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The future of politics in B.C.
May 15, 2013 - 3:50pm
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First of all, let's congratulate Christy Clark and the Bc Liberals for their victory
Alright, now that the nicieties are out of the way...
With the odds (money, mainstream press, etc.) so stacked against the NDP they probaly did ok, even though it is obviously not good enough.
As much as I like Adrian Dix, for his own sake he needs to announce plans for his departure from the leadership.
The people who ran the BC elecction campaigned failed.
The Liberals won because for 28 days Christy Clark was on TV in a hard hat smiling every day , and not TV guy, Adrian Dix was on TV sayin no to jobs, and as well perhaps some NDP voters stayed home because they thought, as the polls were telling them, it was in the bag.
In 2009 the NDP received 40,000 less votes than it did in 2005 and now in 2013 the NDP received almost 50,000 less votes than it did in 2009 and this all occured while BC Liberal governments were gradually losing popularity. Where have all these former NDP voters gone? If the NDP could get back the support it had in 2005 it would have won this election. BC's population is growing so these numbers should be rising. Are NDP supporters disproportionately moving away from the province? Voter apathy and vote splitting are killing the NDP. The rights en masse move away from the BC Conservatives toward the BC Liberals changed the total complexion of the election. The NDP needed the same kind of movement from the Greens. An NDP-Green merger might be a good idea as long as it comes with an agreement to support fair voting / proportional representation.
It's hard to believe but the NDP under Bob Skelly got 825,000 votes way back in 1986. That's almost 200,000 more votes way back when the population was much smaller than today. The NDP's main opponent isn't the SocreLiberals. Its left of centre voter apathy.
The NDP went off on a whole bunch of tangents and should have paid attention to jobs. They didn't and that is the main reason why they lost the election. I am not saying what is right or wrong for society, just that the reality of politcs is in an election campaign you need to keep smiling and promote hope for prosperity. I respect the right. They were on a mission to win, no matter what, and they did.
This election has big ramifications for politcs in BC.
Just watch the mainstream media now build up the Greens hoping that the next election will be between the Greens and the Liberals. And don't think for a second that might not happen. It has already begun in the media. Build up the Greens, keep the opposition split, and you keep the Liberals in power.
What does the Labour movement, the people who funded the NDP in BC, do now?
How many people voted against the NDP because they were programmed by the Liberal ads and the mainstream press to believe Dix is dishonest?
The question is why don't left leaning voters see enough in the NDP platform to think it is worth supporting. Nothing for people on disability, an almost insulting pittance for people on welfare not much of anything for students loans and no reduction in tuition. They also promised tiny increases in other service areas that have been devastated by Liberal cuts. They promised to balance the books within four years. Of course to have any chance of success the party cannot talk about the systemic problems in our system and try to educate the next generation of voters and get them dreaming of a better world.
I can't for the life of me figure out why the party's voters are apathetic and why it can't attract a new generation of voters to the NDP fold.
Organize their membership, one would hope.
Well don't you think that might be a bit difficult for construction sector unions, seeing as, at least the way the media portrayed it, the Liberals ran on more jobs and the NDP ran against construction jobs?
Clark was a great salesperson. Her sales pitch, that bordered on a fairytale, that the Liberals would produce an LNG bonanza of prosperity akin to the Alberta oil boom, won the Liberals votes. Framing Dix and the NDP as economic scrooges that would deny BC our LNG economic bonanza worked seamlessly with that narrative. The NDP never was able to counter that narrative or come up with a compelling narrative of their own.
The NDP has to come up with a compelliong narrative of economic prosperity that can provide people with hope and excitement. And they need a leader/salesperson to get that narrative across to the public. The balanced economic prosperity exemplified by social democratic countries like Finland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands should be the template for the NDP's exciting narrative.
The voters worry about deficit, debt, and its resulting higher taxes. The NDP has to show how it will create the economic activity and prosperity that will support social inclusion and cohesion.
