Great Report Mr Mackin!

Funny as hell

Some party

That is not a political party, but a collection of power-hungry individuals!
With luck they will self destruct.

Sounds like John van Dongen

Sounds like John van Dongen just jumped ship to try and stage a coup....He was only a member of the other conservative party since March...I wonder if he was put up to it by either the 'Liberals' or big business? Big business wants one centre right and maybe the Conservative/BC Reform/Social credit alliance calling themselves Liberals wanted to do another coup and unite the right like they did when they hi jacked the centrist Liberal Party under Gordon Wilson?

There is still eight months to go - that's an eternity in B.C.

In B.C. eight months before the next election is the equivalent of several political lifetimes. The pinks and the blues still have plenty of time to shred each other. This is the best game in town, beats hell out of the NHL. You can be sure no one will be locked out.

Cummins is a welfare bum.

As a Reformer he ran against MP pensions and is now collecting one. He also gets $4,000 a month from a tax payer subsidized party. If one of his supporters gives the party $100 then the rest of us have to kick in $75 to reimburse them.

Nice how this free market apostle gets 100% of his pension from taxpayers and 75% of the $4,000 a month also comes from the public purse.

He of course is going to end all those entitlements that "other" people get because it is not fair that he has to "work" for a living.

The real question is who wants a 70 year curmudgeon as Premier.

Cummins' pension

It was recently that Cummins pension is just under $100,000 per year. Did you see the Globe and Mail on Saturday? We get the Saturday edition and the picture of him was hardly complementary: ruddy-complexion and looking rather older than his 70 years.

If there is just one consistent theme

Between the BC Liberals and the BC Conservatives there is one consistent theme...

Princeton's Professor Frankfurt (emeritus) published a great book most fitting of the situation and the comments coming from Clark, van Dongen, Cummins, Bateman et al.

A review of the content of Frankfurt's book, "On Bullshit" may provide an understanding of the sad state of affairs in BC politics:

"...bullshitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true. They quietly change the rules governing their end of the conversation so that claims about truth and falsity are irrelevant...although bullshit can take many innocent forms, excessive indulgence in it can eventually undermine the practitioner's capacity to tell the truth in a way that lying does not. Liars at least acknowledge that it matters what is true. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are."

Single Member Plurality

Every riding in BC elects a single Member of the Legislative Assembly. When votes are counted within each riding, there's usually a plurality, that is, it takes the combined votes of more than one candidate to add up to 50% of the votes cast in total. If we had a run-off system, where votes are cast for a successively reduced field of candidates (who are eliminated if they fail to reach a certain threshold of support) until one of them achieves at least 50% of the votes cast, like they do in, say, France. Such a system we do not have, and so we often elect a candidate who garnered less than half the vote, SMP, or FPTP (First Past The Post), as we call it...drives pro-rep proponents crazy and losers apoplectic. But it does afford us the fascinating amusement of speculation about the "split."

The "split," of course, gives us such supposed prognostications as, "A vote for the BC Conservatives is a vote for the NDP." Or how about, "A vote for the Greens is a vote for the BC Liberals." It's sometimes difficult to know if such statements are intended to confuse (like a Frenchman would undoubtedly be) or a product of confusion.

Inasmuch as by-elections are not necessarily an accurate reflection of what might be in a general election (it could be said there was a split on the right yielding a win for the left in a pair of recent by-elections,) the statement "BC Conservatives will split the right wing vote" is almost purely speculative since it hasn't been recently tested (for at least two decades in BC.) On the other hand, the statement "Greens split the vote on the right" exists, by certain interpretations, on the record: if even half the GReen vote went NDP instead, the BC Liberals might have lost both the last two elections.
It's an interesting amusement predicated on simple rules: there's only left and right and people (who vote) are ideologically attracted to one or the other. The game gets really interesting if there is more than one party which claims the same ideological ground, as the BC Conservatives and BC Liberals do, or more than one perceived as being on the same ground, such as the GReens and the NDP often are.

The left-right dichotomy is plainly too simplistic, too much so to glean anything much from the roiling teapot of BC political parties today. It's been a very interesting, tumultuous couple-three years in good old BC: regicide by both big parties, one on the way up, the other plunging downwards, signs of life in both fringe parties, one overtly competing with one of the big parties, the other more mercurial, both potentially spoilers.

We hear the split-the-right chant the most and the loudest because it's put out by the BC Liberals, disgraced, almost certainly doomed, but with the megaphone of incumbency. Yet polling suggest the combined support of the two so-called right wing parties does not exceed that of the so-called left. No split exists so far, just dire warnings, probably born of desperation.

Keep Splitting

There is no indication the vote on the right is conserved (no pun intended), despite what BC Liberals are squawking. The combined support of both so-called right wing parties is less than that of the NDP; the supposed right wing support has plainly not been conserved, so the split doesn't exist. Yet both the turn-coats who recently left the BC Conservatives are still trying to float this notion; clearly something else is happening.

