05.07.2019 12:37 PM

Five points about Nanaimo-Ladysmith, which, inter Alia, is a cool riding name

1. The Justin Trudeau Party – which isn’t the Liberal Party – came fourth. Fourth. Trudeau is in big trouble.

2. This isn’t an aberration. The Green Party has been on an upward trend for months – and not just in B.C., either. Ask the good people of Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, Ontario, etc.

3. The Greens won because Trudeau has pissed off progressives – on failed promises of electoral reform, on failed promises of indigenous reconciliation, on false promises about ethical government, on false claims to be feminist.

4. The Greens also won because they, not the NDP, have become the new true progressive banner-carriers. Nanaimo-Ladysmith used to be a New Democrat stronghold. On Monday night, the NDP came third, after the Tories.

5. There is an anti-incumbent zeitgeist in Western democracy, now, and the Liberals, Conservatives and New Democrats are all seen as incumbents. The Greens aren’t. More change is coming, methinks.



3 Comments

  1. Gord says:

    I think this is a much worse result for the NDP than for the Justin Party. It was theirs to lose, and they did.

    I suspect at least a couple other NDP seats on southern Vancouver Island are in play for the Greens – Cowichan-Malahat-Langford (which overlaps with the provincial Cowichan Valley constituency held by the Greens) and Victoria (there is no incumbent, it includes Andrew Weaver’s provincial seat, and the Greens came close in the 2012 by-election and in 2015).

  2. Nick M. says:

    If the NDP won, it would’ve been heralded as a miracle and a comeback for the party federally.

    Right now it feels like 1993 all over again for the NDP, and last night was more evidence of that.

    So the narrative that this Riding is the NDPs to lose is a bit far fetched.

  3. The Doctor says:

    A related factor is that J. Singh has so far gone over like a lead balloon.

    The other thing I notice is that the Greens are truly a classic protest party these days. I find if you ask a lot of people who have voted Green about the Green Party’s actual policy platform, I get a blank stare and silence.

    Also kind of funny that this is almost exactly where another protest party — the Reform Party — stood in Parliament at the dawn of the 1990s, i.e., with a couple of MPs. And especially in BC, the (considerable number of) people who voted Reform in the 1993 federal election were an ideologically odd assortment of disaffected Conservatives and Dippers. You’ll recall that the early 1990s were very unkind to the federal NDP.

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