Clark, one would hope that she would accept her party’s victory with some humility and the loss in her own riding as a clear message that voters aren’t at all pleased with her. But she won’t. That would take a depth of character that she simply doesn’t possess. However, in the near future, when an elected Liberal MLA is coerced to step down so she can run in that person’s riding in a by-election, one can only hope that the voters there will have the wisdom to defeat her again. Of course, she’ll have her friends in the Media Party on her side with heavy duty propaganda to help her win but let’s hope the voters can rise above that spin.
For those interested, Charles Adler will be discussing the election results at 11:05am PDT / 1:05pm CDT / 2:05pm EDT. Update: The segments can be heard here and here.
Update: Lorne Gunter has an excellent summary of the BC election results, as well as a related one about anti-resource politicians like Thomas Mulcair. In the latter one, John Robson has a brilliant line: “The NDP serves as the official opposition to reality.”
An ironic strategy 🙂
I see this election as The Zombie Election.
The people of BC had basically 2 choices at the polls.
Elect the Zombie or the Vampire.
The NDP (zombie) were going to kill you and your businesses and make you a slave to the system, driving all the business-minded people and families east to AB and Sask.
The only viable choice was to vote for the Libs (Vampire) which will just continue to expand and borrow and slowly suck the life out of the Province.
The Political Party which will actually savagely and ruthlessly cut government spending and waste will be the only party which can save BC. Unfortunately, if the voters would actually elect a party to do this, upwards of 50% of them will be voting themselves out of a job. The truth of this will cause most of them to wet themselves and continue on with the Vampire. Doing the right thing is hard.
Redford in Alberta got the union votes from the liberal party.
They voted strategically to keep out the Wildrose Party.
A friend the the liberal headquarters told me their vote loss matched the conservative margin.
Fwiw.
what phone polls never account for is the 47% or there about who are on the take never get off their duff to vote anyway
they say they will vote for the dippers but arent energetic enough to make it to the polls.
under JT, the liberals have taken a turn to the Left
No he hasn’t. Stop making things up.
Yeah under JT we have no idea where the LPC stands on most things! Get it straight already!
I think once Adrian Dix opened his mouth, he ruined his chances for victory.
Just my thoughts.
Now that you mention it, that’s what I thoguht a year ago. I had a sneaking suspicion he’d angry away the election.
Tsakumis’ head must be exploding.
I listened to a podcast of his, from right after Christy stole the leadership. He must have had a brain transplant, or been taken over by zombies.
He now sounds like a complete shill for the NDP….and he criticizes Tieleman for doing just that.
What a self-inflated ego he is…….hope his crow was chewy today!
No Development Party=No Election Win
Listen up Mulcair!
It’s great that the electorate chose the lesser of two evils and returned the Liberals to government. But we renewed their lease at a price because the BC Liberal Government IS A TRULY BAD GOVERNMENT.
This sketchy crew of arrogant, big spending, left leaning nanny staters firmly believes that Government must be the master and that the people of BC can only be servants of Government.
The problem for the voters is how make government the servant of the people instead of the other way round. I don’t believe that recall campaigns are the way to do this because they turn into back door efforts by the NDP to get the majority they couldn’t get in a general election.
What other ways are there to get the Liberal Government to respond to the people of BC?
I don’t know about angry but nutty, yeah.
I think that progressives have been so successful in vilifying those that disagree with them that when contacted for polling many folk respond with safe choices and then vote their conscience in private.
I don’t know very much about BC politics, but I’m certainly glad that the NDP lost, a happy circumstance which can only be good for the country and its economic and unity prospects. On the other hand, I do have an nascent opinion to offer about a couple of things, though:
1. Clark’s loss in her own riding cannot be good for her leadership retention prospects. It’s a bit less clear, I’d suggest, than in the case of Don Getty, which many have mentioned in the various threads on this subject: from the time Mr. Getty assumed the leadership of his party through his political demise and, obviously, well beyond, Alberta politics were far less “competitive”, at least from a partisan point of view, than BC politics at any point since that time. I suppose she deserves credit for carrying on, and all that, but just as Mr. Getty had to give way to Mr. Klein, I’m guessing that Ms. Clark will need to give way — and sooner than Mr. Getty did, on account of that very partisan competitiveness. Which brings me to…
2. Stockwell Day (not that he’s running or anything, or even that he’d be the right person in the circumstance, and not that I’m advocating). In his entire political career, Mr. Day, whom I like and respect very much, had only one bad moment, by my reckoning. I well remember, as an Ontarian (as is Mr. Day, originally), hoping for an alternative to Mr. Chretien, that Mr. Day managed to take 29 of 32 seats in BC in the 2000 general election. I suspect that Mr. Day’s support of Ms. Clark, at a generic level, was probably pretty important in the eventual outcome. The media salivating about the “inevitability” of an NDP landslide had largely, in IMHO, been predicated upon polling data from six and more months ago, which showed a 40-20-20 split (NDP-Liberal-Conservative, at least according to Eric Grenier, who has shown some degree of contrition today). Something, or somebody, or some combination thereof and/or other factors, moved the vote from the Conservatives to the Liberals (I doubt it was Ms. Clark). Which brings me to…
3. The polling “industry”, and its relationship with the media. IMO, it behooves the “industry” to undertake a thorough and utterly transparent examination of its structure, ethics, accountability, methodologies, associations and financing, with at very least (as in bottom-of-the-barrel minimalist objective), how they separate themselves from the Toronto-based media. The “industry’s” systematic failure to adduce reliable information in advance of events, or to account, subsequently, for its sequential and unforgivable mistakes, is a disgrace to public discourse. I would like to see them do it themselves, without having to have a Royal Commission or a parliamentary committee, or some other such government wag.
But, then again, what do I know? The Liberal Party of Canada promised the same thing, and, instead, we got Justin Trudeau; and Jean Chretien advising the British government on how not to lose a referendum.
I think the commentators are missing something; the rise of the Greens. If you add the Greens to the Dippers you get a win in most ridings. In other words, the real dynamic was the defection of socialists to the ‘environmental’ cause.
I listened to a lot of commentating yesterday and this fundamental fact seemed to be lost on the commentators.
“What is beyond disgusting though is the false spin from Christy Clark’s Praetorian Guard…”
The story once again is the media … the inescapable fact that MSM has no integrity and little intelligence. They get away with it though and that is a sad testimony to the lack of common sense among our fellow citizens.
I’ve been making a point of demonstrating cases of such blatant distortion by news media for years now. It used to be quite surprising to see some of the emotional reactions to something as simple as refuting what a “reporter” has claimed. Now, I just drop the clue and wait for the explosion.
In spite of all this, there comes a time for some that they act through self interest and an instinct for self preservation. They stop listening to what they are being told because they understand that the stakes are too high. That is what happened in the election. The larger problem is that once the crisis is past these same people will revert to the old habits and allow the Media Clowns and Pols to continue doing what they have always done.
The media clowns … like the Bimbo Christy … are trying to take credit for a result that came to be IN SPITE of what they had done. Remember that the Bimbo is a Media party hack and embodies everything that implies.
The fact is that these are the people who created the untenable and entirely unnecessary situation that the people of BC faced leading up to the election.