Martyn Brown: John Horgan’s NDP “total victory” wet dream

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      Only hours to go now until the polls open and close on tomorrow’s B.C. election. Haven’t voted yet? Here’s the skinny on voting day tips from Elections B.C.

      With a new Global-Ipsos poll out today (October 23) showing the NDP still leading the B.C. Liberals by 17 points among decided voters, John Horgan’s “total victory” wet dream is only one short sleep away.

      His party is sitting pretty at 51 percent of the decided vote, with the B.C. Liberals way back at 34 percent and the B.C. Greens less than half that again, at 12 per cent. 

      Despite Sonia Furstenau’s strong campaign, it seems that her Greens are destined to finish far behind their 17 percent showing under Andrew Weaver in 2017. 

      And Andrew Wilkinson’s wounded warriors are bound to wind up with the lowest level of support that they have received since Gordon Wilson’s Liberals came out of nowhere in the 1991 campaign to garner 33 percent of the vote.

      What does total victory look like for John Horgan and the NDP, apart from winning a massive majority? 

      For starters, it would involve winning over 50 percent of the popular vote—something that has only occurred once in B.C. since 1928, excluding the two coalition wins in 1945 and 1949. 

      I can’t see the NDP quite hitting the 57.6 percent popular vote mark that Gordon Campbell’s B.C. Liberals did in 2001. But I can imagine Horgan beating the NDP’s previous record-high popular vote total of 45.9 per cent in its 1979 election loss to Bill Bennett’s Socreds. That would be a total victory.

      In terms of seat totals, the most the NDP has ever previously won is 51, in Mike Harcourt’s 1991 election victory, which he amassed with only 40.7 percent of the vote. Granted, there were only 75 seats in total then, as compared to 87 now, but winning more than 51 seats would be a total victory for John Horgan.

      After that, total victory comes down the longer-term geopolitical ramifications that will be the most fun to watch as the riding results come in tomorrow, and three weeks hence, when the mail-in ballots are finally counted.

      What’s Horgan’s ultimate wet dream? 

      It starts with creaming the B.C. Greens, then sending the Liberals’ most threatening leadership contenders packing, and then extending the NDP’s presence beyond previously held swing seats, deep into the heart of historically “safe” Liberal territory.

      The Tyee’s Andrew MacLeod has aptly documented the key battlegrounds. I won’t revisit them all here.

      Suffice it to say, strategically, nothing is more important to Horgan’s NDP than the prospect of defeating B.C. Green Leader Sonia Furstenau in Cowichan Valley. It could well happen, notwithstanding her superb campaign performance.

      That constituency was, after all, typically the NDP’s seat to lose in most elections over the last six decades. And swing voters there as elsewhere tend to cast their lot with the party that is most likely to form the government, especially when that looks like a sure thing.

      Would you rather have a strong voice in government, maybe even sitting at the cabinet table, or a strong voice in the opposition wilderness? Tomorrow, that will be a ballot question for many B.C. voters, in Cowichan especially.

      The NDP is keep to topple Sonia Furstenau in her Cowichan Valley constituency.
      B.C. Greens

      I think the Greens strategically erred in trying to frame their election currency as being potentially once again the kingmakers holding the balance of power in a minority government. 

      Their ads make the pitch that B.C. works best “when the B.C. Greens have a seat at the table.” Trouble is, most voters have made it abundantly clear to the pollsters that they don’t agree with that and they are hell-bent on rewarding Horgan with a majority government. 

      The Greens won’t have a seat at any table in government. That much is clear. And despite their laudable and largely hollow “let’s not be partisan” and “elect us to continue being a collaborative force for change”, they will soon find that our system of parliamentary government is inherently designed to be oppositional.

      That is, assuming Furstenau and Adam Olsen (Saanich North and the Islands are re-elected), which still seems most likely. 

      Olsen, remember, shares his turf with his federal Green counterpart, Elizabeth May. But he has not run an especially strong campaign, and his NDP challenger, Zeb King, is a very popular local government councillor with a strong environmental pedigree. So, who knows, especially with that riding having the largest mail-in ballot numbers in the province.

      In short, if the Greens lose Sonia Furstenau’s voice in Victoria, Olsen proved in his short stint as interim Green leader that he’s hardly up to the challenge of holding the NDP accountable and keeping hope alive for his party. 

      But if Olsen somehow manages to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and Furstenau fails to prevail in her seat, Horgan will feel as General William Tecumseh Sherman did in his Civil War “March to the Sea”. There won’t be much left of the Green’s slim slice of paradise and the NDP’s victory will be good and truly “total.”

      Of course, the NDP are licking their chops at the prospect of winning all those vulnerable swing seats they covet, from Oak Bay–Gordon Head, where Murray Rankin should prevail, to Coquitlam–Burke Mountain, where I predict Fin Donnelly will easily defeat the Liberals’ Joan Isaacs. 

