New BC Liberal leader will have a big task ahead
Members of the BC Liberal party are casting their ballots
over the next few days to choose a new leader of the opposition.
That very phrase must gall many of them, after the party
enjoyed 16 straight years in power under premiers Gordon Campbell and Christy
Clark. However, that’s where they find themselves right now, and based on the
most recent public opinion poll which came out Jan. 19, they could be there
after the next election as well. The NDP were well ahead of them in that poll, 40
per cent to 31 per cent (the Green Party came in at 19 per cent) conducted by
Insights West.
The new Liberal leader will be determined by a ranked
ballot, and membership sign-ups actually will play a diminished role in the
final selection of the leader. Each of the 87 B.C. ridings gets 100 points to
distribute among leadership candidates, so it doesn’t matter if a riding
association has 10 members or 10,000. In fact, the smaller the membership
numbers are in a riding association, the more powerful each vote becomes.
Voters are ranking the six leadership candidates who stayed
in the race to the bitter end. After the first counting, if no candidate
receives 50 per cent (that outcome is highly unlikely), the one receiving the smallest
percentage of the distributed 100 points per riding will be dropped from contention.
The second choices by his or her voters will then be distributed to the other
five candidates. This will continue until one candidate has reached the 50 per
cent plus one mark. It is the exact system used in the 1952 and 1953 provincial
elections – the first of which brought the almost-unknown Social Credit Party
to power as the coalition government of 1941-52 imploded.
The BC Liberal leadership race was off the radar of most
B.C. residents until the past few weeks, when finger-pointing between various
camps started to receive more media attention. Much of this was political
posturing. Most campaigns tried hard to get second-choice commitments from
voters whom they had identified as supporting other candidates. Those will
likely be the most important votes cast by the party members. All voting will
be online, and it is unlikely that anywhere close to the reputed 60,000 members
will actually end up voting.
In such a situation, too much negativity can be a bad thing.
My best guess is that one of the three newer-generation
candidates will end up winning. These three are Dianne Watts, Todd Stone and Michael
Lee. All three campaigns have signed up a significant number of members, but most
importantly, they bring a new dimension to the race. Fresh ideas are vital for
a party which has been in power for 16 years – doing things the same old way
won’t cut it with voters.
Watts is an outsider (the only non-MLA in the race), and as
such has been occasionally ganged up on in leadership debates. Surprisingly,
she is the only woman running at a time when there have been many calls for
better representation of women in leadership roles. She was the highly-successful
mayor of Surrey for nine years, and was urged to enter the leadership race in
2011 when Gordon Campbell stepped aside. She instead stayed on as mayor until
2014, ran as a Conservative in the 2015 election in South Surrey-White Rock,
and by winning, earned a backbench opposition seat in Ottawa for almost two
years before she resigned her seat and jumped into the leadership race.
Lee is a first-term MLA, elected in Vancouver-Langara. To the
best of my knowledge, he is the first person of Chinese descent to ever seek the
leadership of a major B.C. political party. This is actually quite surprising,
given the large number of people of Chinese descent in this province and the length
of time that people with Chinese backgrounds people have lived here. The Chinese
people have been part of B.C. since the gold rush days, and while they were the
subjects of significant discrimination by both the federal and provincial
governments for generations, they have always been an integral part of the
community. The first Chinese-Canadian MP to come from B.C. (and the first MP of
Asian descent ever elected to the House of Commons), Douglas Jung, was elected
in 1957. There have been numerous mayors, MLAs and cabinet ministers (in both
Ottawa and Victoria) of Chinese origin over the years.
Lee is relatively young, has lots of political experience and
is a successful lawyer. He is said to have signed up the most new members to
the party. As noted above, that doesn’t mean much unless they are spread widely
among many ridings.
Stone was first elected in 2013 and is the only candidate
from outside the Lower Mainland. A Kamloops MLA, he served as minister of
transportation in the Christy Clark government. Given the strong support for
the BC Liberals in the B.C. Interior, he should do well in almost all of those ridings,
which gives him a bit of an advantage.
However, he is burdened by having been a member of the Clark
cabinet and playing a role in decisions such as taking money from ICBC. He also
had strained relations with many Lower Mainland mayors over transportation
priorities and tolling, and the tolling policy in particular likely was the straw
that broke the camel’s back and brought down the BC Liberals. Many ridings which
had gone their way in 2013 went to the NDP in the May election. Tolling and other
government pocket-picking measures such as MSP premiums and ever-increasing BC
Hydro and ICBC rates, along with an inability to understand how higher housing prices
were hurting a lot of Lower Mainland residents, lost them a significant number
of votes.
What needs to be remembered is that despite all that, the BC
Liberals almost won the election. Had Courtenay-Comox gone their way (they were
nine votes behind on election night), they would have had a bare majority. Had
they won even one of the seats in Surrey, Delta or Maple Ridge that they had
held, they also would have had a majority. Stone played a significant role in
helping the party lose those seats.
Perhaps even more at fault is long-time cabinet minister Mike
de Jong, the Abbotsford MLA who has been in Victoria since 1994. He was the parsimonious
finance minister whose decisions to take all that money for residents in the
form of tolls, higher user fees and rates, ended up costing the party big-time.
He, and Vancouver MLAs Andrew Wilkinson and Sam Sullivan represent the earlier
generation of BC Liberals in the leadership race, although Sullivan, a former Vancouver
mayor, has always been an unconventional politician.
De Jong and Wilkinson have a significant amount of support,
and have even urged their supporters to give their second choices to the other.
This prompted a fierce reaction from “Kootenay Bill” Bennett, a Wilkinson supporter,
who said de Jong should not get anywhere near the leader’s office. Bennett, who
did not run for re-election in 2017, blames de Jong’s budget for the party’s loss
at the polls.
Most observers feel it is likely Sullivan will get the least
amount of first-ballot support and will be the first to be dropped.
The results will come in on Saturday evening, and by later
in the evening, we will know who the next opposition leader will be. Whoever
wins, they will have a big job to do to make the BC Liberals more appealing to
voters – particularly in the Lower Mainland. This is even more needed on
Vancouver Island, where the party holds just one seat.
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