Perceptions by Gerry Warner

God bless Christy Clark!  She has shown in the end it’s the people that count. Not the media. Not the pundits. And, most of all, not the polls!  Nor, the pollsters, who in recent years, have tried to take elections away from the people eroding our democracy.

Why has voter turnout been so low in recent years? Duh! The polls tell us in advance who’s going to win so why bother to vote? No doubt there are other factors contributing to low voter turnout, but there’s no doubt in my mind that the supposedly scientific and infallible polls are a major factor in the current malaise of voter apathy. But thanks to the spectacular failure of the pollsters in the recent Alberta election and now B.C., polling organizations have been revealed as effective in forecasting elections as tarot cards predicting the future or the daily horoscope.

Once the writ is dropped, polling should be banned. Other jurisdictions have done so and B.C. should do the same.

Now to the election itself and where do I begin? Just for the record, my prediction of a minority NDP victory was wrong too, but I did predict Christy losing her seat which leaves me batting .500, a pretty good average in baseball. Trouble is politics isn’t baseball and nor is it what the NDP fancies it to be as was so horribly evident election night.

Let’s be honest here. The NDP ran a painfully sincere but strategically disastrous campaign based on totally flawed assumptions about politics in general and B.C. politics in particular. Let’s begin at the beginning. Personalities win elections; not policies. Put perky Christy Clark on a stage next to dour Adrian Dix and who’s the audience going to vote for? Case closed. Dix verily reeked of sincerity, but unfortunately he had baggage and voters don’t forget baggage easily. About the worst baggage Clark had to deal with was a bad hair day. Poor Adrian.

The NDP ran an honest campaign, which of course, was mistake number two. Clark on the other hand ran a focused, simple, fact-free campaign that pierced the heart of the NDP campaign like an arrow. And even though her government had brought in several deficit budgets prior to the election and claimed a balanced budget next year on the basis of grossly inflated revenue projections and billion dollar LNG plants that have yet to be built, she managed to once again brand the NDP as financial spendthrifts who couldn’t manage a lemonade stand.

That was pretty rich coming from a government that spent billions on implementing, then shelving the HST and lying about it too. Yet the NDP all but ignored the HST breach of faith during the election. Talk about a strategic blunder!

And Clark also stole one of the best pages out of the Bill Clinton campaign book – “it’s the economy stupid.”  The NDP talked about health care and education cuts until they were blue in the face but Clark’s facile response that a yet to materialize LNG boom would lead B.C. into a promised land free from health and education woes sounded so much more appealing. Clark sold hope; Dix reality. People prefer hope even if it’s based on flimflam.

Then there was the pipelines issue. Clark wisely stuck to her stand that she would allow the Enbridge and Kinder Morgan lines if the companies met her conditions all the while knowing, of course, that her LNG dream wouldn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell if those lines weren’t built. But Dix, seeing a surge of Green support on Vancouver Island, panicked and came out against the Kinder Morgan line on Earth Day when he simply should have kept his mouth shut and waited for the review board’s decision on the line. Clark, of course, accused him of flip-flopping. An attack ad came out showing Dix as a weather vane blowing in the wind and the Greens didn’t break ranks on The Island. It was a disaster.

Things only got worse for the NDP despite their attempts to run a clean campaign based on facts and policies, but poorly enunciated with a vague slogan of “change for the better,” which sounded like a tired cliché from a party that wasn’t really sure of where it was going. Clark, meanwhile, told people the province would be “debt free” in 15 years, an unlikely prospect considering the sketchiness of her LNG dream, but people prefer dreams to facts and so the election was won.

But given that Clark had to fight many naysayers in her own party to win the election, I’d never count her out. If she could take a totally discredited and demoralized party bequeathed to her by Gordon Campbell and turn it into a winning machine, she may be able to do the same thing for the province.

– Gerry Warner is a retired journalist and Cranbrook City Councillor. His opinions are his own.

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