By-election time

Posted on April 18, 2012 by Ian

I have a love/hate relationship with horse race politics.  After all I did polling for a living for over a decade.  There is no doubt that for a certain kind of numbers nerd, it can be exciting watching the numbers go up and down and searching for a searing explanation.

At the same time it really is the low form of political commentary – too easy, too insubstantial and too inside baseball – sportscasting for guys (and I mean guys) who are bad at sports.

But there are two by-elections looming so let’s look at the horseraces.

There are two sites out there speculating on the results.  Both predict a walk away for Joe Trasolini in Port Moody.  No dispute here.

It’s Chilliwack Hope where the speculation gets more far fetched.

Bernard Schulman over at BC Iconoclast is definitive.  He says straight out the BC NDP can’t win there: “There are about 18,000 people in the riding that do vote for all the time or some of the time and vote on the right side of the spectrum.  If there is an even split and decent turn out the Liberals and Conservatives both get close to 9,000 votes versus the NDP at 6,500.”

But the Elections BC numbers don’t support that analysis.  The average number of right wing votes have rarely topped 12,000, while the NDP trends around 5-6000.  So a right wing split sets up a potential narrow three way race.

That’s if this were a traditional race in a traditional time.

It’s not.

Over at threehundredeight.blogspot.com the analysis takes into account the political shifts revealed in recent polls by Angus Reid and Forum Research:  “If we apply these two polls to the swing model for these two individual ridings, we get the following results (not a prediction):

“CHILLIWACK-HOPE
New Democrats: 41-43%
Liberals: 32%
Conservatives: 26-27%
 
“PORT MOODY-COQUITLAM
New Democrats: 46%
Liberals: 28-30%
Conservatives: 24-26%”
 

I tend to believe the second analysis and not just because I want to believe the second.

First, there has been a significant voter shift away from the Liberals and towards both the Conservatives and, to a lesser extent, the NDP.   Any decent prediction has to incorporate that shift.

Secondly, the recent polls show that the current Liberal vote is soft and unmotivated.  Reading the Forum poll you get the feeling that getting out the BC Liberal vote in these by-elections will be akin to taking a Datsun 510 to a tractor pull.

And then there’s the more ephemeral evidence of tough sledding for the BC Liberals:  the slew of last minute endorsements from the past, the frantic ads and ridiculous, sleezy attacks, the lack of volunteers and legislative shut-down so staff and MLAs can fill in. (Hi Pamela Martin.  How’s that leave form coming?)

Pile it all up and I think 308 is right about Pt. Moody and may even be over-estimating Liberal strength in Chilliwack Hope.  I see the Liberals finishing third there, behind the NDP and the Conservative.

If that turns out to be right, the material for political speculation grows exponentially.  We won’t be talking horserace.  We’ll be on death watch.

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Posted in BC Liberals, BC Politics, Christy Clark | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

Plumbing the depths with the BC Liberals

Posted on April 16, 2012 by Ian

BC Liberal MLA Harry Bloy: Clark’s only caucus supporter, incapable of answering a question, an appallingly bad minister, forced to resign for leaking private information, demonstrates his loose grasp on facts and even looser grasp on honour and decorum.

Today in the Legislature

Harry Bloy:  “The NDP’s energy critic has acknowledged the benefits that smart meters will have if customers want to monitor their energy consumption. In this House he admitted: “Certainly, I’m really excited about smart metering.” I guess he was really excited. I’d like to know how excited he was, because he seems to speak out of both sides of his mouth. I can’t figure it out.

“Is he excited because the Leader of the Opposition can’t fraudulently do something against the consumers of British Columbia, can’t lie and cheat and steal money from the citizens of British Columbia? Is that why he speaks out of both sides of his mouth? It really makes me wonder how a Leader of the Opposition can steal from the public.

Deputy Speaker: Member.

H. Bloy: Is this what we’re trying to do here?

Deputy Speaker: Member. Member, I will caution you.

H. Bloy: You know, sometimes it really makes me wonder about the Leader of the Opposition stealing from the public, fraud. I wonder how he proposed to his wife. Is he like his good friend, Svend Robinson? I wonder how he did that.