Perhaps the very tumult of the last few years has knocked a bit of partisan scale from the caverns of voters' minds; it now appears ethics and strategy are considered in addition to ideology. For instance, many voters on the ideological right cannot vote NDP but are disgusted with BC Liberal unethical behaviour; they might vote BC Conservative instead. To make up for missing numbers we have to assume some former BC Liberal supporters have moved instead to the NDP, probably for ethical reasons, but also because today's NDP appears less ideologically inclined, more middle of the road. Cummins has survived an attempt to contaminate his party with BC Liberal operatives, but he's standing on a point of ethics more than ideology. He would do well to keep this higher ground for which the disgraced BC Liberals cannot compete.

What about the Greens? Undeniably Green support cost the NDP several seats (the margin of BC Liberal majority) the last time. I'd wager (an educated wager) not all Greens were happy with this result and will therefore vote strategically for the NDP instead. Indeed, this supposed vote splitting on the left was demonstrated in the previous provincial and the last federal election too. We've seen Green support taper off since; the Green salad days appeared over except for one important example: Elizabeth May's seminal win in Saanich-Gulf Islands, important not only for its precedent in Canada, but for its example to BC. Recall Ms May parachuted into this riding because it was the Green's best shot at winning a seat. Recall, too, that their strategy was to concentrate their meagre resources to just this seat, while running only token campaigns in other ridings. Considering the thirst to make sure this dastardly government gets booted, the Greens might employ the same strategy in BC, perhaps with cooperation with the ascendant NDP.

The split on the right is a myth, but still has consequence on the left. Not all Greens consider themselves lefties, but some might take the ethical, and strategic, stand against the most corrupt government in BC history.

Conservatives

Are there really enough ignorant people in BC to warrant another divisive greed based political party?

metacomet

As far as I know there's no indication that the Greens pull votes away from the NDP any more than they do other parties.

Is there any evidence that the second choice of Greens in BC is the NDP?

Or is it more likely that the Liberals won a narrow victory last time around because with the Campbell Liberals adopting the carbon tax they became more aligned with the Greens than the NDP?

I tend to believe that. Green pronouncements on social justice policy are never what anyone would call "left-wing". So its safer to assume they're Liberals that like carbon taxes.

Devastating portrait

Like an artist, Mackin completes a portrait that conveys more than its component parts. His readers can sense the meeting's tension, awkwardness, repressed anger and futility.

Sunday, I saw Twitter conversations wondering if BC Conservatives are best described as a minor party or a fringe party. Reading Mackin, I suspect the answer will soon be unambiguous.

Gonorrhea Lectim

pwlg, your comment reminded me after checking my copy of the book, of this comment.

I will understand if you don't post this, but ... I thought it was kind'a funny, in a sick sort of way. Direct from friends in East Van!-----Information about Gonorrhea Lectim (Liberalis strain) The BC Center for Disease Control has issued a warning about a new virulent strain of this old disease. The disease is called Gonorrhea Lectim. It's pronounced "Gonna re-elect 'em," and it is a terrible affliction. The disease is contracted through dangerous and high risk behavior involving putting your cranium up your rectum. Many victims contracted it in 2008...but now most people, after having been infected for the past 1-2 years, are starting to realize how destructive this sickness is. It's sad because Gonorrhea Lectim is easily cured with a new drug just coming on the market called Votemout. You take the first dose in 2010 (HST variant) and the second dose in 2013 and simply don't engage in such behavior again; otherwise, it could become permanent and eventually wipe out all life as we know it. Most ridings are already on top of this, like many in the interior, and apparently now on the Island, with many more seeing the writing on the wall.

You know, I don't think

...John Van Dongen deserves any of the flack he's gotten. Near as I can tell, he's acted consistent with his interests for at least the last three or four years, and those include proper oversight into government spending, no favours for friends, and getting to the bottom of BC Rail.

Having met him a few times, I'm aware his acquaintances span the political spectrum, and though he may not be the brightest firefly in the swamp, he's avoided some of the more obvious pitfalls that more doctrinaire right-wingers like Krueger, Coleman, Bennett and Falcon have fallen into.

And now he's spending tens of thousands of his own money at his own expense, to fight for the right of the lot of us to see what more lies behind the BC Rail scandal. I don't know if anyone else is helping him out financially - I certainly haven't sent him a cheque for $500 myself - but it's the kind of selflessness that ought to be at least acknowledged.

One can be sure that he wasn't going to get any funding from other BC Fiberals for his lawsuit once he quit the party - that tells me his aware of the consequences of speaking truth to power.

One can also be pretty sure he linked up with the BCCP despite his obvious misgivings with Jesus at the helm, as a way both of maintaining at least a portion of his MLA's expense account and enrolling some party funding to help backstop his lawsuit, something that would definitely be in the interests of the BCCP to support, given who they're trying to take power from. That tells me he's pragmatic.

Now, after a much-telegraphed mulling-over of the leadership qualities of the BCCP's leader, he's quit the party, ostensibly without rancour, but with a carefully worded statement.

He's thrown away a lot of money, he's reduced his expenses, and he's not particularly played it for political advantage, at least not yet.

Just some things you absolutely CANNOT say about Jesus Cummins or Premier Christy.

Let's give the guy a chance. There could be worse opponents on the right.