NDP

Amazing Comebacks Christy Clark Hopes to Emulate

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BC’s Premier Clark: Big ground to make up, but stranger things have happened.

Four election shockers that keep BC’s New Dems up at night
By Tom Barrett
TheTyee.ca

With less than three months to go until Election Day, Premier Christy Clark’s Liberals are betting on a major come-from-behind surge to wipe out the New Democratic Party’s lead in the polls.

It’s a tall order, but it wouldn’t be the first time voters have shifted that much, that fast.
“Things can change very quickly,” said Angus Reid pollster Mario Canseco. Even when an opposition party enters an election campaign with a healthy lead, voters can abandon it if they decide the party isn’t ready to govern.

For the past several years, the NDP has held a robust lead over the BC Liberals in the polls. Although the lead has dropped from highs of 20 points or more, the most recent polls still show the NDP up by 10 to 15 percentage points.

But headlines like Hudak Tories Roaring Toward a Majority: Poll and Danielle Smith’s Wildrose on Track for Majority suggest just how volatile voters can be. And headlines like ‘We Were Wrong’: Alberta Election Pollsters Red-faced as Tories Crush Wildrose serve as a reminder that polls are a snapshot in time, not a forecast.

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Dix’s Big Gamble: No Dirt

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As Libs sling mud, NDP leader refuses to go negative. Will out-of-the-box strategy box him in?
By Tom Barrett
TheTyee.ca

Mr. Nice Guy: Adrian Dix
Mr. Nice Guy: Adrian Dix

The New Democratic Party intends to win the May 14 election by campaigning against negative campaigning. NDP leader Adrian Dix has said the party won’t fight fire with fire — or, in this case, mud with mud — no matter how nasty the other side gets.

Like pornography, negative campaigning is hard to define, but we know it when we see it. And most of us say we hate it.

Still, political strategists tend to believe it works. Just look at what the Stephen Harper Conservatives did to Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff. Will negative ads hurt Dix in the same way? And if they do, is being positive an effective counter-strategy?

As election day approaches, the NDP’s lead on Christy Clark’s Liberals is likely to narrow. If that happens, “the NDP may have to resort to some harder-hitting commentary on the Liberals generally and Christy Clark in particular,” said political scientist Hamish Telford. “And that will raise all sorts of questions: ‘Well, Mr. Dix, you said you were going to have a positive campaign, now you’re doing this that and the other’…

“So it does box him in a bit and that may cause him a problem for sure.”

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Domino theory

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With a provincial election less than four months away, TV viewers in B.C. have been treated to a flood of advertisements that explain what a great job the Christy Clark government is doing.

One 30-second spot uses dominoes (actually, they’re smartphones set up like dominoes) to represent the world’s tumbling economies. Amidst the clacking chaos, B.C. stands strong, apparently. Viewers would be forgiven for thinking they’re watching election ads, but these are government ads, paid for by tax dollars.

B.C. taxpayers, it seems, need to be told the economy is strong and the Clark government isn’t afraid to be the one to tell them.

This week, New Democratic Party leader Adrian Dix promised that, if elected, he’ll give the auditor general the power to kill partisan government advertising.

Such ads are something that politicians always yell about when they’re in opposition, but discover are really useful when they’re in power. After Dix’s announcement, Victoria Times-Colonist columnist Les Leyne dug out a story of mine that ran in the Vancouver Sun in February, 1998.

The NDP was in government then, and Dix was chief of staff to then-premier Glen Clark. That Clark government was running a $2 million campaign with the slogan “Jobs for B.C. It’s working” As Leyne writes:

There were the same problems as today:

• Employment numbers dropped during the campaign, which negated the entire thrust.

• The Opposition Liberals condemned them as a misleading waste of tax dollars.

• The auditor general of the day — George Morfitt — was complaining that there were no rules to keep propaganda out of government advertising.

He had earlier urged a ban on partisan information in public government communications. The premier’s communications director, Geoff Meggs — now a Vancouver councillor — offered a hollow argument that the government had an obligation to report on its initiatives. Particularly if they were good news ones.

As Leyne says, “Amazing to think 17 years after the auditor general flagged it, we’re still waiting for common sense to break out on this front.”