Libs' Lead Is Big but Soft

With the Liberals sitting at seven points up you would think that May 17th would be a slam dunk for Campbell & Co. and so it will likely prove. But if there is to be an upset, which in my books would be the NDP taking more than 30 seats, I would be looking behind those numbers for signs that there may be weaknesses in the Liberal position.

First off, the big lead for the Liberals is in the Lower Mainland. In this sense it looks a lot like it did in 1996 when the Liberals won the popular vote and lost the election. The problem was that the Liberals won so big on the North Shore that the lead they had in the polls going in was stacked too much in one area. In the current election, the Liberals must worry about Vancouver Island and large pockets of the interior and the north where their numbers are not great.

Second, the Liberals must be concerned that Campbell is about as popular as he’s going to get, which is to say not very, whereas Carole James has nowhere to go but up. Unless your name is Tiger Woods, being the front-runner holds terrors of its own for the only way to go is down.

Another factor going in is that no one really has a handle on what the British call the “marginals”: the constituencies that are not in the bag for either party. In fact, after the debacle of 2001, it’s hard to identify just which seats are marginal. Moreover, to answer the “marginal” question, you really have to know the candidates and most of us don’t know many. In a close race, often the candidate themself can be very well liked locally and thus be hard to beat under any political banner. In the “safe seats” it doesn’t matter if the majority party runs a fencepost with hair.

The youth factor

The next worry bead for the Libs is the theory that young people come to the polls. Every election this thought is raised; every year the young stay at home. These same young people will travel thousands of miles to protest something or other but won’t cross the street to vote. There have been more efforts than usual this year to get young people to the polls and if they work, the conventional wisdom is that this will help the NDP. That would certainly be true of most college kids.

Then there is the environment, something that the Liberals have ignored except to the extent they’ve allowed their pals to bugger it up. Tubing the Ministry of Environment was a strong sign to business that they wouldn’t be troubled by little problems like spotted owls, fish bearing streams or swarms of lice around salmon farms killing migrating native salmon. The conventional wisdom here is that these voters will be of the left and thus only reluctantly go to the Green Party. But what if that’s not entirely accurate? In the last Federal election, especially on the North Shore, many Conservatives voted Green in protest. What if the same thing happens in the provincial election? Could the Liberals lose a few seats because voters going Green didn’t leave the NDP but left them? The Greens stand at about 13% - if they got that up to 20% or so, what would that do to the overall picture?

Recapturing the ‘working class’

The last problem is for both parties. Neither can erase their time honoured images – for Liberals uncaring Big Business; for the NDP selfish and powerful Big Labour. The Liberals are making no effort to soften their image, content to assume that the average voter, while he might not love big business, sees that as the way to more and better jobs.

The NDP, on the other hand, while unable to shake the cloak of Big Labour, has reached out to business in an effort, not so much to get the Chamber of Commerce vote, but to attract that portion of the working people that, for a variety of reasons, have never voted NDP.

If the CCF/NDP had ever come close to getting support from all working people, blue collar people, they would probably have captured every government since 1936. Ms. James knows that much of labour doesn’t like governments beating up on Business because they not only see capital providing the jobs but also the dividends that go into their retirement programs. When I was running for office as a Socred, I had the endorsement of three unions and one of my executives was also an executive with the Pulp and Paper Union. In fact, in both elections I ran in I carried North Kamloops which was, for want of a nicer word, working class. The inability of the left in BC to capture all the areas one would think would go left has disabled the NDP and if Carole James can make some headway here, it will be an important factor on May 17th.

In summary then, a seven point lead for the Liberals looks insurmountable. However, if it gets much closer as the day approaches, look-out. If the popular vote is that close, and the NDP gets a bit lucky, there could be an upset.

Rafe Mair, a regular columnist for The Tyee, can be heard weekdays from 8:30-10:30 on AM600