 Carole James, BC NDP leader |
Having just returned from the Carole James’ NDP Campaign Kickoff at the Italian Cultural Centre, VanRamblings looks forward in the coming days to linking to Ms. James’ address to the party faithful, via a Working TV link, just as soon as the video becomes available.
For the past 24 hours, VanRamblings was unavailable due to what Arne, at our server host Synercom/edi, reports as “a serious hardware failure of our primary network file-server AND of our backup (fail-over) network file-server … because of the catastrophic nature of the problem, the issue was not remediated until early Tuesday morning.” When all is said and done — given the information Arne reports — rather than post early in the day Tuesday, April 19th, as normally would be our wont, VanRamblings will post at the end of a very busy, and at times, tumultuous (but ultimately satisfying) Campaign 2005 Kickoff Day.
Now down to business …
According to a column written by Sean Holman in the Wednesday, April 13th edition of The Vancouver Sun, internal polling conducted by both the provincial Liberals and the NDP indicate that the New Democratic Party is leading, or in contention, in 53 out of the 79 provincial ridings.
Regardless of what the March Ipsos-Reid poll or early April Mustel Group poll report, the 2005 provincial election is a neck-and-neck race, with every possibility that the NDP may form the next provincial government.
According to informed sources, the internal party polls found that British Columbians are looking to put a strong opposition into place, and to that end Green Party supporters, and a substantial number of Liberals across the province, are prepared to hold their nose and vote NDP. The Liberals are so concerned about what their polling is showing that they’re putting out the word that the “current scenario is not unlike the 1972 election, when British Columbians looking to create a strong opposition to the Socreds inadvertently elected a majority NDP government.”
How the Liberals intend to consolidate their core constituency vote come May 17th, and bring a disenchanted electorate back onboard is anybody’s guess. But, they’ve got to be worried about what the future holds.
Meanwhile, Milton Chan’s Election Prediction Project, and The Tyee’s BattleGround BC — an election seat prediction model designed by political commentator and historian Will McMartin — as well as the usually reliable UBC Election Stock Market, have yet to ramp up into full election mode.
In other election news this first day of the 38th British Columbia election, the NDP have released the first two, low-key, ads (available here and here) in their million-dollar strategy to convince voters that “everyone matters,” the first addressing the economy, the second broken promises.
In closing today’s column, VanRamblings offers Vancouver Sun political columnist Vaughn Palmer’s April 19th, campaign kickoff, column (hidden behind a subscription firewall but available on VanRamblings anyway).
