The Tyee has posted the final version of our look at 15 years of Liberal rule in British Columbia.
You can read the full story here.
Liberal party
The BC Liberal record, part 2
The second part of the Tyee’s look at the British Columbia Liberal party in power is up.
98 BC Liberal Falsehoods, Boondoggles and Scandals: The Clark Era 53
Part two of 15 years of public messes, sourced and explained. If we forgot any, please remind us.
The BC Liberal record, part 1
The Tyee has just published the story below, which lists some of the more dubious elements of the British Columbia Liberal government’s record. I played a small part in creating it, along with David Beers and a bunch of other Tyee folks.
Opinion
98 BC Liberal Falsehoods, Boondoggles and Scandals: The Campbell Era 45
Part one of 15 years of public messes, sourced and explained. If we forgot any, please remind us.
Pollster Calls BS on BC Libs’ Private Election Polls
‘Show me the numbers,’ demands Insights West president, who says voters simply changed their minds.
By Tom Barrett
TheTyee.ca
A veteran pollster is calling BS on BC Liberal claims that the party’s internal polls predicted the May 14 provincial election result.
On the eve of the election, polls published in the media suggested a comfortable majority for the New Democratic Party. Instead, the Liberals won by more than four percentage points.
After the election, Liberal sources said their own polls had indicated they would win 48 seats. The party ended up winning 49 seats.
Steve Mossop, president of Insights West, says he doesn’t believe the stories.
During a recent panel discussion at Simon Fraser University Harbour Centre, Mossop was asked by an audience member about media reports that contrasted public pollsters’ embarrassing failures with the Liberals’ own polls.
“I knew the question would come up and my answer to that is, ‘I cry BS,'” he said. “There’s no way. I have never seen the data…
“Show me the numbers.”
Added Mossop: “Every insider that I’ve ever talked to, both in the NDP and in the Liberals, said they all thought they were doomed to fail that night. It’s very easy after the fact, once you’ve won, to say, ‘We knew it all along.'” Continue reading
A modest proposal…
May election results reveal a surprising new voter bloc for the BC NDP.
By Tom Barrett
TheTyee.ca
As the B.C. New Democratic Party racks its neural tissues to discover how it blew a 20-point lead in the polls on May 14, it might be happy to learn that the news isn’t all bad.
Sure, the NDP was thumped in an election that everybody expected it to win. But it did make gains in some unexpected places.
Among the very rich, for example.
Final election results show the NDP made some of its biggest gains in some of B.C.’s wealthiest ridings. Ridings like Vancouver-False Creek, where the NDP increased its total by a healthy 3,479 votes over its 2009 showing. Ditto for Vancouver-Fairview (up 2,768 votes) and North Vancouver-Seymour (up 2,343 votes).
All three of those ridings are among the 10 constituencies with the highest median after-tax incomes, according to BC Stats. In fact, six of the 10 ridings where the NDP made its biggest gains May 14 are on that top 10 income list. (The figures, while the latest available for income by constituency, come from the 2006 census and are a bit dated. But heck, a riding that was wealthy in 2006 is probably still doing pretty well today.)
The table below shows the wealthy ridings where the NDP vote increased the most. The margin columns show who won the riding in the last two elections and the winner’s margin as a percentage of the total vote.
| Riding | 09 Margin | 13 Margin |
|---|---|---|
| Vancouver-False Creek | Lib 28.9 | Lib 15.5 |
| Vancouver-Fairview | Lib 4.9 | NDP 5.1 |
| North Vancouver-Seymour | Lib 31.8 | Lib 18.0 |
| Vancouver-Point Grey | Lib 10.1 | NDP 4.4 |
| Surrey-Cloverdale | Lib 32.9 | Lib 30.5 |
| West Vancouver-Capilano | Lib 53.0 | Lib 44.7 |
As shown, two of these wealthy ridings, Vancouver-Fairview and Vancouver-Point Grey, abandoned the Liberals for the NDP. And the Liberals’ victory margins fell in all of the other four. Clearly, in B.C. the class war is riddled with quislings. Continue reading
The weight on a BC pollster’s shoulders
Many flubbed their May 14 election calls. Here’s one who thinks he knows why.
