According to ThreeHundredEight.com, a website that tracks political polls, the B.C. Liberals have jumped into a small lead in the run-up to next year’s provincial election. Specifically, the Liberals are at 39.4 per cent, the NDP 37.3, the Greens 11.3 and the Conservatives 10.7.
While these results are within the margin of error for the two top parties, and also the bottom two (surprisingly), they confirm a trend. After winning the 2013 election, the Liberals surrendered their polling lead within a year, and remained behind until last November.
That appears to have been a turning point. Since then, the gap has been reversed, with Premier Christy Clark and her party now slightly in front.
The regional poll breakouts spell additional trouble for the NDP. While the party is solidly ahead on Vancouver Island, it trails by a small margin in vote-rich Metro Vancouver, and by miles in the Interior.
This is basically a rerun of the last election, when the NDP almost ran the table in Greater Victoria, won the Island, and held its own in downtown Vancouver.
But the Liberals took the rest of the Lower Mainland, the Fraser Valley and almost the entire Interior. Mathematically, that is an unbeatable coalition.
If the NDP can’t extend its support to suburban and rural families, it loses. But how do you do that?
We already know the Liberal platform: A balanced budget and jobs, jobs, jobs. Clark is a formidable campaigner.
But what is the NDP platform, and what of its leader, John Horgan? I have to confess a bias here. I like John; he’s a genuinely charming and talented guy — indeed, he would make a far stronger prime minister than the current occupant of that post.
If the party bigwigs cut him loose and let him run his own show, he could match Clark on the hustings. But will they?
The Romans had a nasty form of capital punishment. They’d tie you in a sack with a collection of rabid critters and throw you in the Tiber River. That’s pretty much how the NDP treat their leader.
What of the platform? You can see it coming: A frontal assault on dams, tankers, pipelines, mines and the forest industry (a.k.a. the economy), paid for by higher taxes on the rich.
For the sake of variety, may I suggest a different approach? Train an additional 100 GPs each year for five years. Cost to government, $50 million a year, give or take. And spend $100 million to purchase 10,000 extra surgeries a year (we have the worst wait times in Canada for hip and knee procedures).
Hire enough child-care workers to get staffing ratios in line with best practice. Say $30 million to recruit 300 workers.
Build 3,250 low-income housing units (that being roughly the number of homeless people in B.C.). Cost to the province, $225 million (assuming a 50/50 share with municipalities).
Move the Ministry of Forests to Port Alberni, Aboriginal Relations to Campbell River, and Energy and Mines to Prince George (lots of cheap accommodation, plus a boost to the struggling up-island/B.C. Interior economies). Cost: Maybe $25 million in travel costs and associated upheavals, though we do have such things as video-conferences.
This feels like a progressive platform that even the party’s activist wing, if discouraged from pursuing its more carnivorous instincts, could get behind.
The $430-million price tag is absolutely a ball-park figure. But double the cost if you like. We can still afford it.
Here is the crunch. The NDP platform in 2013 was a mirror image of the 2009 version, before that the 2005 version, and before that, 2001.
If the party can’t offer some new ideas, it loses again.
