2017 British Columbia election

[DL]

Actually the NDP has 5 LGBT MLAs, an article in the Georgia Straight mentioned Jennifer Rice as well

[DL]

Any reason for the large swing in Richmond?

Richmond is heavily, heavily Chinese and even though in terms of average income its no richer than Surrey (which is heavily South Asian and is more NDP-friendly) it has traditionally been an NDP dead zone because the NDP didn't have much support in the Chinese community. If you look at household income and being a inner suburb of Vancouver, were it not for the Chinese factor, Richmong OUGHT to be as NDP-friendly as Surrey! so the gains there are a bit of a reversion to the mean

That seems to have changed this time. If you look at how the NDP picked up Fraserview and Burnaby North (both of which have large Chinese populations) and gained so much ground in all four Richmond seats, I suspect that as the Chinese community matures and assimilates politically it is starting to hedge its bets politically and the taboo on voting NDP is wearing off. Now that the NDP has elected four Chinese-Canadian MLAs, I expect the NDP to target Richmond heavily next time and to have much more credibility in that community.

[DL]

One note about polling in the BC election. We were treated to lots of pontificating about how "only traditional CATI polls are of any value" and about how any poll done by IVR or based on an online panel was supposedly a "worthless junk poll".

In the end, the CATI polls that were done were actually the WORST! Final online and IVR polls all more or less nailed it the province-wide vote as dead even or a 1 point gap. The only outlier was the CATI by Innovative which had the BC Liberals 5 points ahead. The only other CATI polling i saw was a series of four riding polls by Oracle all on Vancouver Island...each of which grossly overestimated BC Liberal support.

Can we finally put to bed this notion that only CATI polls are the "gold standard" and that everything else is worthless. It clearly isnt true anymore. i acknowledge that mainstreet's riding polls by IVR were also all dreadful - but a growing challenge in doing riding polls in urban ridings is the impossibility of getting riding based cell phone numbers.

[DL]

Imho the BC Liberals under Christy Clark do get some vestigial support from federal Liberal types because it's common knowledge that Christy and her dead-beat ex-husband and most of her inner circle all dyed in the wool federal Liberals. She is constantly playing up her close ties to Justin Trudeau and on top of that stylistically with her flashy clothes and smug sh**t eating smile, Clark looks like a classic federal Liberal.

What happens if the next BC Liberal leader is a right wing federal Conservative like Kevin Falcon who is from central casting as a Tory? I wonder if that would be a signal to a lot of federal Liberals who still have some "brand loyalty" to the Liberal part of BC Liberal that the charade is over and that the party really is just another Conservative party?

[DL]

I will make five quick points:

1. Even if the Liberals manage to flip a seat on a recount and get a 1 seat majority, it will be a very unstable government with the speaker always having to break ties, but then again under Christy Clark the legislature meets so seldom and the government has had such a thin legislative agenda that she could probably just have the legislature meet once a year and roll all her crap into one omnibus bill to avoid multiple votes that could bring down the government. While it's conceivable that Greens could make a deal to support a Liberal minority, there is no way they will help prop up a Liberal majority. Why would they? Clark is t going to make policy concessions to the Greens if she doesn't think she has to and Weaver already knows that if he makes any kind of deal with the BC Liberals support for his party would quickly drop to low single digits as Weaver becomes the Nick Clegg of BC

2. The kegislature has to elect a speaker before any confidence vote takes place so all parties will be taking a gamble if they let one of their people be speaker

3. If Clark presents a throne speech and the NDP and Greens vote it down and announce they have an agreement, the LG would almost certainly ask Horgan to form a government. (See what happened under similar circumstances in Ontario in 1985). If on some later date that government lost a confidence the LG would not go back to the Liberals and ask them to try again, they already had their chance. Instead it would lead to a snap dissolution. However chances are that even a short lived NDP Green govt would very quickly pass an immediate ban on corporate and union donations and likely a very very low cap on election campaign spending which would eliminate the Liberal money advantage in the next election. They may well also quickly bring in PR which would essentially lock the BC Liberals out of power forever and throw away the key

4. If Weaver does pull a Nick Clegg and backs Christy Clark, it's hard to imagine the Liberals tossing him more than a few very meager bones. The NDP can eat popcorn watching the Greens self-destruct as they face mass resignations from their members horrified to see their party prop up the hated BC Liberals

5. Let's not forget that the knives are already out for Christy Clark in her own party. She was never popular in her own caucus and party and the consensus seems to be that she blew it with a very weak campaign and that her personal unpopularity is the reason the Liberals almost lost. Her days as leader of the Liberals are likely numbered.

[DL]

Rumours the Greens and Liberals might form a coalition. LOL at all you Green leftists who were duped into voting for them!

If that were to happen I think it would quickly be Andrew Weaver personally selling his soul to the BC Liberals...the party could well revolt against his leadership and force him to sit as an independent. The other two Green MLAs could end up being a caucus of two.

[DL]

If BC actually did move to proportional representation - how long before the BC Liberals would split into two parties - a Conservative party and a Liberal Party. There would no longer be any incentive for this uneasy marriage of convenience to continue

[DL]

Another small wrinkle. The legislature has to elect a speaker before anything else happens. The incumbent speaker is Linda Reid who is nominally a Liberal and has been an MLA for over 20 years. She is well liked on both sides of the house and wants to stay on. I can guarantee the if stands in the legislature don't change NO ONE from the NDP or the Greens will stand for election to be speaker against Reid. That means that the NDP plus Greens will have 44 seats and the Liberals will have 42 and there are unlikely to be any tie votes for the speaker to break once the NDP takes power and in any case the speaker has to cast deciding votes with the government...so I could see an NDP government with Green support last at least a few years ...enough time to ban corporate and union donations, drastically reduce campaign spending limits, ban all government advertising, boost the minimum wage to $15, start an inquest into all the corruption under Christy Clark that would likely lead to some arrests AND bring in proportional representation which would change the face of politics forever in BC. Of course it will take a few years to actually implement PR and that will give the Greens a huge incentive NOT to cause an early election since any early election,cation would have to be fought under existing FPTP.

