Posted March 31, 2009 by Sacha Peter
Category: By-Election
Elections BC has posted the detailed results from the Vancouver-Fairview and Vancouver-Burrard by-elections.
I will be able to generate some maps tonight when I have some time to do the proper analysis.
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Posted March 30, 2009 by Sacha Peter
Category: Legislature
Apparently the government will be pulling the plug a couple days short on the Legislature, so if you want to attend question period you better be taking the Tuesday morning ferry to Victoria.
The unpassed bills in the session will be Bill 6 – Police (Misconduct, Complaints, Investigations, Discipline and Proceedings) Amendment Act, 2009, and Bill 12 – Strata Property Amendment Act, 2009. (Update: Also Bill 9 – the Labour Mobility Act)
This will give MLAs a couple extra days to get ready for the upcoming campaign. It will officially start on April 14, 2009, but really has started a long time ago.
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Posted March 30, 2009 by Sacha Peter
Category: News
I have updated the candidates list.
I have noticed that we now have five parties that are planning on running 10 candidates or more, and this is the threshold I have chosen to individually display such parties.
Due to technical reasons, I have split the table into two portions. There isn’t enough width available to display all the candidates on a single line.
I am not happy with this “solution”, however, and would be looking for suggestions in terms of improving this interface glitch.
Also due to request, I have put in a (*) next to the incumbent MLAs names.
Posted March 30, 2009 by Sacha Peter
Category: News
Elections BC put out a press release last week which attached a spreadsheet (local copy) showing the percentage of voters registered “correctly”.
What would account for the lack of tracking voter ‘drift’?
One would intuitively think that voter registration would be a lot more difficult in rural ridings, but this turns out not to be the case – there is a fairly even spread of ridings that are urban and rural nature across the rankings. The other thought would be about mobility of people – the more mobile you are, the less likely you are to be tracked for registration – but it doesn’t make much sense intuitively why a place like Burnaby-Edmonds would be a good 20% above Burnaby-Deer Lake.
Maybe some mysteries were never meant to be solved.
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Posted March 28, 2009 by Sacha Peter
Category: Irrelevant and Irreverent
I’m going to be introducing the “weekend post”, which may have some anecdote or something of discussion.
This weekend’s question will be: Given that we have seen two polls, has this changed your own opinion of what the outcome of the election is going to be?
Feel free to post your comments on any topic dealing with provincial politics – it can be off topic as well and you will not incur the wrath of moderation unless if you post outright spam.
Posted March 27, 2009 by Sacha Peter
Category: News
Apparently on Monday the BC Supreme Court is going to partially strike down on the revisions to the BC Elections Act, with respect to the limitations on third party advertising.
Instead of a $150,000 cap between Election Day and 90 days before the Election, it will be reduced to 28 days, which is equal to the writ period. No word on the cap of third party spending allowed during the writ period.
This sounds like a reasonable judgment – Elections Canada, for example, only cares about third party expenditures in the writ period, and not outside the writ period. Also, when one considers that election dates are not fixed (despite the legislation that may imply they are, I think Prime Minister Stephen Harper taught the country why this was not the case) it would equally be unconstitutional that somebody could be violating the law by having election advertising 90 days before an election is called when they don’t even know the date of such an election. What if the next government decided to suddenly call an election 3 years in their term?
The prominent third party advertisers before the February deadline were the BC Teachers’ Federation and the BC Business Council, and I bet both groups will be scrambling to get some ads out before the April 14, 2009 writ date.
Posted March 27, 2009 by Sacha Peter
Category: Transportation
It will be interesting to see whether BC Ferries will come up as an issue during this election.
The Premier announced that there would be a general fare reduction for some routes in December 2008 and January 2009, and that the province would be picking up the tab at that time. This has now expired and other than a brief mention, it has come and gone. There were some complaints that the province separated BC Ferries from a crown corporation to an independently run corporation owned by the government to avoid political interference, but having the government giving money to BC Ferries for price discounts defeated the purpose of this decision.
BC Ferries in a March 9, 2009 press release said that they will be raising fares (as previously allowed by the BC Ferries commissioner in September 2007). So a car from Vancouver to Victoria would be $45 from $43 effective April 1st. BC Ferries also has removed the fuel surcharge due to the significantly lower price of oil. I do not think inflationary increases will emerge as an issue, although on the lower volume routes (i.e. not to Victoria or Nanaimo) the 7.25% increases may cause public complaint. Mitigating this, however, is that the high-volume routes heavily subsidize operational expenses on the lower volume routes.
Not much news has been heard of lately about the three new ferry ships (the Coastal Renaissance, Coastal Inspiration and Coastal Celebration) since the last bit about the corporation ironing out some operational efficiency issues. No news generally means they’ve figured things out – the NDP was probably itching to turn this into another “fast ferries” issue in reverse. The two slogans that helped the NDP’s demise in 2001 was the fast ferries and the “fudget-budget”, and the NDP desperately needs something to ’stick’ onto the BC Liberals in order to help their election prospects.
Having a ferry lose power while docking in Horseshoe Bay and crashing into the local marina was an event that has been forgotten (and highlighted the necessity of building new ships since the old ones clearly are in line for replacement), but the Queen of the North sinking is still in memory. These are not political issues.
For the lesser served routes, there probably isn’t the “media density” to get issues relating to BC Ferries up on the provincial headlines, but these may turn into local issues with the candidates.
On a personal note, I remember last year that BC Ferries had a “Coast Saver” program where you could get from Tsawwassen to Duke Point and back until March 31 for nearly half the price that you could otherwise. They did not repeat the program for this year, and I wonder why – I thought it was a great opportunity to get to Vancouver Island on the cheap. Ordinarily it would cost about $140 to get two passengers and a car for a round trip, but with the Coast Saver you could do it for about $70. This made it more economical to get on the island for a couple nights for a get-away. While this is not political, I wouldn’t doubt it that lower ferry prices would have a positive impact on domestic tourism on Vancouver Island, especially in the off-season in March.
I confirmed this observation by noting that I had to wait one ferry to get to Duke Point – we got to the terminal about 20 minutes before boarding and were three cars short of making it on before the ferry was full, so we had to wait two and a half hours before getting onto the next one. I also noted that this was on a Thursday afternoon, normally a time where you should be easily able to get onto the ferry, so I wasn’t the only person thinking about going for a quick holiday.
Posted March 27, 2009 by Sacha Peter
Category: Legislature
The second the last week in the Legislature before the election was a rather sedated affair, with the notable exception of question period and the BC Rail / Patrick Kinsella allegations by the NDP, which Bill Tieleman, Sean Holman and Vaughn Palmer have been following.
The following topics were the first topic of the four question periods:
B.C. Rail contract with Patrick Kinsella
Meetings between Patrick Kinsella and government ministers
Gravel extraction proposal and Hopington aquifer
Role of Patrick Kinsella and Premier’s Office in B.C. Rail sale
You can see a theme on these topics – it would suggest the NDP are running a campaign on “integrity” than issues, which I have previously suggested before is a smart decision.
Also, for those that don’t know, the Hopington aquifer is in the Township of Langley, and a simple google search will bring up some documentation with respect to that issue.
In terms of legislation, three government bills were introduced – this was partially covered by previous writing on this site:
Bill 11 – Pension Benefits Standards Amendment Act, 2009
Bill 12 – Strata Property Amendment Act, 2009
Bill 13 – Forest Amendment Act, 2009
Five government bills are on the order paper that have not passed third reading; in addition, the throne speech has not been passed either.