A Wasted Election

If the polls are at all accurate tomorrow’s vote will be a virtual tie between the Lib and CPC and the outcome will be down to voting efficiency. As it stands, Scheer’s CPC is likely to run up huge majorities across the prairies but may lose squeakers in “vote rich” Ontario. All of which translates to a minority CPC government – best case – or, more likely, a minority Lib government with NDP/Green support – worst case.

As campaigns go this was extremely dull. The hobgoblin of climate “emergency” was embraced by all but the People’s Party. Trudeau apparently wore blackface on several occasions. Jagmeet Singh turned out to be a very likeable candidate. The Canadian media was happy to give Trudeau a pass on SNC-Lavilin, blackface, allegations of teenager groping and a host of other scandals. The Canadian media also obsessed about whether or not Scheer was an American. Trudeau spent most of his campaign running against Doug Ford and Stephan Harper. In late-breaking, inside baseball, news apparently Scheer hired Warren Kinsella aka “The Lying Jackal” to run a campaign to smear Max Bernier and the People’s Party as racists. (I don’t know why they would pay the Jackal to do this, he seems more than willing to smear for free.)

The only thing which will really interest me in tomorrow’s results is to see what popular vote Max and the People’s Party get. The polls seem to suggest 1-2%. To succeed, Max has to significantly exceed this predicted vote. If the PPc can take 5% of the national popular vote with a few hot spots of 10% or better, the party will be on its way.

Right now Canada has four national parties who essentially agree with one another that there is a climate emergency, immigration is an unalloyed good thing (and you’re a racist if you say otherwise), that deficits are not to be taken seriously and that taxing an ever-expanding class of persons known as the “wealthy” is a moral imperative. The only difference between the Greens, NDP, Cons and Libs is the speed they want to go down an already agreed upon highway.

It is a commonplace in Canadian politics that about 70% of the nation leans left. Which would leave 30% or so leaning right. I suspect there is a bit of fluidity to those numbers but the people who run the CPC seem to believe that they cannot stray far from the liberal/progressive/green orthodoxy or, well, soccer mums won’t vote for them.

Forty years ago – before he went mushy – Preston Manning challenged that orthodoxy. He challenged from the West and was branded a bigot and a racist and a separatist. He kept slogging forward. In 1988 the Reform Party got 2.09% of the popular vote, in 1993 it got 18.69% and in 1997 it got 19.35%. It became such a threat to the Conservatives in Name Only that the Progressive Conservative Party merged with it to form the Canadian Alliance which later morphed into the Conservative Party of Canada.

If Max can beat the 2% he’s predicted to get the building of the PPc can proceed apace. This is especially true if Scheer fails to win and faces a leadership review.

For a legitimate conservative/libertarian party to exist in Canada the tottering old structure of the CPC needs to collapse. Scheer’s Conservative Party serves no real purpose as it has walked away from conservative principles for fear of frightening Ontario voters. The sooner the CPC is destroyed the sooner a real conservative party can unite the right.

As President Tump would say, “We’ll see what happens.”

Green Option

In the last BC provincial election Andrew Weaver – master of doubtful climate models and UVic professor – managed to win the riding I was living in. He has turned out to be a reasonably competent MLA and had led the Green Party on a relatively moderate course. Yes, there is still a lot of looniness about “climate change” but that goes with the territory.

A few years later and for this election I am living in a riding where there is a real chance that the Green candidate can pick up the seat bringing the Greens to two in the Legislature assuming that Weaver keeps his seat. Vaughn Palmer writing in the Vancouver Sun goes into the details of the three way fight in Saanich North here.

I have not voted yet and am weighing the options. I have no particular animus towards Christy Clark and the BC Liberals – other than the fact the silly woman put in a knee jerk carbon tax – but I don’t see any reason to vote for them other than to keep the NDP out of government. As a general rule I never vote for the NDP, especially at the provincial level, simply because BC has enough economic problems without putting a bunch of agenda driven, public service union beholden, socialists in charge.

Normally, that calculus means that I would hold my nose and vote Liberal; but in this election, in this riding, voting Green is very tempting. Not because I agree with much of what the Greens stand for, rather because voting Green is a safe way of registering dissatisfaction with the BC Liberals. (This, by the way, is driving the NDP crazy as illustrated in this interview with eco-warrioress Tzeporah Berman in The Tyee. There is nothing like a good faction fight on the eco loon left to warm the cockles of my heart.)

An ideal election outcome from my perspective is a BC Liberal victory by about one seat. Or a BC Liberal minority relying on the Greens to win confidence votes. The libertarian side of me wants to see government in all its forms rolled back; but if that is not going to happen then a weak, worried government is the next best thing. Voting Green in Saanich North takes a seat away from the NDP but avoids giving it to the BC Liberals. It is awfully tempting.

Debate, eh?

Well I watched pretty much the whole thing. One of the 30,000 or so people who did on YouTube.

Justin showed up. Wore pants, albeit short pants, and sounded like a really quite good university debater. Tom was unctuous. Lizzie was, sorry to say, drowned out. And Steve looked very much like the sort of adult one would want to have as Prime Minister. (And I don’t like Steve.)

No one landed a zinger. No one ran over time. Everyone was quite polite and very Canadian. On my Twitter feed one American who was watching the Republican Gong show could not help but compare and contrast and wish the US had something like the pretty solid debate we had tonight.

My one note is this: Trudeau, Mulcair and Harper all talked over Lizzie May. It grated. I kept hoping that Harper would “white knight” Liz and say something simple like “let her finish”, or “Miss May was speaking”. It would have made Mulcair and Trudeau look like the bullies they so clearly are. It would have been smart politics too. Liz put up a credible performance tonight. Yes, of course she is a lunatic; but she was not wrong on C-51. She is a weirdly decent person and that came through.

Harper could easily have called the other boys to order and demonstrated the real leadership his campaign is trying to project. He didn’t.

It was not a fatal error, but it was an opportunity missed.