BC Conservative infighting continues

Posted June 30, 2009 by Sacha Peter
Category: Other Parties

The BC Conservatives sent out a press release stating that due to continued in-fighting, that most of their directors and party leader Wilf Hanni has resigned.

I had previously posted that I had thought these internal squabbles were resolved after they received a court ruling certifying Wilf Hanni and his supporters on the board as the true directors as the BC Conservative party, but this obviously wasn’t completely rectified.

According to the press release, it appears that legal fees, approximately $30,000, is hindering the party. As directors could potentially be liable for such fees, they resigned to likely avoid facing future liability.

The BC Conservative party currently has only one asset – its name is strikingly similar to a federal party that happens to be in government. If it was not for this, the party would be non-existent. If the people that left the party think they can continue in politics as a different name and have a feasible chance of being elected in the legislature, they will be kidding themselves. They need to look at the BC Refederation Party’s results, which had some of the lowest vote counts in the entire province.

At least the ex-directors of the BC Conservative Party can enjoy Canada Day knowing that they likely will not be personally liable for the party’s liabilities.

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Bill Tieleman on NDP strategic error on carbon tax

Posted June 16, 2009 by Sacha Peter
Category: Analysis

Bill Tieleman writes about how the “Scrap the gas tax” campaign was a net vote winner for the NDP. I am inclined to agree with him, but will add a few points to the argument. Note that I was one of the commentators that thought that going against the carbon tax was good political strategy for the NDP, but they were waffling by calling it a “gas tax” instead of just directly campaigning against it.

The (federal) Conservative party already did all of the ground work on this issue in the previous election (spending millions of dollars in the process), and the NDP not keeping the theme consistent to the anti-carbon tax campaign probably cost the NDP a couple marginal seats (thinking Cariboo-Chilcotin, and perhaps Maple Ridge-Mission).

The (federal) Liberal party got slaughtered in British Columbia because of a very poor leader in Stephane Dion, but also because the thought of having two carbon taxes is even more revolting than one.

You can already see some lobbyists trying to break the revenue neutrality aspect of the carbon tax – the question is not whether they will be able to, the question is when the government will succumb to the pressures of vote-buying by diverting carbon tax revenues into spending initiatives. Pandora’s box has been opened, and there is no going back.

The NDP’s fear of facing backlash against the pro-carbon tax environmental lobby (e.g. Tzeborah Berman, etc.) scared Carole James into using this “gas tax” terminology even when it wouldn’t have done her or the party any good by trying to “hedge” its strategy by using lesser wording.

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Cabinet swearing in date

Posted June 8, 2009 by Sacha Peter
Category: News

The BC Liberal and NDP MLAs have been sworn in; Vicki Huntington gets her own swearing-in session on Tuesday. On Wednesday, June 10, cabinet will be sworn in.

The next day of the legislature will be on August 25th, with the revised budget in on September 1st. It is no secret that the $495 million deficit will be significantly higher than expected, primarily due to a reduction of projected revenues. Current economic indicators highly suggest reductions in income, corporate and sales tax collections, property transfer taxes and natural gas royalties.

The government will face a huge challenge on whether they will deal with this by waiting out the economic storm and continue with higher deficits, whether they will raise taxes, or whether they will decrease spending. They have four years of political lee-way until the next election, so I would highly suspect the decisions they make will likely be unpopular politically, but good from a policy perspective.

Another minefield on the policy arena will be the negotiation of union contracts, most of which are due to expire after the 2010 Olympics.

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Vicki Huntington – Elected – Analysis

Posted June 2, 2009 by Sacha Peter
Category: Analysis

The judicial recount is over, and Vicki Huntington has been confirmed as MLA of Delta South, defeating Attorney General Wally Oppal by 32 votes. Huntington will be the first independently elected MLA in British Columbia in two generations.

It will be interesting to see what impact she will have on the legislature. Some (mainly BC Liberal proponents) say none. I will discuss the various angles that have been discussed elsewhere by commenters on this website.

