Five Lessons — Real and Imagined — from BC’s Election Results

In a stunning upset of “Dewey Defeats Truman” proportions, the BC Liberals have defied all the polls save one and returned to power with a fourth straight majority government. No doubt, there will be much soul searching and wound licking over the coming weeks. I believe that five lessons — real, imagined, and not-quite-clear — will be gleaned from the experience.

1. Proceed with caution when predicting the future.

In last year’s US Presidential election, statistician Nate Silver made fools out of all those television pundits who privileged “gut feeling” over quantitative analysis. But sometimes even the data geeks get it wrong.

So what happened in British Columbia? Did voter support swing at the last minute? Did New Democrats fail to get out their vote? Were there methodological problems with the polling? All we can say for sure is that the political landscape is littered with failed predictions (albeit rarely so shocking as last night’s), and that in the future, partisans and non-partisans alike are probably better off displaying greater humility when speaking of what is yet to come.

2. Going negative works.

This is a very depressing development. Early on, NDP leader Adrian Dix admirably vowed to run a positive campaign, and although that strategy began to shift in the final days, his team never attempted anything on the scale of the unrelenting attacks unleashed by Premier Christy Clark and the Liberals.

While negative campaigning can sometimes backfire, it appears to have worked this time around, as the Liberals successfully tapped into the sizable block of BC voters susceptible to red scare tactics. All the Premier had to do was remind us of secret NDP plans to steal our hard-earned tax dollars and distribute them to greedy union bosses, or something to that effect, and BC’s “free enterprise coalition” dutifully flocked into action.

If I were inclined to ignore lesson #1 above, I would predict an NDP emulation of this campaign style for the next several elections.

3. Campaigning on the environment doesn’t work.

This is even more depressing — and not necessarily accurate. But in politics, it is perception that matters.

During this election, the NDP adopted a moderately progressive environmental platform. The strategy evidently did not pay off. Conceivably, the problem may have been that its environmental policies did not go far enough; perhaps a more stringent stance, like opposition to LNG, might have chipped off a few extra Green votes and energized the party’s base. But New Democrats are most likely drawing a different conclusion. I predict (again, with all due humility) that in the next election, the NDP will focus more on capturing the ideological territory of the Liberals than the Greens.

But there are different strategies to consider.

4. The NDP and the Greens must cooperate.

This call is likely to grow louder over the coming months and years, but electoral cooperation won’t be easy to implement. Green Party support comes from across the political spectrum — more so from the NDP than the Liberals, to be sure, but not overwhelmingly so. Plus, it is hard to determine exactly how Green and NDP transfers of support would break down on a riding-by-riding basis.

But while such a scheme is not guaranteed to succeed, neither is it guaranteed to fail. A pre-election alliance in targeted ridings is at least worth further exploration. And with Jane Sterk’s probable impending departure from the Green Party leadership, possibly to be replaced by new MLA Andrew Weaver who said he would prefer an NDP to a Liberal government, bad blood between the two parties may yet diminish.

5. It’s now up to civil society.

Regardless of what happens in 2017, BC will spend the next four years governed by a party that believes itself to have a mandate for pipeline ambiguity, LNG development, and climate inaction. Environmental and social justice groups must mobilize to demonstrate to the government that its priorities for the province are not embraced by the majority of voters who wanted someone else.

“Well, that was easy,” Christy Clark joked in her victory speech last night. It is now up to all of us to make sure that the next four years are anything but.

This post appears on rabble.ca.

Cleaning Up Gordon Campbell’s Mess

According to every poll and every projection by every firm and every commentator, Christy Clark and her Liberal Party are about to be handed an unbalanced ass-whooping of the sort we British Columbians seem to enjoy dishing out to governing parties once every decade or so. Naturally, when this happens, I will be singing and dancing as much as the next person. But allow me to qualify my unencumbered joy thusly:

The impending Liberal defeat is not Christy Clark’s fault.