By Tom Barrett
June 21, 2013
TheTyee.ca
Pollster Kyle Braid thinks he’s figured out how he missed so badly in the May 14 election.
Like almost every other pollster, Braid, a vice-president at Ipsos Reid, came up with results on the eve of the election that suggested a healthy victory for the New Democratic Party. When that turned into a healthy victory for the BC Liberals, Braid and the other pollsters were left with egg dripping from their faces.
The last Ipsos poll, taken May 13, suggested the NDP had the support of 45 per cent of decided voters, compared to 37 per cent for the BC Liberals. The final results were NDP 40 per cent, Liberals 44.
Braid told an audience at the Spur Festival in Vancouver this week that he thinks he adjusted his data when he shouldn’t have and failed to adjust it when he should have.
Every polling company adjusts, or weights, its samples. That’s because samples rarely look like the general population. They may, to take a simple example, contain more women than the electorate as a whole. Continue reading
Green gains likely came at BC Libs’ expense
Further election number crunching that suggests the centre-left vote split is myth.
By Tom Barrett
May 31, 2013
TheTyee.ca
The Green Party’s biggest gains in the May 14 election seem to have come at the expense of the Liberals.
During the campaign, the New Democrats seemed obsessed with losing votes to the Greens. The Liberals even tweaked the NDP by running a pro-Green newspaper ad in Victoria near the end of the campaign.
Maybe the Liberals should have saved their money.
The final count shows the five ridings where the Green vote increased the most were all in southern Vancouver Island. And in four of those ridings, the Liberal vote dropped more than the NDP vote.
One popular theory holds that the Greens steal votes from the NDP. If that were true, you’d expect the Greens’ gains to come at the expense of the NDP in these ridings. But that doesn’t seem to have happened.
In Oak Bay-Gordon Head, where Andrew Weaver won the Greens their first seat ever, the Greens picked up 8,392 more votes than in 2009. At the same time, the NDP vote dropped by 3,780.
But the Liberals, who won the seat in 2009, saw their vote drop by 4,110. Those votes don’t seem to have gone to the Conservative party, which is usually assumed to be the biggest vote-splitting threat to the Liberals. The Conservative vote increased by only 492 over 2009.
The numbers suggest that the Greens pulled a lot of support from former Liberal voters.
Libs suffered in Island ridings
Now, it’s possible that a whole lot of Liberal supporters stayed home May 14 and a whole bunch of new Green supporters turned out for the first time. Or a lot of Liberal supporters switched to the NDP and some NDP supporters switched to the Greens. But, given the size of the Liberal collapse, it seems likely that plenty of former Liberal supporters went Green.
The overall number of valid votes in Oak Bay-Gordon Head increased by 994, or four per cent, suggesting that Weaver’s support didn’t all come from new voters.
The Greens’ other big increase came in Saanich North and the Islands, which also went Liberal in 2009. This time, after all the ballots were counted, the NDP took this riding in a close three-way race.
The Green vote increased 6,913. The NDP vote dropped 2,363. The Liberal vote dropped 2,784. There was no Conservative candidate.
Overall, the vote in Saanich North and the Islands increased by 2,365, a hefty eight per cent over 2009. Continue reading
Behind BC’s pollster fail
Were they foiled by the ’10-second Socred’? A look at several possibilities.
By Tom Barrett
May 17 2013
TheTyee.ca
“Any election is like a horse race, in that you can tell more about it the next day.” — Sir John A. Macdonald
Greg Lyle has seen a lot of election campaigns — and campaign polls — as a pollster and a political organizer.
He says there’s a key difference between parties’ internal polls and the polls you read about in the media.
“Parties spend a lot of money on polling,” Lyle said in an election night interview.
A major party will spend between $150,000 and $200,000 on polls during an election, he said. Public polls, the kind you read about in the media, are either sponsored by media outlets at a relatively low cost or given away free.
