About-face on electoral reform will hurt Liberal MPs' re-election chances in Surrey and Delta
The federal Liberal government pulled the plug on electoral
reform last week – and the fallout in Surrey and Delta may not be fully noticed
until the next election in 2019.
Four of the six local MPs commented after the about-face by
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. They said the reversal was disappointing, but
not completely surprising, given the magnitude of the task and the lack of
consensus about a new system. Conservative MP Dianne Watts took the opportunity
to tease her Liberal opponents (five of the six local seats are held by
Liberals), saying “that was a promise they made to the voters that were voting
for them. Now they've broken that promise."
Surrey Centre Liberal MP Randeep Sarai said the issue of
electoral reform wasn’t a big deal in his riding. He cited affordable housing
and crime as issues that came up repeatedly during the 2015 campaign.
He is likely correct that it wasn’t top of mind for many
voters, but even if it wasn’t, there is no question that the pledge helped
several of the new crop of MPs in Surrey and Delta win their seats by such
large margins. They did so by taking a significant portion of NDP and Green
votes – and to many of those parties’ supporters, electoral reform is a big
deal.
A comparison of the 2008, 2011 and 2015 results in local
ridings shows that the Liberals surged far beyond any previous high water marks
in 2015. Much of that surge came from taking votes away from the NDP and Green
parties.
One of the best examples is in Surrey-Newton, where former MP
Sukh Dhaliwal made a stunning comeback after losing his seat in 2011. In 2008,
he won the seat by less than 2,500 votes, defeating Conservative Sandeep
Pardher. The NDP’s Teresa Townsley wasn’t too far behind.
In 2011, the race was much closer. That year, when the riding
was called Newton-North Delta and included North Delta, he came second, losing
the seat to the NDP’s Jinny Sims by just over 900 votes. He took 31.4 per cent
of the vote to Sims’ 33.4 per cent.
In 2015, Dhaliwal won with almost 56 per cent of the vote,
handily defeating Sims by more than 13,000 votes. It is obvious that most of
those votes came from NDP supporters, although Conservative voters in the 2011
election also went Liberal in large numbers.
In Delta, which had been a Reform and Conservative seat since
the 1980s, Liberal Carla Qualtrough won in 2015 with 27,355 votes, just under
50 per cent of the total. Conservative MP Kerri-Lynne Findlay lost her seat and
her vote total dropped by almost 8,000. Redistribution played a part – the
riding once again included North Delta, traditionally more NDP-leaning.
However, the NDP total in the riding actually fell by almost 3,000 votes, and
the Green vote also fell. The Liberals clearly benefited from the Trudeau
promise, and the overall Trudeau brand.
In the new Cloverdale-Langley City riding, Liberal John
Aldag won easily in an area where the Conservatives had been dominant for
decades. Aldag won 24,617 votes (45.5 per cent) while Conservative Dean
Drysdale won 18,800 votes (34.8 per cent). Aldag took votes from both NDP and
Conservative supporters. While the area has grown and seen significant demographic
changes, the NDP vote clearly dropped and the Green vote plummeted. The Trudeau
pledge did make a difference.
Ken Hardie, who won the Fleetwood-Port Kells seat easily for
the Liberals, was probably the most honest in his comments last week about the
broken promise.
"The average person could look at that and say 'Yep, we
broke our promise.' What we would say in response to that is we basically
couldn't come to a consensus and we ran out of time," he said.
Hardie likely won’t be punished as much in 2019 for the broken
promise. The Liberals did quite well in that riding in 2008, coming second when
Brenda Locke was the candidate – far better than they did in most other Surrey
and Delta ridings (other than Newton-North Delta). However, the NDP took a lot of former Liberal votes in 2011,
and it is quite possible that some of those Liberal votes will go back in the
NDP column in 2019.
Hardie won his seat with 46.9 per cent of the vote, while incumbent
Conservative MP Nina Grewal took just 29.3 per cent of the vote. Her vote total
fell by more than 9,000 votes, while NDP candidate Garry Begg had 6,000 fewer
votes than Nao Fernando got for the party in 2011.
The broken promise on electoral reform will be just one
factor in the next election – but in this area, it could be a difference-maker.
Comments
Post a Comment