Well, not primarily. She certainly hasn’t helped. “Ethnicgate” does not reflect well on the Clark government, but this present ordeal is not particularly different from the “very ethnic” mini-scandal that failed to put a dent in the Harper Conservatives during the last federal election. People are outraged at the BC Liberals now because we were already predisposed to feel outraged. “Ethnicgate” provided a focus for what was always there.

So why don’t we like the Liberals? All arrows point to Gordon Campbell, that ghostly spectre whose past misdeeds will no doubt haunt the upcoming campaign. Clark is simply paying for her predecessor’s mistakes, and while she has committed her own fair share of blunders along the way, not even the charismatic lovechild of Justin Trudeau and Barack Obama could have prevented the SS Gordo from sinking. The Liberal Party’s fate was permanently sealed one summer day in 2009 — only two months after the last election — when the Campbell government announced its plan to introduce the dreaded HST.

Let me qualify my point once more. The Harmonized Sales Tax, which will finally meet its end next week, is not all bad. Nor is the old Provincial Sales Tax, which will replace it, all good. As far as consumption taxes go, value added taxes like the HST are undoubtedly more efficient than cascading taxes like the PST. And it may even be the case that businesses would have passed on all their HST savings to consumers through lower prices — eventually. (But then why was the business community so in love with the HST? Never mind.)

So what is wrong with the HST? I can’t speak for all British Columbians. Surely, the sneaky, underhanded way in which the government introduced the tax plays a big part in explaining why people don’t like it, and understandably so.

As for me personally, the main reason I signed the anti-HST initiative and voted against the new tax in the subsequent referendum is that I am not a fan of broad-based consumption taxes in general — be they HST, PST, or GST. Such taxes are notorious for taking a bigger bite out of the incomes of the poor than the rich. And while I realize that it is unrealistic to eliminate both the HST and the PST all at once, I came to the conclusion during the HST debate that the only proposal I could support would be a conscious effort to shift taxes incrementally away from consumption and towards more sensible tax bases. In other words, lower the sales tax — whatever form it takes — and recoup lost revenue by raising income taxes, corporate taxes, or carbon taxes (a more targeted consumption tax).

Of course, neither the Campbell nor the Clark Liberals gave any indication that they were willing to engage in a profound conversation of this nature. All I can do is hope that the incoming NDP government will be more open to such an exercise. In the meantime, I happily count down to election day and await the long overdue demise of the Campbell era — more than two years after he stepped down as Premier.

Vancouver Sun Letter

Please see today’s Vancouver Sun — or click here — for my latest letter to the editor. This one is about BC Premier Christy Clark’s efforts to raise government revenue via liquefied natural gas production. As regular readers might expect, I am not exactly on board.

Twisting the Facts on the Environment

Infographic courtesy of sumofus.org

Case #1: BC Premier Christy Clark has a job creation plan. One component of said plan involves three liquefied natural gas plants in the northern part of the province. Unfortunately, this runs afoul of the provincial Clean Energy Act. So what does Premier Clark do? In June, she redefines “clean energy” to include natural gas — a resource that emits greenhouse gases just like any other fossil fuel — provided that it is used to power those plants in northern BC. Just like that, everybody wins!

Case #2: Scientists advising North Carolina’s Coastal Resources Commission recommend that the state plan for a sea level rise of 39 inches along its coast by 2100 due to climate change. Business groups complain that the resulting restrictions on coastal development will damage the economy. State lawmakers respond by introducing a bill that would bar officials from taking such pessimistic predictions into account. Instead, they would be required to consider only historical trends. In July, after North Carolina is widely mocked for trying to declare rising sea levels illegal, state legislators agree to a compromise and instruct the Coastal Resources Commission to come back with another report in four years. In the meantime, officials are still to ignore the scientists’ original advice.