Charlie Demers wrote the following on Facebook, and I tend to agree. It's similar to what I posted last night in the BC Election Day Reactions thread.
Middle class voters worry about the deficit and resulting higher taxes. What is the point of a left wing party if it is only focused on providing another electoral option to the them? The NDP in this election said nothing about creating jobs or protecting jobs but they did talk about slaying the deficit dragon. It sure didn't look like it worked to me.
If the party stands for an environmentally sound economy it can't be half pregnant about things like LNG. It needed to explain why the whole thing is a money pit just like the North East coal debacle. We've seen the movie in BC before and it doesn't have a happy ending but the party decided that they had to go along with a phoney scam that its base doesn't support. The facts were readily available to run a reasoned campaign about LNG and the other oil and gas plays. The rural areas are going to lose in the long run if those projects go ahead.
The NDP can maintain their left-wing support of social equality and still include support for economic prosperity. The northern european social democratic countries have proven that way works. A left-wing party can establish a balanced integrated approach that can gain support across class lines.
Saying more about creating and protecting jobs might have been the way to go. History seems to show that the deficit dragon is slayen by increasing prosperity through the creation of better jobs. Maybe it would be a good idea for the NDP to change its name to the "Labour Party"?
I think they should change it too the ATAP party (All Things to ALL People) or maybe the MCM party (Middle Class Centrist).
I agree totally with this statement of yours. I only wish they would try doing that. However when you fear being labelled a socialist it is hard to talk about the benefits of socialism in other countries.
The Labour movement in Canada is too conservative, it has no hope for the future. It's all about preserving some lost golden age. Don't depend on them to come up with answers to your problems.
If you want young people to vote for you, you can't follow that path. They are on the frontllines and labour is currently opposed to their future well-being. They are too closely aligned to the failed GM model. USW on the other hand has the right idea with their agreement with Mondragon. Workplace democracy would most definately appeal to my generation.
At least the Greens on the other hand are more keen on the whole concept. Heck, even the federal Liberals have a critic role devoted towards promoting co-ops in Mauril Bélanger who also happens to support Proportional Representation unlike some NDP folk, *cough* Bill Tieleman *cough*.
This might even appeal to disaffected Red Tories (I do not mean moderate federal Conservatives).
Haha... really? I didn't realize that. I know he was an unwitting backer of one of the sketchiest of sketchy "co-ops" here in his riding. If nothing else, I suppose he now has firsthand knowledge of an example of what type of "co-op" should not be promoted.
I'm not sure I follow. Organizing workers (or any constituency) is rarely - if ever - easy, but that's what a labour movement is supposed to do.
And for all the hand-wringing by union bureaucrats about how hard organizing is or how cumbersome it is to get certified, at least you won't get beaten or thrown in jail for trying to organize, something that was the case in this country a century ago.
Thank you JKR for some really interesting and informative analysis. Really helps put some things into perspecitve instead of some of the knee-jerk comments to what just happened. (albeit, in this case, totally understandable shock reactions). Everyone needs clear headed, factual analysis in order to figure out what happened and what should be the next course of action.
Thanks again for your input.
Left Turn, that's a good quote from Charlie and a lot to agree with--mainly that BC, like Canada, is largely a conservative province/nation. But I think he misses the point with his PPS: yes, there is a certain sense of retreat away from the hard work of changing people's minds and the superficially rewarding sideeffect of regaining moral superiority and sharing it with other like-minded people, but the real hard truths have to be learned by centre-left people who believe a lot of the same things as movement/activist types, at least broadly: that elections will never save you. Even if the NDP had won, what was on the docket that makes life better -- I mean really better -- for working people.
For me, I picked out the 20% reduction in child care costs and commitment to collective bargaining, but there was plenty missing. And even so, student groups, unions, etc. were doing very little to hold the NDP to their interests pre-election. That lesson has to be taught to people who need to learn it. Then we can start expanding our ideologies and outlooks.
