Vancouver Islanders can be proud that their historic resistance to B.C. Liberal overtures has prompted the frustrated party to create a custom-made vision just for them.
We’re special now. Like Quebec.
The great thing about having a region-specific platform in a provincial election is that it allows a party to focus on all manner of issues that people immediately recognize. Everyone on Vancouver Island can glance at the Liberals’ first Island platform and see things that are immediately relevant to them.
The downside is that focusing promises on one region involves using tax money from everywhere else to pay for them. Those ferry-fare breaks and that teaser about Victoria bidding for the 2022 Commonwealth Games involve a certain amount of subsidies from taxpayers in the rest of B.C.
Plus, depending on how successful this effort is, other regions will be clamouring for their own tailored platforms. If the Liberals develop the concept to its fullest extent, there will eventually be a half-dozen or more platforms, and a lot of headaches trying to keep them all balanced and co-ordinated.
But the inaugural effort has just one focus. It’s a concentrated undertaking to loosen the NDP’s stranglehold on the 14-seat bloc that makes up the Island.
It’s not so much resistance to the Liberals as it is an ingrained preference for the NDP. The high-water mark for the Liberals was in 2001, when they swept all the Island seats. That was a hundred-year event that was part of a provincial phenomenon rooted in widespread disappointment/disgust with the Glen Clark NDP government. There was nothing unique to the Island about it.
The NDP grabbed nine Island seats back in the next election in 2005, and added one more in 2009, while the Liberals managed to hang onto four. Last time around, in 2013, the Liberals managed just two seats. Party officials took it as an affront. Both Island Liberals were installed in cabinet posts (one later stepped aside for family reasons) in an effort to build on what little strength they had left. They’ve recruited a strong field of candidates for the May 9 vote. But it’s still going to be a struggle.
Issues and voting patterns change over time, but Island history seems to play a continuing role in election results. The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, a precursor to the NDP, played an important role in the early days. The logging, milling and mining history of the Island nurtured the growth of industrial unions, which in turn helped grow the NDP.
Also, the capital city’s political history included a strong NDP tradition, holding seats through thick and thin. Working from those bases, the NDP generally goes into elections on the Island a lot more confident of victory than the Liberals, although lately they keep a wary eye on the Greens.
Liberals acknowledge that history, even as they try to write a new chapter.
“For too long, the B.C. NDP have represented the majority of ridings on Vancouver Island,” Premier Christy Clark wrote in the introduction to the platform. “They haven’t brought any fresh ideas to the table. And neither the B.C. NDP nor the B.C. Greens have a plan to grow the economy. We can’t afford political parties that don’t have economic plans at a time when jobs are at risk from a rising tide of global protectionism — especially in the United States.”
That risk isn’t readily apparent in Victoria. It has the lowest unemployment rate in Canada at the moment, 3.8 per cent, the lowest in nine years.
But the platform warns the Island is “surrounded by risk.” Rising protectionism in the U.S. Fragile economies in Canada and around the world. It urges readers to follow the plan and keep Vancouver Island working. The NDP’s B.C.-wide platform comes Thursday, and Greens will be doling out ideas throughout.
Just So You Know: One promise in the platform, a review of the capital’s governance, is a guaranteed sore spot. It was promised in 2014 as well, then got lost in a cabinet shuffle.
It was either abandoned, or some version of it was finished and kept under lock and key, because it’s such a headache.