Case #3: As a signatory to the Copenhagen Accord, Canada is required to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. Earlier this month, Environment Minister Peter Kent announces that Canada is halfway there. This must mean that the country has already lowered its emissions to 8 or 9 percent below 2005 levels, right? Wrong. By “halfway,” the minister means only that if we continue along the same path, we will be halfway to our target by 2020. Furthermore, this 2020 “halfway” projection does not use 2005 emissions as a baseline, but rather hypothetical 2020 emissions assuming inaction on the government’s part. The upshot is that by 2020, Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions are currently projected to drop to only 2.7 percent below its 2005 emissions, rather than 17 percent below. Halfway indeed!

Case #4: Enbridge would like to build a pipeline pumping Alberta oil to the BC coast for export. Sadly for Enbridge, people are increasingly concerned about accidents and the possibility of oil spills. To reassure the public, the company puts out several promotional videos. Earlier this month, it is discovered that in two of these videos, a string of islands in Douglas Channel, with a combined area of over 1000 square kilometres, is completely erased from the map. One must admit, the tanker route certainly looks a lot safer this way.

The PR lessons from this summer have been fascinating. If the facts are not convenient, simply invent new facts. Staying on message is the important thing. Who are we to let reality get in the way?

Stockwell Day for Premier?

Thank you Georgia Straight editor Charlie Smith. I needed that. In the midst of unrelenting bad news broken up only by worse news — pipeline debates, carnage in Syria, the federal government’s ongoing dismantlement of Canada’s worthiest accomplishments — a good laugh was just what the doctor ordered.

On the Straight’s website yesterday, Smith wrote a fanciful piece speculating that former Canadian Alliance leader and Jet Ski aficionado Stockwell Day might run for Premier of BC. Smith admits that this does not come from anything Day himself has actually said, and bases his thought experiment solely on reports of Stockwell sightings at dinners attended by pro-Liberal Party Fraser Institute directors. (Sometimes I wonder if journalists create drama just for drama’s sake. Yes, I know I’m naive.) According to Smith’s line of reasoning, the governing party is debating whether or not to debate a name change at its convention this fall, and there is a chance that this in turn could prompt a leadership review which Premier Christy Clark might not survive.

And who better to take her place and unite BC’s newly divided right than Flintstones-era prophet Stockwell Day?

After momentarily jumping atop my desk in celebration whilst giddily chanting “Hell yeah!” at the top of my lungs, I begin to worry that a “fully-Stocked” (har-har) BC Liberal Party might indeed reclaim political territory ceded to the upstart Conservatives. But then I remember who we’re talking about. This war-mongering, homophobic pro-lifer used to routinely create embarrassment for himself — whether by showing up at a press conference on the shores of Okanagan Lake in a wetsuit or reportedly expressing a belief that the Earth is 6000 years old and humans once coexisted with dinosaurs. Any Liberals silly enough to consider electing him as their leader would be demonstrating an uncommon eagerness to put the final nail in their party’s coffin. Which, as far as I’m concerned, is reason enough to support his re-entry into politics.

Of course, Day will never do it. Any suggestion to the contrary is nothing but a left-wing journalist’s wishful fantasy.

But is it a crime to dream?

The Senate Election that Refuses to Die

Map of Canadian Senate Divisions

Three months ago, I wrote a post warning of coming Senate elections here in British Columbia. Now it seems that the private member’s bill providing for such elections, despite Premier Christy Clark’s support, will not be making it through the sausage factory any time soon.

Reason to celebrate? Unfortunately, no. Not to be deterred, our Premier assures us that an election to replace retiring Senator Gerry St. Germain will go ahead as planned without either enabling legislation or any of that pesky public scrutiny and debate that go along with it.

I explained three months ago my opposition to an elected Senate — that it merely papers over the injustice of a fundamentally undemocratic system of representation, and effectively discards the principle of one-person-one-vote. Far better to simply abolish the outdated institution and look elsewhere for checks and balances. Yet despite the far-reaching influence that my mother assures me my blog posts ought to have, there remains a persistent myth that Canada needs a Senate in one form or another to represent regional interests. It is no coincidence that all federations have bicameral legislatures, this line of reasoning goes.

