Tomorrow is election day in British Columbia, Canada. In the grand scheme of things, a canadian provincial election may be small potatoes, but it's very important to those of us who are lucky enough to live here. For Kossacks, the strategy and tactics used by both sides may be instructive, especially in the case of the Liberals, who have run, once again, a campaign that appears to have been crafted by Karl Rove himself.
A description of the parties, the players, the issues, and the campaigns are below the fold. I will be doing some GOTV tomorrow, but will report on the final results later this week.
The Parties:
1. The Liberals - First off, the Liberals are anything but liberal; they are the party of big business and social conservatives who recieve most of their money from corporations and wealthy individuals. Their leader is Premier Gordon Campbell.
2. The NDP - The NDP, of which I am a member, is the center-left labor oriented party that ran the province for most of the 90s. It recieves most of it's contributions from individuals and unions. Carole James is the leader of the BC NDP.
3. The Greens - The Greens here are a more developed party than in the states and have an economic agenda in addition to their normal emphasis on the environment. Their leader is Adrian Carr.
A Short History
In 2001, a few short months after the SCOTUS chose Bush as the new President of the USA, Gordon Campbell unleashed a negative campaign without precedent in Canada. Record amounts of money went into negative ads and a nonstop smear campaign that the NDP was unable to match. In addition, mistakes by the NDP concerning the Fast Ferries Project and a militant Green Party further undermined the NDP re-election effort. The result was a disaster that saw the Liberals take 77 of 79 seats in the provincial Legislature.
The NDP did not even have enough seats to maintain official opposition status, which meant that the Liberals were able to essentially govern in secret, announcing legislation in press releases without any prior debate or opposition input into the process. For the last four years, British Columbia has been under corporate control, with predictable results; massive tax cuts for corporations and wealthy people, the almost complete destruction of the social safety net, unilateral abrogation of union contracts with public sector employees, the sale of public assets to private interests under questionable terms, the privatization of public services, and the elimination of legal services for the poor.
The Issues
The ONLY issue, up until very recently in the campaign, is the assault by the Campbell government on health care and social services. A few days ago, the provincial teacher's union let slip that it is preparing for a strike no matter who is running the government on Wednesday. This opened the door for the Liberals to attack the NDP as a tool of the unions and promise to make education an essential service, thus making strikes illegal. The Liberals have been touting the economy as a great success story, but ours is a resource economy subject to the whims of the commodity markets. We export oil, gas, raw logs, lumber, coal, and BC Bud.
Status of the Campaign
Once again, progressives are preparing to commit suicide in the name of ideological purity. The polls here are notoriously unreliable because of admitted sampling problems, but the numbers have been fairly steady throughout the four-week campaign. The Liberals are polling at 42-49%, the NDP at 32-40%, and the Greens steady at 12%. These numbers are slightly deceptive because much of the Liberal support is concentrated geographically in fewer ridings, thus making the race closer than it appears. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that if the left could consolidate, they would own this province. Sigh. Due to the idiosyncracies of the system, it is possible to win control of the Legislature with only 35-40% of the popular vote, which is what happened in 1996, so all hope is not lost, but it's going to be a squeaker. My own riding of North Island is very likely going to switch back to NDP.
The Campaign
This is the part that may be of interest to Kossacks. Gordon Campbell has run a campaign that looks like it came stright out of the Rovian playbook. Campbell's personal negatives going into the election were sky-high, with fewer than 30% of those polled approving of him personally. So the Liberals ran away from Gordo, placing him in a Bush-bubble where the press or ordinary citizens could not reach him. Commercials and signs were created that showed only the candidate for that riding (usually, the party leader's face is plastered everywhere) and minimized the size of the word 'Liberal'.
They started back in January using provincial money to run 'feelgood' ads similar to Reagan's 'Feel Good America' pre-election campaign back in '84. During the runup to the election writ, the Liberals began throwing money around for social programs, although it is all 'temporary' or one-time funding, and has continued this through the campaign, handing out about $250 million from a budget that they refused to table before the election (extremely unusual, as governments normally run on their budgets). The Liberals have gone heavily negative for the final week of the campaign after Carole James wiped the floor with him during the only televised debate (again, extremely unusual).
The NDP has it's own problems. Carole James has never held office other than as a regional school district board leader. In addition, they have chosen the wrongheaded, IMHO, strategy of distancing themselves from their base union support and running a limp centrist campaign that relys on bashing the Liberals over their dismal performance on healthcare and social issues. The party is more concerned with forming a respectable opposition than it is on actually winning control of the government. They have even banned the use of Campbell's Maui drunk-driving mugshot (click on Campbell's name at the top of this diary) as being too harsh. These are all the same mistakes Dems have been making - aiming too low and using a BB gun instead of a shotgun.
An excellent blog on BC politics can be found at the Tyee.
Wish us luck. I think we're going to need it. If enough Greens decide to vote NDP in order to remove the Liberals, we'll do well, taking somewhere around 30-40 seats. A respectable showing, according to party people I talk to, would be 20-30 seats. Anything less than 20 seats will be a disappointment. Personally, I'm prepared for the worst but hoping for the best.