First is the issue whether Huntington will cross the floor or not. The chance of Huntington joining the NDP or Green party would be close to zero as this is the opposite side of her political spectrum. As for the BC Liberals, it would be highly unlikely for this to happen as long as Gordon Campbell is the leader – both would know that if she joined the BC Liberal caucus, she would get ’swallowed up’, and she would be making a lot of enemies in the process (i.e. a good deal of the 10,000 people that voted for her in the election). If there was a leadership change, the political calculus would change somewhat, but I would still regard a floor crossing as unlikely to occur. The BC Conservatives would also be extremely unlikely, as they are not sufficiently organized (or credible).

Huntington would have known that if she accepted the BC Liberal nomination in the lead-up to the 2009 election that she would have cruised to victory, with a good shot at cabinet. It would be absurd for her to go through the effort as getting elected as an independent, only to be offered a cabinet position if she would cross the floor.

The summary is that I think she will remain independent, at least until the 2013 election.

One remote scenario that has a 0.1-0.5% chance of occurring is that Gordon Campbell would ask Huntington to serve in cabinet as an independent. Note this is highly unlikely. It would have been likely had there been a 42 BC Liberal, 42 NDP standing after the election.

One of the arguments that the BC Liberal proponents in the riding had was that if Wally Oppal was elected that he would be able to provide cabinet representation to the region. This argument did not make sense, due to the fact that Oppal was in cabinet previously. It also would not make sense in the 2009-2013 period, mainly because of Oppal’s age – it would have been very highly likely that he would have retired in the 2013 election – he will be 73 years old in 2013. There would have been zero accountability, mainly because the threat of not being re-elected would be gone.

Recall that during the lead-up to Election 2009 that Oppal was waffling on whether he wanted to run again or not, and even went past the party’s deadline for incumbent MLAs to officially declare whether they were or not. This could have been a media stunt by Oppal (to gather more attention for himself, as he loves dealing with the media), or it could have been a legitimate decision whether he wanted to run again. It could be possible that the “punishment” for this was to move his seat from Vancouver-Fraserview (which would have been a probable victory) to Delta South (again, a probable victory, but lesser so due to Vicki Huntington). The political calculus worked for the BC Liberal party – it would have been more probable that Huntington would have won against a no-named candidate for Delta South than Oppal, at the risk of Oppal losing to Huntington.

During the legislature, Huntington will undoubtedly be seen by the media as the centre-right opposition critic, although she will not want that role – she will want to be seen as the critic for Delta South’s interests. She faces a problem – in order to get media attention, she will need to discuss broad provincial issues, most of which will have little to do with Delta South specifically. If she discusses Delta South specific material, she will not get media attention. There is a fine balancing act for her to perform. Since she has a massive amount of political experience and intelligence (seen in the choice to run independently), she should be able to figure this out.

An interesting angle for the 2013 election is one of political financing – independent candidates cannot issue tax receipts for political donations until the writ has been dropped and they are confirmed candidates for an election. This means that most fundraising has to be in a compressed period of time, and it makes it much more difficult for independent candidates to get elected. One advantage of incumbency that Huntington will undoubtedly take advantage of is setting up a registered constituency association in Delta South – while independent candidates cannot issue tax receipts until the writ period, registered constituency associations can. Independent MLAs can establish their own constituency associations when they are elected.

This means if Huntington remains independent, she would be able to be able to issue tax receipts for donations received after she forms a constituency association, and be able to retain those funds for the 2013 election. This would give her a credible shot of retaining her seat if she decides to run again in four years – she would be able to raise sufficient funds.

In terms of 2013 positioning, the government will want to “punish” the people of Delta South, mainly to prove to them that electing an independent candidate is bad for their political (and inevitably financial) health. They will try to do this in ways that are subtle and not terribly overt (akin to the NDP’s routing of the Millennium Line through NDP-only ridings in the 1990’s), but they will try to send a message in 2013 to voters that “if you keep on electing an independent, you will get nothing”. It will be interesting to see whether the voters will accept the implied “bribe”, or whether they will react by sending Huntington back to Victoria, assuming she runs again. If the government bullies too hard, they will receive a backlash from the voters. If they shower voters with gifts, it might make Huntington look good by “delivering the bacon”. There is a middle ground between the carrot and the stick that may work on voters.

One obvious way for the government to punish Huntington is to change election financing legislation to forbid independent MLAs from issuing political tax receipts from received donations (just like in the federal system where independent MPs have no ability to raise money in an effective manner). Such an overt act isn’t beyond the ability of the government, as exhibited by the Election Act financing amendments (the so-called “gag law”) brought in 2008.

