01) LIBERALS WIN B.C. ELECTION
PV Vancouver Bureau
In an election night stunner, the BC Liberals overcame a big NDP lead in the polls to win a fourth straight majority on May 14th. A vicious anti‑NDP attack ad campaign and the enthusiastic support of the corporate media helped Premier Christy Clark win 50 seats out of 85 in the provincial legislature.
The Liberal share of the popular vote dropped slightly, from 45% in 2009 to 44% in this campaign, and the Premier was defeated in her own Vancouver‑Point Grey riding. But the expected split in the right‑wing vote did not materialize, since the BC Conservatives under John Cummins fell flat with less than five percent. That reflected a calculated move by decisive sections of big capital to unite behind Clark, who was not their favoured choice to lead the Liberals.
Despite support from younger and low‑ to medium‑income voters, the NDP lost three percent of its 2009 vote share, falling to 39.5% overall. NDP leader Adrian Dix will lead a caucus of 33 MLAs back to Victoria, winning most seats on Vancouver Island and along the north coast. But his party is hotly debating how an apparent 15 to 20 percent lead in the opinion polls evaporated during a one-month campaign, costing them crucial seats in Vancouver and especially neighbouring suburbs. The drop in voter turnout to below 50% could mean that some NDP supporters did not cast a ballot, either because they wrongly assumed the party was cruising to victory, or because the Liberals' negative campaign had some impact.
The NDP relied heavily on support from trade unions, which have bitterly resisted the Liberals' anti‑working class policies since former premier Gordon Campbell took office in 2001. The labour movement had hoped that a new Dix government would put an end to contracting out and pay freezes for public sector employees, and ease the rules for organizing the unorganized.
But the NDP held back from substantial promises to improve the lives of working people and the poor. Dix pledged to reverse a small part of Campbell's enormous tax breaks for the corporate sector and upper‑income brackets ‑ but so did Christy Clark, to distance herself from Campbell's legacy. Dix had planned to use some of these revenues for specific "practical changes", including support for badly‑underfunded public schools and post‑secondary education.
On the other hand, the NDP's promise to raise starvation‑level social assistance rates by a miserly $20 a month ‑ and only after two years ‑ was seen by many poor people and anti‑poverty advocates as a slap in the face. The NDP also failed to present any serious plan to build more low‑income housing, missing an opportunity to win support on a crucial issue.
For progressives, the $20 social assistance promise summed up Dix's slogan of "change for the better, one practical step at a time." As a result, there was little real enthusiasm about prospects for the poor and jobless under the NDP.
The Green Party, which elected its first federal MP two years ago in British Columbia, finally made a provincial breakthrough, electing Andrew Weaver in the Victoria riding of Oak Bay‑Gordon Head. Led by Jane Sterk, the Greens won over 15% in several ridings, ending up with eight percent of the province‑wide vote, slightly lower than in 2005 or 2009.
The Greens tried to capitalize on public resentment against the drive by energy transnationals to use B.C. as a corridor for major exports of diluted bitumen from the Alberta tar sands. A solid majority of British Columbians oppose Enbridge's plans to build a new tar sands pipeline, and Kinder Morgan's application to twin its aging pipeline to a refinery in Burnaby. Both projects would mean massive increases in tanker traffic along the coast, with the strong likelihood of an eventual oil spill disaster.
As the campaign began, Dix strengthened his party's stand against the projects, sparking accusations of a "flip‑flop" from the Liberals. The Greens argued, with some justification, that they had a more comprehensive environmental platform. Both major parties, the Greens pointed out, support the rapid growth of the province's liquid natural gas industry, which means a big overall increase in British Columbia's greenhouse gas emissions.
But Dix's strategic decision seemed to pay off when major environmental groups endorsed the NDP late in the campaign, aiming to block the corporate‑friendly Liberals. Yet the NDP actually lost votes over its 2009 results.
The corporate media twisted the facts to portray the Liberals as "job creators," and Christy Clark was repeatedly shown on TV wearing a hard hat at job sites across the province. The media also demonized the NDP as "tax and spend socialists", despite the party's refusal to challenge big business while in office during the 1990s.
As the Communist Party of BC's four candidates pointed out, electing the NDP would not have solved the capitalist economic crisis hammering working people across the province. The NDP's recent record here and in other provinces (as in other capitalist countries) shows that social democratic governments tend to wilt under pressure from big capital, sugar‑coating neoliberal policies with the occasional sprinkling of progressive content.
Speaking to People's Voice on election night, CPBC candidate Peter Marcus (Vancouver‑Mount Pleasant), said "The Liberal victory is a setback for working people who wanted a new government in Victoria. Unfortunately, Adrian Dix's NDP failed to campaign for real change. The labour movement and its allies haven't fought for twelve years against the Liberals only to watch things stay much the same. But the NDP did little to win working people's confidence, by dismissing serious action on poverty reduction, social housing, labour legislation, a higher minimum wage, and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions."
Look for more analysis of the British Columbia election in our next issue.
(The above article is from the May 16-31, 2013, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)