      Once the dominoes start falling, they tend to carry their own momentum in elections such as this one promises to be. Liberal-held swing ridings such as False Creek and North Vancouver-Seymour are teetering on the edge. Ditto for their seats in Surrey, Kamloops, the South Okanagan, up Highway 97, and along Highway 16.

      But which victories would Horgan find most delicious?

      That’s easy. It would start with defeating Jas Johal in Richmond–Queensborough and maybe even Michael Lee in Vancouver-Langara. 

      Both of those seats used to be “safe” Liberal ridings and the two men who hold them are easily the Liberals’ most likely best bets to succeed Andrew Wilkinson as leader when he gets the rapid, royal boot. Johal and Lee each have their strengths, the former especially as a communicator, and beating them would truly set the brewing Liberal civil war in motion.

      Plus, if Richmond-Queensborough falls for the Liberals, so might their former stronghold in Richmond South Centre and seats to the south and east beyond. 

      Total victory for John Horgan would mean the defeat of potential B.C. Liberal leadership contenders Jas Johal and Michael Lee.
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      Total victory for the NDP wouldn’t just be winning Surrey-Cloverdale and maybe even Surrey South and Surrey-White Rock; it would be marching victorious into that historic NDP wasteland known as the Fraser Valley.

      Might the Laurie Throneness debacle split the right-wing vote with independent Jason Lum, to allow the NDP’s Kelli Paddon to sneak into office in Chilliwack-Kent? Might the Margaret Kunst fiasco in Langley East deliver enough votes to elect the NDP’s Megan Dykeman? 

      Might Mary Polak be sufficiently sewered by the Conservatives’ Shelly Jan to deliver Langley to the NDP’s Andrew Mercier? Or, mercy me, might the departure of ex-Liberal Daryl Plecas and the furor from that local civil war somehow even tip Abbotsford South to the NDP’s Inder Johal?

      Unthinkable, the know-it-alls all sniff, pointing to yesteryears. But the times, as they say, are a-changin’, and in this extraordinary election, John Horgan might yet stand to permanently alter the face of B.C.’s ideological electoral map.

      If the Fraser Valley tips at all NDP, it will be a new world order in B.C. And those ridings and communities will feel new love from the Horgan government that they never dreamt was possible. 

      The thing is, when new political turf is won, the ones that win it and newly treasure it in government will move heaven and earth to hold that territory forevermore.

      True, the size of Horgan’s virtually sure-fire NDP majority will inevitably come down to voter turnout. Now is no time for his supporters especially to be resting on their laurels if they hope to not just win, but to obliterate the competition.

      Of British Columbia’s nearly 3.5 million registered voters, Elections B.C. has already received 478,900 mail-in ballots and 681,055 more ballots through advance voting. By the end of today that total figure is bound to top 1.2 million ballots already cast and received.

      As impressive as those early voting turnout numbers are, that still leaves almost 2.3 million registered voters unaccounted for, including some 245,379 voters of the 724,279 who were issued vote-by-mail packages not yet received by Elections B.C.  

      In other words, some 34 percent of those mail-in ballots haven’t yet been received. Although that doesn’t include those that are currently in transit to Elections B.C. for return processing or that were or might yet be dropped off at a district electoral office or voting place.

      How many of those nearly quarter-of-a-million mail-in votes were ultimately mailed too late to reach Elections B.C. by 8 p.m. tomorrow, and will therefore not be counted? For the life of me, I cannot understand why Elections B.C. did not do more to inform voters about that mail-in deadline, which I dare say is not at all well understood. 

      Much more should have been done to dissuade voters from mailing in their ballots too late and to also inform them about the ways those completed mail-in packages can be dropped off in person right up until 8 p.m. tomorrow. In fact, the law should be changed to ensure that all mail-in ballots postmarked through election day will remain eligible to be counted.

      But that’s academic now. 

      And the only thing that will spare the Liberals from General Horgan’s total victory scenario is if their outstanding voters show up at the polls and the NDP’s voters choose to sit on their hands and not vote.

      Same goes for the Greens, of course, who will especially be praying that enough swing Liberal voters in Cowichan show up to at least help Furstenau hold the NDP’s Rob Douglas at bay and keep their perennial wet dream alive.

      My bet? The NDP will wind up over 51 seats—maybe as many as 60—the Liberals will do well to retain 30-plus seats, and the two Green incumbents will indeed live to fight another day. 

      Not quite total victory for the NDP, perhaps, but not far from it. And I wouldn’t bet a plug nickel on the latter being more likely than the former.

      Martyn Brown was former B.C. premier Gordon Campbell’s long-serving chief of staff, the top strategic adviser to three provincial party leaders, and a former deputy minister of tourism, trade, and investment. He also served as the B.C. Liberals' public campaign director in 2001, 2005, and 2009, and in addition to his other extensive campaign experience, he was the principal author of four election platforms. Contact him via email at bcpundit@gmail.com.

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