Of course if the absentee count flips a seat all bets are off, but if the standings remain 43-41-3 the above is the scenario I expect

[DL]

I've heard that the NDP don't mind Reid as speaker...and of course the NDP will prefer ANY Liberal to be speaker to giving up a vote from the opposition side

[DL]

According to the Lascelles conventions and precedents if the legislature rejects Crooked Christy's Throne Speech on Day 1 then the LG must ask the leader of the second largest party to try to form a government and only if he fails is there a new election.

Btw we are all waiting for you to explain why all your predictions of how this election would go were so totally, wildly WRONG

[DL]

What makes you think the speaker would be an opposition MLA? Usually the party with the most seats supplies the speaker and in this case the incumbent speaker Linda Reid the Liberal wants to keep her job

[DL]

I think that in ridings where the BC Liberals won by a big margin on election night the absentees will likely pad their leads in raw votes though in almost every case the bC Liberals are beating the NDP by a smaller percentage of the than they got on election night...in the case of Courtenay-Comox it's likely (though not certain) that the NDP will pad its lead with absentees. In 2013 the NDP lost that seat to the Liberals by 2000 votes but won the absentees by 30 votes

[DL]

Somewhat different but the pattern was still that the NDP did better with absentees than election night votes and the predecessor riding of Comox Valley also contained the military base

[DL]

What is the theory that military personnel vote based on where their base is? I believe in federal elections, they can vote in whatever riding they want.

That's why some estimate that no more than half a dozen absentee votes were actually cast in Courtenay-Comox by personnel from the base.

[DL]

Its remarkable how well the NDP si doing over all with the absentees with about half of them counted now

Share of absentee vote   
so far            95,868   
BC Liberals   34,016   35.48%
NDP                   42,876   44.72%
Greens           16,732   17.45%
Other          2,244   2.34%

[DL]

Liberals are now ahead in Courtenay-Comox by three votes Still in progress though.

They counted 137 out of 2,077 absentees so far so we have a loong way to go there. Keep in mind that there are different categories of absentee votes (e.g. absentee out of ED, absent out of the country, voted at DRO, mobile hospital votes etc...) so its quite possible that the 137 that they counted today were all of one particular sub-category of absentee votes

[DL]

I suspect given the trend in absentees the NDP will end up winning Courtenay-Comox by close to 200 votes when all the dust settles and then I predict that my the end of June John Horgan will be sworn in as Premier leading a minority NDP government with Green support and that government will last at least two years if not more

[DL]

Let's start singing "The Orange and The Green"

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/b-c-greens-and-ndp-to-hold-joint-news-conference-1.4136539

[DL]

Any sign of Lotuslander? Is he on suicide watch somewhere?

[DL]

One would hope so, but I'm worried the Liberals are going to use this to whip up some outrage from the public, most of whom would have had no prior knowledge of the speaker's role to begin with.

Good luck trying to whip up any kind of "outrage" over the canada day long weekend and in to summer. In any case, if the BC Liberals wre really going to try to whip people up into a frenzy they would have spent the last couple of weeks mimicking harper in december 2008 and calling it a coup d'etat by the "losers" (sic.) of the election...but they didnt do that

[DL]

I seriously doubt there will be another election in 2017. There is likely a lot of bluffing and inside baseball speculation. It is interesting though to speculate what would happen if there was a new election? Would the NDP and Greens campaign as partners seeking a mandate for their accord? Would they each run a full slate of candidates or would they not run against each others incumbents and divvy up who would run against which Liberal incumbents?

[DL]

Even if Clark asked for a dissolution most observers felt the LG would refuse since having a second election in three months is nuts. Insightswest has a poll that says the NDP would win a snap election 41-36 with the Greens at 21

[DL]

I don't think you can compare this to the Dalton McGuinty situation in 2011-2012. McGuinty had been Premier for 8 years and had suffered a major rebuke when he lost his majority in 2011. He was on the way down and his popularity was plunging even lower after the election.

You cannot compare this to BC where the NDP is on the way up and is the new government with a honeymoon. A better comparison is how a year after the Liberal/NDP accord took office in Ontario in 1985 the Ontario Liberals had already bolstered their ranks by 3 - first of all two NDP MPPs crossed to the Liberals and then the Ontario Liberals won a byelection in Tory held York East.

I doubt if the NDP going to start trying to trigger byelections in winnable seats, but I could see them approaching a Liberal MLA in a very marginal seat with the offer that that person resign from the Liberal caucus and run for speaker as an independent and the NDP and Greens offer to let that person run for releection in the next election unopposed on the British model.

The other thing that could happen is that some Liberal MLAs quit to take jobs in the private sector and even if they represent seats that are unwinnable for the NDP - Horgan could wait up to six months to call a byelection and have long stretches where his margin in the ldge expands to 2 seats

[DL]

Clark is not only quitting as leader of the BC Liberal Party, she is also resigning her seat in the legislature effective August 4. Since Horgan has six months to call a byelection that means the NDP/Greens will have a clear majority with no need for a tie-breaking vote by the speaker during the entire fall session and up to March of 2018.

Where is "Lotuslander" these days? I usually rely on his posts about BC politics to know what will NOT happen next.