NDP campaigner says financial crisis helped Conservatives

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      Local NDP results are starting to spill in. Apart from one yahoo yelling something about Don Davies in the back of a very crowded, very boisterous, Taiga-jacketed room, no formal announcements yet.

      Vancouver East incumbent Libby Davies seems secure, after just a few polls have reported. Don Davies should take Vancouver Kingsway. In Vancouver South, Ujjal Dosanjh and Wai Young are in a dead heat, but not enough to leave room for Ann Chambers. Michael Byers, despite his academic-environmental sex appeal, is trailing the red and the blue in Vancouver Centre. And in Vancouver Quadra, David Caplan is even trailing Green Dan Grice.

      In other words, it’s time to check in with Gerry Scott, the NDP’s manager for federal organizing in B.C.

      “I have mixed feelings about tonight,” he told the Straight, as other media folk swarmed around us, waiting for their turn. “I hoped for more seats in B.C. It was a pretty good result in the context of what turned out to be a significant Conservative uptake in the last few days.”

      Scott noted that there was no single defining issue during the campaigns. Among the contenders were childcare, the war in Afghanistan, and the future of the environment. Though all of them are mega-issues, he said they just didn’t get traction.

      “In my own view,” Scott said, “the economic undoing helped the Conservative government. This was a status quo vote.”

      Scott noted that the likely Don Davies victory in Kingsway “is a fitting tribute to the Liberal betrayal of the people in that riding”.

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