Threepeat a rare triumph in B.C.

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/05/2009 (6235 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

From start to finish in the 2009 election campaign, British Columbia Liberal Leader Gordon Campbell never wavered in his definition of the ballot box question. “Ask yourself: Who is best able to lead us through troubled economic times?”

He pitched 100 variations on those words, but the message was always the same: Don’t risk a change of government in an economic downturn.

The polls, even those that put the New Democratic Party in a competitive position, suggested that voters agreed with the way the Liberals framed the campaign. The economy was top of mind and the Liberals were the best choice to manage it. Campbell himself had the edge on that score, with polls giving him as much as a three-to-one edge over NDP Leader Carole James on economy.

Nearing the end of the run, Campbell even riffed on the line from one of the more vicious attack ads — the one that portrayed him as a hopeless drunk, saying “on May 12 let’s take his keys away.” He replied: “Now is not the time to give the keys to any economy to New Democrats.”

Campbell played switcheroo on another NDP slogan, the platform call “to take back your B.C.”

“They want to take you back to the 1990s,” he said. New Democrats argued in vain that the 1990s weren’t as bad as the Liberals made out. But that in itself was a trap. Were they saying the overwhelming majority of voters got it wrong in tossing the NDP from office? Or that if they had it do all over again, they would do the same thing?

The more effective opposition slogan was the one that came to the forefront as the campaign went on: “Eight Years is Enough.” It captured the concerns of many voters, some of them Liberal supporters. The Gord-knows-best style of governing. The heavy-handed dealings with Tsawwassen residents and small business on Cambie Street. The push for run-of-river power development and public-private partnerships. But “eight is enough” was a negative message all the same.

The New Democrats clearly didn’t like Gordon Campbell. James invoked his name excessively in her speeches as if it were a curse word. She was less successful at articulating a vision of what she was for, particularly given the revolving-door themes of her campaign. When the party released its platform, the vow to get rid of the carbon tax topped the list of highlights. But the NDP downgraded the “axe the tax” drive after it provoked a backlash from some environmental leaders.

The party tried to exploit the eve-of-the-campaign discovery of a $300,000 contract between BC Rail and Liberal insider Patrick Kinsella. After Kinsella threatened legal action, that was barely mentioned.

Those and other decisions will be second-guessed in the weeks ahead, as New Democrats contemplate their third defeat in a row. Inevitable as those recriminations are, the post-mortem ought to begin with a more straightforward question: Given the paramount importance of the economic issue, would any plausible strategy have won this election for the NDP? Probably not.

For Liberals, the post-mortems will start by asking whether they did as well as they could have/should have done.

Campbell spent the last few days of the campaign calling on his supporters to do a better job of getting out the vote. “We saw in 2005 what happens when you don’t get out your vote,” he reminded them. “We know that the NDP did a better job than us.” He quantified the shortfall for reporters during a chat on the campaign bus. By his reckoning, last time out the Liberals lost a dozen seats they could have won if they’d done a better of turning out their share of the vote.

The Liberals set out to do a better job of motivating their supporters and winning those close ridings. The fiercely competitive Campbell was driving for a gain in seats that would boost his side and demoralize the Opposition. He also adopted a more confident and relaxed style for his leader’s tour of the province, in contrast to what was called “the boy in the bubble” campaign of 2005.

The approach pushed the Liberals to 49 seats, improving on the 42 they held at dissolution. A third term, rare in this province, would have been sufficient in itself to qualify as a triumph.

Vaughan Palmer is a columnist for the Vancouver Sun.

vpalmer@shawlink.ca