Tom Fletcher grew up in the Peace River region and has covered B.C. politics and business as a journalist since 1984.
Unusual signs have been popping up around Victoria and Vancouver, the last places in B.C. where Jagmeet Singh’s NDP are said by pollsters to be likely to hold maybe three seats in Monday’s election.
“B.C. votes NDP to stop the Conservatives,” they declare, along with the official party sponsorship label. A front-page ad in Victoria’s daily newspaper localized it: “Here on the Island, we vote NDP to stop the Conservatives.”
A more honest way of expressing this plea would be: “Don’t vote Liberal just because we did for the last four years.
Since Justin Trudeau’s pandemic snap election of 2021 failed to secure a majority, Singh and the NDP have been best known for propping up the Liberals in exchange for marginal efforts toward tax-funded pharmaceutical and dental care.
Victoria MP Laurel Collins cruised to victory with 44% of the votes cast in 2021, after serving just a few months as a government union nominee for city council. Now she battles not just the Liberals, who finished second with 27% four years ago, but the surging Conservatives as well.
“We need to say no to Pierre Poilievre’s Trump-style cuts to services and higher costs for you,” Collins warns in a video ad running on Facebook. But the NDP’s two-front war also includes a radio ad for the seven ridings on Vancouver Island, warning that, “Mark Carney would cut health care and give tax breaks to billionaires.”
“Tax breaks to billionaires” has been a staple of Singh’s speeches for quite a while. Technically this is true. Carney’s Liberal platform promises a one-per-cent cut to the bottom bracket of federal taxation. This is a watered-down copy of Poilievre’s vow to cut that bracket by two and a half points. Since all taxpayers are subject to the bottom bracket, billionaires would also benefit from these tax breaks.
Provincial NDP politicians have jumped in as well. B.C. Premier David Eby has appeared at events and in videos promoting Collins and two other Greater Victoria candidates, and long-time cabinet minister Adrian Dix has endorsed incumbent Don Davies in Vancouver-Kingsway. When the NDP has to make a special effort to hold East Vancouver, you know they’re in trouble.
Outside urban areas, the NDP may have come to terms with a blue wave that mirrors the one they saw in the provincial election last fall.
In recent years, the NDP has traded industrial union support for urban identity politics. Collins exemplifies this shift, having come to politics from teaching “political sociology, social justice studies and sociology and gender” at the University of Victoria.
An early video clip of her speech to a House of Commons committee got some viral play as the election approached. In it she warns that she is “wildly emotional” about the greater threat posed by climate change to women and children. How heat waves and flash floods target victims by sex and age is not explained. When you’re a gender studies hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Further to last week’s column about the value of Gainsburger polls served up daily by media, volatility of voter intentions continues. Four days of advance voting finished Monday, with early-voter turnout up by 25% from the last election and more than seven million ballots cast.
There has been a distinct shift towards early voting since it became more available, but overall voter turnout has remained dismally low, hardly surpassing 50% some years. In the 2021 election, nearly 75% of voters aged 65-74 made the effort, but only 46% of those aged 18-24 did.
This round of advance voting is a clear signal that turnout may actually increase this time. The last time there was a sudden shift in federal voter support here on the Left Coast was in 1993, when Preston Manning’s Reform Party came from nowhere to sweep almost all of the province, including most of Metro Vancouver and Vancouver Island.
Tom Fletcher grew up in the Peace River region and has covered B.C. politics and business as a journalist since 1984.
tomfletcherbc@gmail.com X:@tomfletcherbc