Frankly Speaking

Garry Begg of the NDP is now ahead by 27 votes in Surrey-Guildford. A judicial recount will take place next week. If  that result holds, the NDP will have a majority government by the slimmest of margins. Surrey voters played a pivotal role in the Oct. 19 provincial election, as foreshadowed by the frequent visits of NDP leader David Eby and Conservative leader John Rustad to Surrey during the campaign.  The drama continued for another 10 days until Monday, Oct. 28, when final results were announced after recounts and counting of absentee ballots. In one Surrey seat, Surrey-Guildford, winning candidate Garry Begg of the NDP has a 27-vote margin of victory over Conservative Honveer Singh Randhawa. A judicial recount will take place next week to make the final determination. One is also scheduled to take place in Kelowna Centre, where Conservative Kristina Loewen is 38 votes ahead of Loyal Wooldridge of the NDP. For now, the NDP have the slimmest of majorities in the B.C. Legisl...

“I don’t know what government we got. I don’t know what government we did not get. I don’t know what government we are going to get.” - Barry Mather, Vancouver Sun , June 13, 1952 The comments from Sun columnist Mather (later an NDP MP for New Westminster, and later Surrey) reflect exactly what happened on Saturday, Oct. 19. B.C. residents cast over two million votes in the election, but 12 races where the margin of victory is less than 500 votes mean that no one knows who will win. On election day, the governing NDP led or won 46 seats, the Conservatives led or won 45, and the Green Party had elected two. Mather was writing about the pivotal election of 1952, when the coalition government that had ruled B.C. for 11 years broke apart. The Liberals and Conservatives each went their own way, and Social Credit under W.A.C. Bennett won 19 seats in a minority government, which featured the transferable ballot. The party had never elected an MLA prior to that election. Bennett went ...

News today that Black Press has voluntarily entered creditor protection and could be sold to a three-way partnership is the latest in a long string of bad news stories for community newspapers. David Black, longtime owner and founder of Black Press, is out of the newspaper business after more than 50 years. It has been a sad day for me. I have spent the past 46 years involved with the community press, mostly as a reporter and editor. I was a Black Press editor for 16 years with The Langley Times, retiring from full-time work in 2015. I am particularly saddened when I think of the many great people I worked with at various newspapers, most of them now owned by Black Press. Some still work there, some have retired, some have left this world behind. Community newspapers have been struggling to find an arrangement that works for them, as businesses, and for their readers, for the better part of 20 years. This became a particular challenge when smart phones, notably the iPhone, made their a...