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(And HuffPo version here!)

(Oh, and John Horgan seems to have, um, gotten stuck on the campaign trail…)

Twenty-one years ago, we BC Liberals were gathered at the Hotel Vancouver, peering up some big TV screens, shocked by what we were seeing.
It was Election Day in British Columbia, and the returns were coming in.  And they didn’t make any sense.  At all.

We were ahead, but we were behind, too.

The Gord Campbell-led Liberals had substantially more votes than our principal opponent, the BC New Democrats – some 40,000 votes, when they were all counted.  We owned the popular vote, right from the moment that the polls closed.  We’d end up with three percentage points more than the Dippers, in fact.

But we were still losing.

There was noise behind us: Christy Clark, Mark Marissen and some of their campaign team were swinging down the Hotel Vancouver stairs, cheering.  Christy had won a seat in the Legislature, and would soon become a star.  In a time, she’d become Premier, too.

But not tonight.  Tonight, the BC NDP – much like Donald Trump would do, two decades later – won with less votes.  Way less votes.  Just as the 2016 Electoral College had perverted the clear will of the American people, a bizarre BC electoral system had denied victory to the clear winner of the 1996 race.

And now, 21 years later, BC returns to the polls tomorrow.  And the race is just as tight as it was in 1996.

Clark, having been BC Liberal leader since 2011, is well-known quantity.  She is upbeat, she is unflappable, and she is one of the best political performers I’ve ever seen.  But in B.C., those who won’t vote for her – well, they were never going to vote for her.  The fact that she has overseen the strongest economy in Canada – the fact that she has the lowest unemployment rate in the country – is irrelevant to her hardcore opposition.  They dislike her.

The embodiment of their dislike is their (latest) champion, BC NDP leader John Horgan.  Horgan is a big, burly kind of guy – the kind of guy who shoots his mouth off at family gatherings, offering strong opinions when none is wanted.  He’s kind of like the uncle who won’t ever shut up.

Evidence of this came early in the campaign. At very the first leaders’ debate, Horgan – after talking over Clark repeatedly, like boorish, over-refreshed uncles do – Horgan leered at the Premier and actually said this: “I’ll watch you for a while. I know you like that.”

That creepy, condescending remark was a Kim Campbell Week One Level was a disaster. Horgan — sounding rather like Groper-in-Chief Donald Trump — would continue to hear about that one for many days.  The next morning, the National Post put his words in a headline on their front page.

“That regrettable moment in the B.C. leaders debate,” noted the Post, unamused.  Horgan was “angry,” lacked “respect,” and had the debate’s most “regrettable” moment, the newspaper reported.

It was also true.

The entire campaign kind of was like that.  Christy was upbeat and unflappable all over the hustings.  Horgan was a boor, and had more policy positions than the Kama Sutra.  And the BC Green Party’s leader, Andrew Weaver, generally impressed soft-NDP voters with his demeanor and his candour.

If the BC NDP loses – as some now predict they might, despite having been ahead by double-digits just a few weeks ago – it will be partly because Weaver’s Greens stole away voters who were unimpressed by the BC NDP leader’s total inability to control his temper, and himself.

Personally, as you may have gleaned, I very much want my BC Liberal friends to win.  They’ve run the better campaign.  Sure, they are a coalition party, made up of Liberals and Conservatives and former Socreds.  Sure, they’ve been in power for a long time – since 2001, when Gord Campbell reduced the NDP to just two seats.  Sure, Clark never seems to stop smiling – that has to be irritating to pious and preachy Dippers who want to discredit her.

But trust me on this: the BC NDP are the most venal, most corrupt political party I have ever come across – and that’s saying something.

In ’96, the Glen Clark-led New Democrats were the sleaziest, dirtiest, rotten-est opponents imaginable.  They’d threaten young Liberals with violence at our events.  They’d send in big union guys to dissemble our events minutes before announcements, citing non-existent bylaws.  They’d drop leaflets containing dirty, grimy attacks on our people.  I asked campaign boss Greg Lyle about the hate.  Said he: “These are the best jobs they’ve ever had.  They will say and do anything to keep them.”

As a few of us predicted to the media on election night 1996, the Clark NDP would reveal itself to be the most dishonest provincial government in modern Canadian history, too.  They stole from charities (Google “Bingogate”). They were linked to bribes (Google “Hydro-gate”).  And, of course, there was the deck that killed off an NDP Premier (Google “Glen Clark,” “deck” and “act of folly”).  The BC NDP treated the provincial treasury like it was their personal piggybank.  Their name was synonymous with scandal.

Can the BC NDP win tomorrow night?  Sure they can.  It’s a tight race.  The media has been gunning for Christy Clark.  Some British Columbians have forgotten – inexplicably, incredibly – that they live in the province that most other Canadians want to live in.

But – as they peer up at those big TV screens at the BC Liberal 2017 election night party – here’s hoping there isn’t a repeat of 1996.

You know: win more votes, but still lose.

 

 

 

 

 

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#Right #here #folks.

