A few election night notes from Vancouver Island:
• Greens were furious with the nasty things New Democrats were saying about them in the waning days of the campaign. Think that will affect their willingness to work with the NDP in a minority government?
• The most-anticipated sequel since Godfather II turned out to be more like Jaws III — and no one is happier than Green Leader Andrew Weaver.
Even though the same three candidates were running in Saanich North and the Islands, there was no repeat of the neck-and-neck-and-neck race of 2013, when the NDP, Liberals and Greens were separated by fewer than 400 votes.
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Liberal candidate Stephen Roberts landed in a political cowpie when it emerged he had applied to build a swimming pool atop a Salt Spring archeological site near a burial ground (dude, never mind the election, didn’t you watch Poltergeist?) though it’s impossible to say if that had any real effect. The NDP’s Gary Holman might have had the advantage of being the incumbent, but it always felt as though the Greens’ Adam Olsen had the higher profile.
Olsen’s relatively easy victory was good news for Weaver, who had said he would step down after the next term if he remained the only Green in the legislature. Sonia Furstenau’s win in the Cowichan Valley was icing on the cake.
The Greens needed to keep advancing to survive. Their federal counterparts have stalled: After electing Elizabeth May as their first MP in 2011, they failed to do any better in 2015. In fact, their share of the popular vote fell to 3.5 per cent. May’s own profile has diminished now that the Stephen Harper dragon has been slain.
Weaver didn’t want to follow that pattern. As it turns out, the Greens appeared to double their popular vote from the eight per cent they got in 2013.
• The height of irony, and the NDP’s worst nightmare, would have been a Liberal win in Cowichan courtesy of the vote-splitting Greens. Anger over the Liberal government’s approval of a contaminated-soil site at Shawnigan Lake drove the rise of the Greens in a riding that has long been a New Democrat stronghold. The Green candidate was Sonia Furstenau, one of the leaders of the fight against the soil dump.
New Democrats were terrified that the anti-Liberal backlash would backfire, the Greens siphoning away just enough votes to deliver the traditionally safe NDP seat to the Liberals.
As it turns out, they needed to be worried about the Greens more than the Liberals. They also needed to be worried about one of their own: riding association president Ian Morrison, ticked off because the party’s gender-equity policy precluded him from seeking the NDP nomination, quit and ran as an independent.
When Furstenau outpolled the NDP’s Lori Iannidinardo on Tuesday, the New Democrats were looking longingly at the two to three per cent of the vote going Morrison’s way. They had reason to fear vote-splitting — just from an unexpected source. Even if Morrison’s votes weren’t enough to overcome the gap, you wonder how much the NDP’s internal warfare turned off voters altogether.
• Keep an eye on Mitzi Dean, the New Democrat who held on to the Esquimalt-Metchosin seat being vacated by Maureen Karagianis.
Well-liked and highly respected as executive director of the Pacific Centre Family Services Association, Dean is passionate about social issues but has no elected political experience. She came to the Island a dozen years ago from her native England (she is one of only two people in the West Shore who can use the word “whilst” without it sounding like an affectation) where she worked for the country’s largest child-protection charity.
• After then-NDP leader Adrian Dix stepped down following the 2013 election, John Horgan declined to run for the job, arguing that it was time for a new generation of New Democrats to take the helm. So he stepped aside and waited for someone younger to step up.
And waited. And waited.
When no one did so, Horgan filled the gap, assuming the leadership three years ago this week.
He’ll be 58 this summer. Had the NDP taken a hiding Tuesday, would he have stayed on?
• Yes, as a matter of fact, the media are biased against your party. We also get together with Gary Bettman on Thursday nights to conspire against your hockey team.