Compelling, but not quite true. The world contains twenty-four federations, and fully five of them (Venezuela, United Arab Emirates, Comoros, Micronesia, and St. Kitts and Nevis) have unicameral legislatures. Admittedly, this is a small percentage, and pales in comparison to the majority of unitary states with no upper houses. In other words, despite this sprinkling of exceptions, it seems that federalism and bicameralism do indeed tend to go hand in hand.

So let us examine the connections. First of all, is it right for the provinces to be given representation in one of the houses of the Parliament of Canada? I don’t see why. The proper agents for provincial interests are provincial governments, not federal lawmakers. If the provinces are represented in the Senate, then shouldn’t the feds, by the same logic, be represented in a second chamber of the provincial legislatures? Or if the goal is to asymmetrically increase the influence of the provinces (not an entirely unreasonable goal), then would it not be more effectively and transparently achieved by means of a simple devolution of powers?

Second, even if it were right to preserve provincial representation at the federal level, the Canadian Senate does not do this. As an appointed body, it merely serves the interests of the ruling federal party and its loyal hacks. Were Christy Clark and Stephen Harper to have their way and make the Senate an elected body, by contrast, its members would then be selected by the same people who select members of the House of Commons — i.e. Canadian voters — only their influence in certain parts of the country would be wildly and arbitrarily out of proportion to their numbers. At most, this would mean that the power of some provinces would be increased vis-a-vis other provinces, not that the power of the provinces in general would be increased vis-a-vis the feds. The only way to accomplish the latter goal through Senate reform would be to allow provincial governments to appoint Senators (the German model), and virtually no one in Canada argues for that.

So please heed my warnings, anonymous blog surfers! Senate elections, whether in BC or elsewhere in the country, will do no good, and to the extent that they legitimize an irreparably flawed institution, may do considerable harm. Let us just abolish the blasted thing and be done with it.

Red Chamber Blues

BC Premier Christy Clark took a break from bullying teachers yesterday to back the idea of elections to Canada’s Senate. If the private member’s bill introduced by Liberal John Les passes through the Legislature, which with the Premier’s support it almost certainly will, British Columbians could wind up voting this fall on the replacement for retiring Conservative Senator Gerry St. Germain.

The problem with Senate reform is that it places a veneer of legitimacy over what is a fundamentally unjust institution. Elected or appointed, the Canadian Senate will always be based on the formula of representation by region or province rather than representation by population, and thus will violate the cardinal democratic principle of one-person-one-vote. Yes, the status quo where we hand a veto over all our legislation to a body of basically lifetime patronage appointees is wrong, but that doesn’t make any and every change right. Senate elections will resurrect the chamber’s tattered image, and embolden it to challenge more bills passed by the House of Commons. Short of abolition, I would rather have an appointed but mostly ineffective unjust institution than an elected and effective one.

But isn’t a strongly bicameral legislature an important check on government power? I would say that the checker must be at least as democratic as the checkee. If, however, we as a society judge a second house of Parliament to be vital to our system of government, then perhaps we can consider other forms of a more participatory nature. Both BC and Ontario have in the recent past made use of citizens’ assemblies to examine options for electoral reform. Why not set up such a body on the federal level — not just to deal with a single issue but as a permanent feature of our democracy. Structured so as to represent Canadians proportionally by such demographic criteria as region, gender, ethnicity, class, age, and sexual orientation, a national citizens’ assembly could start out with a mostly advisory role, and then take on increasingly more power once the country becomes accustomed to its operation.

But in the meantime, what to do about the Senate election possibly coming to BC? Those of us who favour abolishing the Senate have a choice. We could boycott the election as a matter of principle, or we could just accept that the battle is lost and reluctantly add Senators to the list of people we vote for. A boycott carries the obvious risk of delivering victory to the worst of the worst (probably another Conservative). Perhaps the best possible outcome would be for some enterprising candidate to run on the pledge to try to abolish the Senate from within. I for one could scarcely resist voting for such a person — even if it means sullying myself by coming into contact with the notorious Red Chamber through the ballot box.