My friend Greg Lyle knows BC

— 05.05.2017 05:28 PM

…and he knows BC elections, too. Here, his latest survey(s):


Can the BC NDP – who once had a double-digit lead – still win? Yes, says Greg:

However, an NDP victory is still possible: 40% of the electorate say they want to hear more before making up their minds. This is almost exactly the same number we saw at this point in the 2012 Alberta election, before a surprise PC upset at the very end of the campaign.

But can Comeback Clark take this one again? Still hard to say. 

But I agree with the Globe: the BC Liberals deserve to.


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Government, lobbyists and the media

— 05.05.2017 08:00 AM

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From CP via CTV:

“I am very happy to see members of the press this evening,” Trudeau said early in his remarks, which drew subdued applause from the roughly 300-person crowd.

“We are very happy to see (journalists) among us and thank you very much for being here,” he said, looking at reporters and raising his hands to give a conspicuous, single clap.

The new system involves holding fundraisers featuring Trudeau or ministers only in public places, announcing them in advance, allowing the media to attend and disclosing the guest list within the following 45 days…

Liberal party spokesman Braeden Caley said there was “a pause” on national fundraising events throughout the first quarter while the new standards for open and transparent fundraising events were being prepared.

Some Liberals are pointing to that as one reason for lacklustre fundraising figures in the first three months of this year, when the Conservatives raised nearly twice as much money from a larger pool of contributors, even though they are in the midst of a leadership race that ought to be siphoning would-be donations to the party.

I must say that I found the single-clap thing – and drawing the media’s presence to everyone’s attention – to be a bit Trump/Harper-esque. It was unnecessary.  The media are doing their job, and their presence is a good thing.

Brendan Caley’s remarks also help to explain the fundraising gap I wrote about a couple days ago.  (The same thing has happened in Ontario: the governing Liberals hit “pause” on fundraising, to respect the new rules, while the two opposition parties did not.)

As I’ve written many times before: until the media give political parties free ad space – and until the taxpayer is willing to pay for everything that parties need to do during election campaigns – fundraising is obviously required.

The new rules ensure that it is all done out in the open, and without the possibility of undue influence.  That’s good, and deserving of more than a single hand-clap.

 

 


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Dear Kev

— 05.04.2017 09:53 AM

Column, now on HuffPo.  Got a lot of comments about this one.  Sample: “You’re mean, but I like it.”

Snippet:

You weren’t going to ever, ever beat Justin Trudeau. He was going to put you — a bloviating blowhard, a misanthropic misogynist, a down-market Donald — through the political Cuisinart. He was going to shred you to pieces, and make soup out of you, Sharky.

So you packed up your toothbrush, waved over your shoulder in the direction of Mad Max, and started jogging back to Gate 11.

You always planned to. You won’t be missed.


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Globe and Mail: Christy Clark was “warm,” “friendly,” “respectful,” “handled [Linda] well”

— 05.03.2017 02:31 PM

Dear Team BC NDP: a hashtag, and a lot of fake Twitter outrage, does not a winning campaign make.  Check this out – the Globe and Mail is calling you out on your (typical, usual) tendency to get outraged about every frigging thing, the absurd #IAmLinda included:

Of all the interactions ever to occur between a voter and a campaigning politician, the one last week between BC Liberal Party Leader Christy Clark and a woman in a North Vancouver market has got to be among the most anodyne.

Except, of course, that this one was caught on camera and went viral on Twitter, where it is being used against Ms. Clark.

We’re not buying it. Anyone who wants to can see the incident online and judge for themselves. But what we saw was this:

Ms. Clark is walking through the market and greeting voters. A woman introduces herself and gets a warm greeting in return, complete with a friendly handshake.

Then the woman says, “I would never vote for you because of what…” Ms. Clark cuts her off with a smile. “You don’t have to. That’s why we live in a democracy,” she says, and walks on.

And that was that. Except for the Twitter outrage, and the embarrassing #IamLinda hashtag that went with it.

The voter in question, Linda Higgins, is an innocent party in all of this. There’s no evidence she was looking to make news, or that she was an NDP plant. She deserves no condemnation.

But neither did Ms. Clark do anything wrong. In fact, in the hurly-burly of a closely fought election campaign, she handled it well. Voters love to tell politicians they are not going to vote for them; it’s a fact of life for campaigners. As long as a politician is respectful, he or she can move on without having to listen to every prepared lecture about their failings.

Voters who start a conversation with “I would never vote for you” shouldn’t be shocked when the conversation is brief. The assumption in the #IamLinda hashtag is that Linda Higgins is a victim. But of what? Of not being an exception to the facts of life?

If there is a larger sense among some B.C. voters that the Liberal Party has grown arrogant after so many years in power, that’s fair. But the fact that a garden-variety exchange between a voter and a politician has become a distracting political incident on Twitter speaks more about a social medium that feeds on easy outrage than it does about the real issues in this election.


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