The part about the "undecided" column is quite significant. If polls were reporting percentages of decided & likely voters, and NDP voters were more likely to have been decided all along, and most of the undecided voters were hesitant Liberals... that would easily explain the disparity.
I would have liked to see plots throughout the election period showing numbers that haven't been corrected for decided/likely. Let "undecided" stand as a valid poll result that can be tracked.
Watching the election coverage and looking at photos of the two campaign headquarters taken on election night, I was struck by the fact that the NDP supporters at the Convention Centre seemed to be overwhelmingly caucasian and aging. By contrast, the Liberals seemed to have a more diverse, somewhat more youthful crowd at the Wall Centre. I have long believed that the NDP needs to make a concerted effort to reach out and engage with new Canadians. Harper has been extremely successful at doing this federally and it arguably won him his majority.
I find it very telling that a number of visible minority NDP candidates went down to defeat in ridings with significant new Canadian, Asian or South Asian populations (eg Gabriel Yiu losing to Suzanne Anton in Vancouver-Fraserview, Jagrup Brar losing to Peter Fassbender in Surrey-Fleetwood, George Chow losing to Moira Stilwell in Vancouver-Langara). Even Mable Elmore had a surprisingly close call, again in a riding with a significant Chinese population. The NDP lost incumbents in seats with significant new Canadian/Asian/South Asian populations, such as Delta North, Coquitlam-Maillardville and Port Moody-Coquitlam.
The reality in BC is that the demographics are changing, and if the NDP cannot reach out to new Canadian voters, it may very well be doomed for the foreseeable future. The same thing has been said of the Republicans in the US and their inability to expand their base beyond 'old white people', and in particular, their failure to appeal to Latino voters.
I am not suggesting that the NDP take a page out of the Liberal 'ethnic quick wins' playbook - far from it. But in my view, the NDP has got to do a better job of engaging with new Canadians and some of the ethno-cultural communities that currently support the Liberals to a greater degree than the NDP.
ghoris, with all due respect, there are enough asian voters in greater now that the NDP could not have won in some of the ridings where it did win without winning significant votes from chinese and other asian voters. I personally delivered voting reminders to several asian households that had been identified as NDP supporters in Burnaby-Edmonds.
I categorically reject any hint of the racist notion that the ndp lost the election because of asian voters. I'm more concerned about all the rednecks, cowboys and social conservatives that voted Liberal. Look at any results map, and you'll see that the middle and northeast of the province are solid red. Not many asians there.
The demographics at the NDP event at Canada Place were not indicative of how it looked on a lot of the ndp campaigns in the lower mainland. I have Mable Elmore as a friend on Facebook from the days when we were both involved in the Stopwar coalition, and throughout the campaign she posted pictures of groups of volunteers, most of whom were east asian or sout-east asian. Raj's volunteers on his campaign in Burnaby-Edmonds seemed to be an ethnically diverse group from what I saw when I was at his campaign office, not as diverse as Mabel's, but certainly more than the crowd at the convention centre.
I am not suggesting that the NDP lost the election "because of Asian voters", and *I* categorically reject the notion that it is "racist" to suggest that the NDP needs to do a better job of reaching out to new Canadians, as you have implied.
ghoris, I don't think I implied that it's racist to suggest that the NDP needs to do a better job of reaching out to new Canadians. I did however provide evidence to suggest that the NDP may be doing a better job of reaching out to new Canadians than your post suggests.
The NDP can go to hell as far as I am concerned now. They are done in BC for probably 16-20 years.
The NDP did not do anything really. They should of been hammering the Lieberals on their record. Yet they just sat back thinking they had it in the bag. Maybe in another 12-20 they may get another chance to govern but i know it won't be in my lifetime. With the other conservative party done and Greens rising the Liberals are in for next two to three elections for sure, if not longer.
I know NDP'ers can be pretty optimistic but enough is enough. Two piss poor campaigns in a row and with the Lieberals record this should of been a romp so I will also no longer be donating to the NDP anymore. How can one donate to a party that is not serious about wanting to win and act like amatuers?