Last weekend’s byelection results were, in one sense, no surprise but, in another respect, a bad omen.
In Langford-Juan de Fuca, the NDP candidate won easily. Ravi Parmar defeated his nearest competitor, Mike Harris of the Conservative Party, by 53 per cent to 20.
In Vancouver-Mount Pleasant, Joan Phillip, the NDP candidate, crushed the runner-up, Jackie Lee of BC United, 68 per cent to 14.
It was always a near certainty that the NDP would come out ahead in both seats. Langford-Juan de Fuca had been former premier John Horgan’s riding, while Vancouver-Mount Pleasant is one of the NDP’s safest seats.
What happened to the BC United candidates is another story.
In the Langford riding, the party’s standard bearer, Elena Lawson, ran a dismal fourth. The party had just nine per cent of the vote, down from 16 in the last election, well behind the Greens and far behind the Conservatives.
That’s a striking, and ominous, result.
The Conservative candidate won 20 per cent of the vote, an unheard-of tally for a normally marginal party. In the 2020 general election, the Conservatives took just two per cent of the provincial vote.
BC United did slightly better in the Vancouver riding, coming second with 14 per cent. But even there, they only just edged the Greens by three points, no great accomplishment for a party that hopes to be in government.
The message seems clear. The decision to rechristen the Liberal party as BC United was a colossal error.
Perhaps this sounds like hindsight. And yes, we have only two byelections to go on.
But when right-leaning voters in Langford abandoned the Liberals in droves, as they clearly did, the verdict is in.
“BC United” was never a name to grab voter attention. A better choice might have been “The B.C. Party.”
Even then, the decision to rename the party was always hard to understand. Apparently, the new leader, Kevin Falcon, thought the term “Liberal” suggested too left-leaning a pose.
With the NDP far ahead in the polls provincewide, how wise was this?
Or perhaps he felt the need to distance himself from the federal Liberals. Yet that was never a problem for Gordon Campbell or Christy Clark.
Far more than a name change, the challenge facing Falcon is to clarify where his party stands on such vexed issues as climate change and health-care reform. Instead, he wasted the better part of his first year in office substituting a lacklustre name for one that had decades of voter recognition behind it.
Of course he’s not the first to make this mistake. On a non-serious note, some other notable naming ventures of dubious forethought come to mind, including “Passmore Gas and Propane,” “Amigone Funeral Home,” “STD Contractors,” “Curl Up and Dye Hair Salon,” “Little Hope Cemetery,” and not to be outdone, “Stubbs Prosthetics & Orthotics.”
Not surprisingly, most of these endeavours failed.
Getting back to the point, Premier David Eby is making a name for himself by forceful decision-making.
His choices are sometimes controversial. He’s interested in government primarily as a mechanism for change, and weighs its performance on that basis.
If he continues at his present pace, there’s a real danger of voter exhaustion.
But first, Falcon and his party have to right their ship. They have to present serious and thoughtful alternatives to an NDP government still coasting on Horgan’s popularity.
And they have to do so without alienating their small-c conservative base, as the results in Langford-Juan de Fuca show.
It’s sometimes said that opposition parties don’t win elections, governing parties lose them.
Falcon would be ill-advised to count on that next time around.
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