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NEWS GAZETTE
NEWS: West Shore voters hit the polls in full force /A3 ARTS: Sooke Philharmonic performs in Langford /A16 SPORTS: New inductees for the Hall of Fame /A21
Friday, October 23, 2015
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Diminished by strategy Liberal wave made NDP support moot except in areas like the Island Jeff Nagel Black Press
Katherine Engqvist/News Gazette staff
Fun for all ages Langford resident Beckham Clark, 17 months, explores the new toddler area in Playzone at City Centre Park in Langford. Renovations are still underway with more fun items for toddlers and interactive games for those a little older yet to be installed. The facilities have reopened once again with an expanded play structure for children of all ages and those still young at heart.
For months, anti-Conservative campaigners from environmentalists to veterans tried to persuade like-minded voters to coalesce behind the strongest opponent in each riding. We even saw some of that movement materialize here on the West Shore in the form of rallies. But as the dust settles on the Liberals’ powerful majority victory, it’s unclear if those strategic voting attempts had great effect, other than to demolish Green Party hopes to add seats. Organizations like LeadNow and the Victoria-based Dogwood Initiative funded ridinglevel polls to try to help guide progressive voters. LeadNow recommended NDP candidates in 11 B.C. ridings, and the Liberals for two seats on the North Shore. All but three of those chosen candidates won their races. Mario Canseco, vice-president of Insights West, which did polling for Dogwood, said strategic voting attempts appear to have had more effect on Vancouver Island than in the Lower Mainland, where those efforts were swamped by the strength of the Liberal wave. “There are certain pockets where strategic voting worked very well and probably enabled some NDP victories,” he said, adding a few New Democrats were elected on the Island who otherwise would not likely have prevailed over Conservatives.
In the campaign’s final week, several prominent B.C. environmentalists publicly turned away from the Greens in favour of either the NDP or Liberals, in the name of preventing another Conservative government. Green leader Elizabeth May likened it to being gunned down by “friendly fire.” When the votes were tallied, the Green vote in B.C. had increased only marginally – from 7.7 per cent to 8.2 per cent – and they hung onto only May’s seat. “When the election was called I was going to be in the national English language TV debate, unfortunately between Harper and Mulcair it was cancelled. That was a key part of our campaign strategy. When I was in the national televised debates in 2008, that’s when our popular vote soared,” May said. Joined by the West Shore Green Candidates, Frances Litman and Fran Hunt Jinnouchi, at the Victoria Conference Centre, May said strategic voting was a major factor in local riding results. “Particularly on Vancouver Island and the Lower Mainland was the notion that people who wanted to vote Green shouldn’t. Couldn’t. Would be bad people if they did,” she said. That was hard to overcome, May said, because many Greens, Liberals and New Democrats shared the same priority. “It was simply not possible to imagine this country enduring a single second more of Stephen Harper’s policies,” she said. “I know there’s a huge base of voters in B.C. that wanted to vote Green and told me they couldn’t, but they all said, next time, once Harper’s gone, next time.” Strategic voting was based on
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the premise that Liberals, NDP and Green supporters would risk leaving room for Conservatives to win many races unless they first settled on a single consensus candidate. May said many she spoke with feared that a vote for any of the Green candidates would be helping Harper. “I sympathize with where their fear was coming from. NDP fed it hard on Vancouver Island that you had to vote NDP to stop Harper, and you can see that the NDP was not the party to stop Harper.” It’s difficult, Canseco said, for progressive strategists to get enough granular riding-level data on individual races to gauge how they are evolving in time to be useful to voters. A shorter campaign might have resulted in a Conservative victory, he said. Instead, the Liberals had more time to build momentum and present leader Justin Trudeau as a viable prime minister. Canseco doesn’t accept one theory that the red wave resulted mainly from the Conservatives’ choice to emphasize the niqab issue in Quebec, harming NDP chances there and making the Liberals seem the more obvious alternative for the anyone-but-Harper movement. He said NDP leader Tom Mulcair simply did not perform as well in debates or on the campaign trail as he did before in the House of Commons, and the choice to balance the budget made him seem like “a small ‘C’ Conservative” compared to the bolder Liberals. “They weren’t able to solidify this idea that they were the vehicle for change,” Canseco said. editor@goldstreamgazette.com