Pollsters tend to be political junkies. They like to be a part of the campaign drama and they want to know what’s happening. That’s part of the reason they give campaign polls away.
But political polls are also loss leaders for pollsters. They make their money testing public opinion for people who want to sell shampoo and potato chips; having the media talk about their election insights helps attract such clients.
So if you’re a pollster, calling an election correctly is great publicity.
Having people say “How did the pollsters get it so completely, utterly, ridiculously, ludicrously wrong?” is not great publicity.
’10-second Socred’ syndrome
Lyle, managing director of the Innovative Research Group, thinks the answer to that question lies partly in pollsters’ methodology. Many of the big polls taken during the campaign were online polls: a pollster assembles a panel of tens or hundreds of thousands of people who are willing to answer questions, sometimes for a token fee. The pollster conducts a poll by drawing names from that panel and sending out emails with links to questionnaires.
Some experts argue that such polls pose problems. While online polling has generally been pretty successful, some, like Lyle, argue that online polls don’t “respect the rules of polling, which is that everybody has a random chance, or an equal and known chance of being selected.” Continue reading
In a Greenless world, would the NDP have won?
To decide, look at 13 lost New Democrat ridings where the Greens factored in.
By Tom Barrett
May 15, 2013
TheTyee.ca
Imagine a British Columbia without the Green party. It’s a fantasy that many angry New Democrats are indulging in today.
That’s because, if you take the Green party out of Tuesday’s election and assume that every vote cast for the Greens would have gone instead to the NDP, you’re looking at a hefty NDP majority government.
Pending absentee ballots and possible recounts, Tuesday’s results were: 50 seats for the BC Liberals, 33 NDP, one Green and one independent.
The NDP lost in 13 ridings where the combined NDP and Green vote was greater than the BC Liberal vote. Switch all those seats to the NDP and you get 46 NDP, 37 Liberals, no Greens and one independent.
However, the assumption underlying this fantasy Greenless world is a bit iffy.
Those 13 ridings include Oak Bay-Gordon Head, where Andrew Weaver took 40 per cent of the vote. The NDP came third, just behind former Liberal cabinet minister Ida Chong. Can you really say Weaver split the NDP vote?
For the sake of argument, let’s give this riding to the NDP in our fantasy legislature. That leaves 12 ridings where the NDP came second to the Liberals and would have won if all the Green votes had gone to them. How likely is that? Can you assume that every Green voter would have voted NDP if the Greens didn’t exist? Continue reading
In key ridings, NDP failed to improve on 2009 results
By Tom Barrett
May 15, 2013
TheTyee.ca
One big reason the new B.C. political map looks so much like the old one is the NDP’s inability to pick up ridings they almost won in 2009.
Four hours after the polls closed, votes were still being counted and several ridings were too close to call. Still, it was clear that the New Democrats failed to make any headway in the many ridings that were close in 2009.
There were 17 ridings that were decided by less than five percentage points in the last election; 11 of them went Liberal. The NDP needed to drag most of those into their win column to claim victory Tuesday.
Given the comfortable NDP lead suggested by the polls, that should have been an easy task. Instead, the Liberals managed to hang on to most of their near wins and even stole two ridings that the NDP had narrowly won in ’09.
In Saanich North and the Islands, which the Liberals won by less than one percentage point in 2009, the NDP was leading by an eyelash Tuesday night in what was essentially a three-way tie.
In Burnaby-Lougheed, which the Liberals won by less than four points in 2009, the NDP was up by three points Tuesday night.
The NDP also took Vancouver-Fairview, which the Liberals won by just under five points in 2009.
But the NDP couldn’t hang on to two ridings they won by narrow margins in 2009.
In Maple Ridge-Pitt Meadows, where the NDP won by a little over one percentage point in 2009, the Liberals were ahead by three points Tuesday night.
The Liberals also took Cariboo North, which the NDP won by less than four points in 2009.
Find Tyee election reporting team member and contributing editor Tom Barrett’s previous Tyee articles here. Find him on Twitter or email him.
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