At the beginning of the second week of the current 32-day British Columbia provincial election, according to a province-wide poll conducted by IPSOS Public Affairs’ Kyle Braid for Global BC, John Horgan’s B.C. NDP hold a commanding lead over both the B.C. Liberal party — in power from 2001 to 2016 — and the B.C. Greens that will not only return the New Democrats to power, but could very well end in an election rout, and an overwhelming majority for the only elected social democratic government in Canada.
“It’s not close,” says Braid. “The NDP started the campaign with an 18-point lead over the BC Liberals. Currently, 51% of decided voters say they would be most likely to support or lean towards the New Democrats. The BC Liberals are next at 33% support, followed by the Greens at 12%.
The NDP have a 25-point lead among women (53% NDP vs. 28% Libs) and a narrower, but still substantial, 11-point lead among men (49% Libs vs. 38% NDP).
The NDP has a large 26-point lead on Vancouver Island (51% NDP vs. 25% Libs) and a 23-point lead in Metro Vancouver (55% NDP vs. 32% Libs). Things are much closer in the Southern Interior/North, where the NDP has only a 5-point lead (44% NDP vs. 39% Libs). The Green Party does best on Vancouver Island at 20% support (vs. 11% in Metro Vancouver, 9% in Southern Interior/North).
B.C. NDP leader John Horgan, at 44%, has a huge lead over both B.C. Liberal leader Andrew Wilkinson (14%) and recent winner of the contest for leadership of the B.C. Greens, Sonia Furstenau (6%) as the leader who British Columbians think would make the best Premier of B.C.
According to poll aggregator 338 Canada John Horgan’s NDP are on track to win as many as 69 seats in the British Columbia legislature (there are 87 ridings across the province), with Andrew Wilkinson’s B.C. Liberal party set to win as few as 18 seats, leaving the B.C. Greens without a seat in the house in Victoria. Be mindful, tho, these are early days in the B.C. election.
The election chances for all three B.C. political parties will likely come into clearer focus following the upcoming televised leaders’ debate, a date for which event has not been set as VanRamblings’ column goes to print.
For those who are interested, as of midnight, here are the number of seats filled by each party: NDP: 83/87 | Liberals: 82/87 | Greens: 44/87 | Libertarians: 11/87 | Conservatives: 8/87. In a press conference she held yesterday in Vancouver, the B.C. Greens’ Sonia Furstenau told reporters that it was unlikely the Greens would field candidates in many more ridings than have been filled to date, while both the B.C. NDP and the B.C. Liberals will have all their parties’ candidates in place no later than this weekend.
In the early days of Decision BC 2020, John Horgan and the B.C. NDP have gotten off to a near faultless start, with little interfering respecting the leader’s messaging — although Mr. Horgan was forced to respond to a tempest in a teapot issue that arose yesterday, when former B.C. NDP vice-president and 2017 Vancouver-False Creek NDP candidate Morgane Oger posted a selfie on Instagram on Monday as she stood in front of a framed photograph of graffiti reading “f*** the” with the rest of the text cropped out. CTV News obtained a photo of Ms. Oger posing with the entire photograph, showing a stone wall where the phrase f*** the police is fully legible, with a caption reading, “Art is a window into society’s soul.”
“That photo really frames the sentiment of people who are on the receiving end of policing, not because police officers themselves are discriminatory, but because society actually still tolerates discrimination through its enforcement,” Oger said in an interview yesterday morning.
John Horgan responded to the “controversy”, stating, “I know Morgane, I know her to be a passionate woman who’s focused on increasing the well-being of people in vulnerable situations. The sentiment expressed in the photo on Morgane’s Instagram feed does not reflect my sentiment.”
B.C. Liberal leader Andrew “The Grouch” Wilkinson campaign off to an unsalutary start
Poor Andrew Wilkinson. Not only is he an almost anonymous political figure in our province, with a leadership standing of a sorry 14%, the woebegone B.C. Liberal leader has had to contend with one very real candidate controversy after another. If this keeps up, his political fortunes are toast.
