The Journal has once more spoken with veteran political correspondent Keith Baldrey, legislative bureau chief for Global BC News, about the current state of B.C. politics (current as of the time of writing, at least). The interview was conducted on June 23, and is the second of two parts.
The Journal: Last week you said that the last two elections really exposed the rural/urban divide in this province, and that while the Liberals are trying to close that divide, the NDP have yet to show how they can reach over that divide and fashion their policies to attract the people they don’t currently enjoy the support of. Is that one of the factors behind Horgan’s persistent non-appearance in rural ridings during the election campaign?
Yes. He spent a lot of time in North Vancouver and Surrey and the Tri-Cities. They [the NDP] had to run the table basically from Boundary Road in Vancouver right out to Mission. The odds were stacked against them, but they almost pulled it off. If they’d won a couple more seats there they’d have a more comfortable majority.
Presumably their strategy next time is to do better in those ridings that they barely lost, like Richmond-Queensborough and Coquitlam-Burke Mountain and Vancouver-False Creek. Between those three ridings they only lost by 1,000 votes. They’ve got a better shot at winning those ridings than they do at winning Boundary-Similkameen or Kamloops or the Cariboo, because the gaps there were much wider.
I think [the NDP] will continue with their strategy of looking almost exclusively at Metro Vancouver’s interests rather than anyone else’s.
About Fraser-Nicola: that’s an interesting point. We are definitely a rural riding, but something that surprised me about the election is that we’re not that remote; we’re right on the doorstep of that area where Horgan was campaigning very, very hard. It wouldn’t have taken much effort to get up here, but he did not make one appearance here. Do you think that was just because of his “It’s rural, never mind?” attitude, or do you think it could have had something to do with the disagreement with [NDP candidate] Harry Lali back in January [when Horgan asked Lali to step aside in seeking the NDP nomination in Fraser-Nicola]?
I think there was probably a concern that any appearance up there [by Horgan] might have opened up a controversy that they didn’t want to have there, that the questions at a campaign event would not be about policy, they would be about the relationship between Horgan and Harry Lali. That takes them off-message and off-script.
John Horgan ran a very disciplined, consistent campaign throughout. He stayed on-topic, on-message, and campaigned in the geographic areas he thought he needed to win an election, and he almost pulled it off. He came very close, and he greatly improved the NDP’s showing for any time in 25 years.
I was thinking that if he had turned up in Fraser-Nicola—well, you said on election night that whoever wins Fraser-Nicola wins the election, and you were partly right. Maybe if he had turned up the NDP would have won the riding.
Look at Kamloops, another example of a bellwether riding. Kamloops did vote for the winning side; but the winning side just didn’t get a majority.
But Fraser-Nicola, with that one extra seat under Horgan’s belt: every seat was crucial in this election.
And Fraser-Nicola might be a riding that Horgan decides—I don’t think he’s going to spend a lot of time in Kamloops or Prince George, but the result in Fraser-Nicola was close enough [the Liberals won by 595 votes] to suggest that maybe he does extend; that’s one riding that he does start trying to embrace, come the next time.
Again, though, I expect he’s going to spend most of his time and his messaging in the suburbs; but there will be some exceptions, and I would think that [Fraser-Nicola] is one of them; it’s a relatively closer race than some of the other Northern and Interior races. Another would be Columbia River-Revelstoke, which had been NDP for years and is competitive enough to perhaps swing back [the NDP’s] way.
It’s not that the NDP are completely turning their back on the North and the Interior; they can’t do that. It’s just that their emphasis will have to be on the suburbs of Metro Vancouver, because that’s where the votes are.
Are you still sticking to your twelve-to-eighteen month prognosis for an NDP/Green government?
I think so. It will be interesting: one of the things that’s driving the NDP/Green alliance right now is their supposed interest in electoral reform. I think the Green interest in that is genuine, because that’s the only way the Green party has a hope of becoming a major party, under proportional representation. The NDP is split on that issue. You have a number of NDP activists who actively campaigned against the last two referendums for electoral change.
If they want to get to that electoral referendum, they’re going to have to hang around in government for more than a year; probably at least a year-and-a-half, if not two years. That may force them to be a little more cognizant of doing the things they need to do to retain power.
On the other hand, minority governments, from time to time, do engineer their own defeat, if they think the time is right to go into a campaign and win a majority. W.A.C. Bennett did that in 1953: he concocted an issue, caused his government to fall, and then swept to a large majority.
So if the NDP gets a sense that the electorate, right now, will reward them even more, they will figure a way to topple themselves; find an issue and figure they have enough seats to pick up, which may include Fraser-Nicola, to form a majority government.
The other thing that’s going to make it hard for this [NDP/Green] alliance to function with any effectiveness is that it’s going to be very hard to govern in the legislature by the current set of rules, particularly regarding how the speaker votes. If they don’t change the rules they’re going to have a tough time; if they do change the rules they’ll still have a tough time, and it will be controversial.
But given the tightness of the majority: the extended illness of one MLA, or the death of an MLA, could have an impact on whether the government survives or not. It’s conceivable that nothing gets done in the house, because of the prolonged absence of an MLA or simply because they can’t get the votes through because of the numbers in the house.
It’s not inconceivable that John Horgan would visit the Lieutenant-Governor at some point and say “This place isn’t working” and request a dissolution.
I don’t think he’s going to do that this fall, but I think as time goes along that possibility becomes more real.
So you’re saying that B.C. politics is going to continue being even more interesting than usual for a while.
Oh, I think it’s going to be a fascinating thing to watch, and to cover, for some time. It’s hard to make predictions, but I would say that if Horgan can get past September then he’s safe until the following February. Then he’s safe probably for at least a little while, and if he can get past the spring he’s safe until the following fall. Once you’ve got past a couple of confidence votes, you’ve got smooth sailing for months, because you don’t have to test the confidence of the house again.
I think it will depend on [the NDP] changing the rules of the legislature, in terms of how the speaker’s office functions and how it votes.