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Pretty much. An actor is playing Trump, but Trump will never be a real president, so it all evens out.

who is she 👏🏿 pic.twitter.com/amElWRGFdp

— najahta (@najahtaa) May 7, 2017

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But if the ballot question is economy/jobs – and it usually is – then Christy Clark’s BC Liberals will win.  Take a look at this info-heavy Ipsos chart:

She is also ahead if the dominate issue(s) is/are taxes, government spending, transportation, pipelines, or natural resources.

If, however, the ballot question is health, housing, education and social issues generally, John “I’ll watch you for a while” Horgan will do better.

I think my BC Liberal friends will still win.  One big poll today agrees.

What say you, B.C. folks? What’s the dominant issue out there in God’s country?

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The relationship is direct, and undeniable.  Look at this fascinating graphic from the New York Times’ extensive coverage (and their cool interactive map here).

If you came from an area of high unemployment, you voted for the racist, anti-Semitic National Front.  There was a direct correlation.

Similar analyses were done with Brexit and Trump.  Check out this Brexit map via Oxford University, showing the desire to “leave” the E.U. was strongest in rural areas with low population density:

Finally, here is a fascinating and portentous early, early graphic showing the demographic that Trump always owned – the ones who feel they didn’t have anyone to speak for them (and about whom I wrote yesterday, in respect of France).  These are the “voiceless” people, and they are found disproportionately among Le Pen, Trump and Brexit supporters:

“People like me don’t have any say.”

Remember Trump’s inauguration speech, the one George W. Bush called “weird shit”? Trump may have sounded unhinged, but he said the words “voice,” “forgotten,” “our people,” and “American” and “America first,” many, many times. Why? He knew who his audience was, and it wasn’t the same audience as the presidents who went before him.

To note that there is an urban/rural divide – and a chasm between the employed and the unemployed, the powerful and the powerless – is to state the blindingly obvious.  It isn’t a shockingly new insight, at all.  The divide always been there.  But the divide – and the resentments they breed – has gotten worse.

And the political beneficiary has always been the Right.  The Right have always been better at trading in resentments.  They have always been better at passion instead of reason.

I wrote a book about it all, a few years back, and noted that progressives like me need to get better at the words and values stuff.  My take, which is as good a place as any to end, includes a chat with a leading American political linguist, and a discussion of…Donald Trump.

So when the billionaire birther Donald Trump was musing about seeking the Republican presidential nomination, [Geoffrey] Nunberg could only shake his head in disbelief. “It’s like the asshole of the month club,” he says of the Republicans, marvelling. “And they really are assholes. They were talking about Trump. So, when he was thinking about announcing [his candidacy], he went right to the top of the Republican polls.”

“[Trump and] the Right are better at values,” says Nunberg, who is taking a break from writing his next book at his San Francisco home to talk with me. “The Right has a natural advantage in the modern context, because a lot of the issues they are promoting are emotional issues – cultural prejudices that are easier to work with, linguistically, than some of the issues that Canadian Liberals and American Democrats are concerned with.”

Words and values: I’ve been saying the same thing for years. Want to beat the likes of Trump?

Reach out to the isolated, jobless and voiceless ones.  They don’t have to always agree with you.  They just need to hear from you.

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Vive la France!

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The answer was right there in front of me, ironically enough. Brilliant.

A vote for the National Front was of course a vote tinged with racism and homophobia. My father looked forward to the time when we would “throw out the Arabs and the Jews.” He liked to say that gay people deserved the death penalty — looking sternly at me, who already in primary school was attracted to other boys on the playground.

And yet what those elections really meant for my father was a chance to fight his sense of invisibility. My father understood, long before I did, that in the minds of the bourgeoisie — people like the publisher who would turn down my book a few years later — our existence didn’t count and wasn’t real.

…the National Front railed against poor working conditions and unemployment, laying all the blame on immigration or the European Union. In the absence of any attempt by the left to discuss his suffering, my father latched on to the false explanations offered by the far right. Unlike the ruling class, he didn’t have the privilege of voting for a political program. Voting, for him, was a desperate attempt to exist in the eyes of others.

“A desperate attempt to exist in the eyes of others.” 

Want to preserve democracy, and civil society? Don’t just follow people who think like you on social media. Don’t regard disagreement as treason. And don’t ever think there are more votes on Wall/Bay Street than Main Street. 

There aren’t. There’ll never be. 

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…and, their “Washington correspondent” is involved in illegal hacking. See the full Times story, here.

The Rebel’s support for white supremacy and the Holocaust-denying National Front should surprise no one who has been paying attention lately – as seen here. Given what I used to believe about their founder, that surprises and disappoints me. But it’s real. 

So The Rebel has fully embraced the dark side. That matters, and that will have real consequences for all of them. 

But it also matters in this way: The Rebel initially promoted itself as a legitimate news organization. Many of us therefore (reluctantly) came to their defence when they were denied press credentials at the Alberta Legislature by the Notley government. 

Well, the Notley government was right – The Rebel is no news organization. It is a far-Right propaganda vehicle that trades in illegally-obtained material. 

It should be accredited as a news organization nowhere in Canada. 

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@jjhorgan's #BCNDP's aligned with @realDonaldTrump on trade. @christyclarkbc wants to hammer Trump over softwood. That's the #bcpoli ballot.

— Warren Kinsella (@kinsellawarren) May 6, 2017

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