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Abbotsford South B.C. Liberal candidate, Bruce Banman — the former Abbotsford Mayor best known for ordering city staff to lay chicken manure down on a homeless encampment, while calling homeless Abbotsford residents, “drug using criminals” — was forced by Andrew Wilkinson to apologize for his intemperate remarks and actions.
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Meanwhile, in the riding of Langley East, B.C. Liberal candidate Margaret Kunst came under fire for opposing a rainbow crosswalk for the township.
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And lest we forget, Chilliwack-Kent MLA Laurie Throness continues to face criticism for running advertisements in the Christian lifestyle publication The Light Magazine, which has included anti-LGBT articles including content against SOGI resources in schools and in support of conversion therapy. Not to mention which, just this morning, several Chilliwack and Tri-Cities organizations have written a joint letter to Liberal Leader Andrew Wilkinson calling for the removal of Chilliwack-Kent candidate Laurie Throness over his expressed views on conversion therapy, a controversial practice that aims to convert LGBTQ+ members that the federal government is moving to ban.
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And just last evening, B.C. NDP Delta North candidate Ravi Kahon alleged Surrey-Fleetwood B.C. Liberal candidate Garry Thind had violated the B.C. Elections Act. Lawyer Rachel Roy reported to Elections B.C. that dozens of members of a WhatsApp group called “Garry Thind-Fleetwood” were asked to collect information including names, dates of birth, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and a piece of government-issued identification (e.g. Social Insurance number, driver’s license number) from voters, in order that Mr. Thind’s campaign staff could order mail-in ballots to his election headquarters, with an eye to campaign staff filling out and posting the mail-in ballots without the express knowledge of the voters they were purporting to represent — a fraudulent activity, and a clear violation of the B.C. Elections Act.
B.C. Liberal leader Wilkinson also found himself in hot water with former senior Liberal party adviser, Martyn Brown, for “arguably the most cynical, most dishonest, and most outright dumb all-time acts of desperate vote-buying” when Mr. Wilkinson vowed to scrap B.C.’s 7% provincial sales for a year and then cut it to 3% the next year.
“When they go low, we go lower, might as well be his motto,” writes Mr. Brown in a column in The Straight. “It shows that Wilkinson’s B.C. Liberals have learned absolutely nothing from their well-deserved banishment from office following former premier Christy Clark’s pathetic attempt to throw her party’s “principles” out the door, in her vain effort to cling to power.
Before the COVID pandemic brought our economy to a standstill, crippling government revenues in the process, the sales tax was projected to yield $7.5 billion to provincial coffers. It is the B.C. government’s second-largest source of funding, accounting for some 22% of total taxation revenues. Deliberately losing whatever remains of the government’s drastically reduced revenue stream wouldn’t just be grossly irresponsible; it would be insane.
This is what the lust for absolute power does to otherwise smart people like the Brainiac Wilkinson: it turns them and anyone who votes for them into partisan lunatics, devoid of all sense and principle. Fiscal discipline was supposed to be the B.C. Liberals’ central tenet. No longer.”
Gosh, if this is how a longtime friend of, and senior party official within, the B.C. Liberal party is expounding on the political acumen respecting his beloved provincial political party, one is left to wonder how the average British Columbian feels about Mr. Wilkinson’s crass attempt to buy votes?
For all that, Andrew Wilkinson has to thank his lucky stars that John Horgan called the election when he did, months before Justice Austin Cullen’s Commission on money laundering within the province of British Columbia provides a summary report to government on the extent, growth, evolution and methods of money laundering in gaming and horse racing, real estate, unregulated entities and persons who provide banking-like services, the use of shell companies, trusts, securities and financial instruments for the purposes of money laundering, luxury goods, and … well, you get the picture. Money laundering in B.C.: a legacy of the Christy Clark government that, due to B.C. Liberal government inaction, distorted British Columbia’s economy, fuelled the opioid crisis and overheated the real estate market.
As VanRamblings was saying to a friend yesterday, and as we reported in an earlier column, the government of John Horgan is the first British Columbia government in more than a half century not to be dogged by controversy and the taint of corruption. So much for British Columbia’s vaunted reputation as the disreputable wild, wild west of Canadian politics.