Finally, the message that an independent candidate elected to Victoria might send, assuming Huntington does a competent and credible job, might be that more credible independent candidates might stand for election in 2013, and the public might consider them more strongly (notice the string of “might”s in that sentence!) The independents that got significant vote counts in 2009 were Huntington (Delta South, Delta Council) and Arthur Hadland (Peace River North, Peace River Regional District), who were the only independent candidates with elected office experience.

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Kootenay West – Referendum – Anomaly

Posted June 1, 2009 by Sacha Peter
Category: Analysis

Kootenay West (an NDP stronghold – 66.8% voted NDP) was the only electoral district to have more valid votes cast in the referendum than in the general election. 18,153 valid votes were cast in the election vs. 18,174 cast in the referendum.

No other electoral district comes close – Peace River North is second with 143 votes less cast in the referendum than in the general election. Peace River North is also a special riding because so few people voted there. Adjusted for voting numbers, Abbotsford-Mission is the next electoral district that had the most people voting in the referendum relative to the general election – with 244 less referendum votes cast validly than in the general election.

Was the Kootenay West result tabulated correctly? The referendum vote total looks very anomalous.

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BC Conservative Party statistics

Posted June 1, 2009 by Sacha Peter
Category: Analysis

While I will be dissecting the election after the judicial recount, I’m getting around to the miscellaneous inquiries I have received with respect to analyzing the election results.

One of them was this comment:

I would be interested in knowing what the Conservative vote as a proportion of votes cast in the 24 ridings they ran in was.

Just a cursory glance at the results show that it appears that they made respectable showings in most of the ridings they ran in.

While I didn’t vote for them, and I thought their campaign was far from professional and policies were a little too out to lunch, I think with some tweaking, they could be a serious threat to the BC Liberals, in terms of splitting the right-of-centre vote. The BC Liberals had better watch their right/rural flank.

The answer to this question is the following:

The BC Conservatives obtained a total of 34,465 votes in 24 electoral districts. The 24 electoral districts had 470,990 valid votes cast, which means that the BC Conservatives had an average of 7.32% in those ridings.

On the issue of analyzing the BC Conservative Party’s performance, there are some other points of analysis:

In terms of the “leftiness or rightiness” of the seats, 5 of those seats were won by the NDP; 19 seats were won by the BC Liberals. Two of these seats were close (less than 5% spread) in the results – Boundary-Similkameen, and Vernon-Monashee. It appears that these seats would be favourable to the right-wing voter. Of the seats that went NDP, the Conservatives performed at 4.86%, while the Greens performed at 7.35%.

In terms of the “none-of-the-above” voters, the Green party performed 8.60% in the 24 seats, or slightly higher than their provincial average. It does not appear that the BC Conservatives have split any of these types of voters, especially considering that the number of valid votes divided by registered voters (one measure of voter turnout) was 54.9%, or roughly the provincial average for turnout.

Out of the 24 seats, I would estimate four seats as being contentious – Boundary-Similkameen, Kootenay East, Skeena and Surrey-Fleetwood. Vernon-Monashee was closer in the actual result, but this was due to an extraordinarily strong Green party candidate. In the four seats, the Conservatives had a vote of 10.94%. However, this is in the statistical white noise range, and also includes the strong performance of Joe Cardoso in Boundary-Similkameen.

Party leader Wilf Hanni received 9.98% of the vote in Kootenay East, a riding where many pundits predicted would hurt the BC Liberals due to a close race; yours truly never saw it happening, but if others did see it being a factor in the riding, the numbers would suggest that the entrance of Hanni in the race helped the BC Liberals, instead of the intuitive conclusion of helping the NDP. I don’t believe this is true.

The other special case was in Chilliwack, where Benjamin Besler was clearly the the recipient of votes (14.7%) against John Les (due to continuing special prosecution investigation that involves himself and others).

It is easy to say that the BC Conservatives’ performance in Election 2009 will harm the BC Liberals in the future, but it will only be the case when they start getting credible candidates. Out of all their 24 candidates, only two have elected office experience – Joe Cardoso (Okanagan-Similkameen regional district) and Mark Thompson (Saskatoon City Council).

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