Deputy Speaker: Member. Member.

H. Bloy: I’m just wondering. How did he do that?

Interjections.

Deputy Speaker: The member for North Island on a…

Point of Order

C. Trevena: …point of order, Madam Speaker. The member for Burnaby-Lougheed is using unacceptable, unparliamentary behaviour, unparliamentary language and inferring the good name of the Leader of the Opposition. I would hope that he will withdraw and apologize.

Deputy Speaker: Hon. members, the point of order is well taken. I will ask the member to withdraw.

H. Bloy: I withdraw.

I predict Harry Bloy will be forced to withdraw from the next election. This is one fool who will not be running next time.  His support for his leader speaks volumes about the kind of party the BC Liberals are at this point in time.

It also suggests that BC Liberal tempers are running high as the end draws ever nearer. Their looming defeat is now taking on an air of mercy.

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The end of the BC Liberals?

Posted on April 14, 2012 by Ian

Last week’s Forum poll confirmed the numbers seen in most polls lately.  The NDP at 46% of the decided vote is 20+ points ahead of both the BC Conservatives and the BC Liberal party who are tied for support in the low 20’s.

Yeah, we know.  Ho hum.

Maybe that’s why the Vancouver Sun didn’t even bother to cover the poll, despite being released on the cusp of two key by-elections.

Only the Globe really covered the poll and most of its commentary focused on the struggle between the Libs and Cons.  ’Why can’t they just unite and give free enterprise a fighting chance’ was the prevailing sentiment.

Except the numbers released by Forum don’t bear that out.   The story they tell is one of the collapse of the BC Liberals combined with the irrelevance of the “unite the right” argument.

First things first.  The BC Liberals are doomed.

Of the three parties with any significant support theirs is  by far the weakest.  The slide – if Forum’s numbers are correct – is not over.

Forum tracks voter enthusiasm.  And the Liberals should be very worried about their remaining voters.

A third of BC Liberal voters are “not very” or “not at all enthusiastic” about voting Liberal.  That’s much worse than the other two parties.  Conversely, BC Liberal voters are significantly less enthusiastic than either NDP or Conservative voters about voting for their party.

That’s a nightmare scenario for GOTV.  You knock and call and the voters just don’t respond.  It’s also a scenario for future defections.

Where would they go?  Or more to the point – could enough go to the BC Conservatives to give them a fighting chance?

Not this time.  The Liberals look like a typical coalition tearing itself apart.  Almost half their voters disapprove of the BC Conservative leader.  From the Forum numbers I’d say at least half the Liberal voters will never switch.  They’ll stay till the end.

Who’s voting Liberal and who’s not is also very interesting.  First off, the Liberals trail badly in just about every demographic imaginable.  Looking at this poll I can imagine maybe one group where the Liberals would be close enough to make it a contest:  White male stock investors over 65, making more than $1 million a year, residing in Kent prison awaiting sentencing for Ponzi schemes

Some of these numbers must be scaring the heck out of the governing party.  The BC Liberals don’t just have a gender gap.  They have a gender chasm of Mariana Trench proportions.  Amongst women voters the BC NDP leads the Liberals by 28% or 2.5 to 1.

The NDP also enjoys a substantial lead amongst male voters – 43 to 26.  That’s unheard of since 1991.

Finally, besides women who’s driving the NDP vote?  Middle class voters, that’s who.

The NDP leads the BC Liberals among all income classes.  All.  But among voters earning between $40K and $80K the lead is huge.  Amongst voters earning between $60K and $80K the NDP’s vote is triple that of the Liberals – 52 to 17.  Crazy.

The last thing I noticed about the Forum poll is this:  there doesn’t seem to be a turnaround in sight.  Too many Liberals are angry with and have doubts about the Conservatives.  Too many key demographic groups have fled to the NDP.

Most of all, these numbers have gone on for far too long.  They look too hard.  In Forum’s tracking, all three parties have settled into a groove.  For four months Forum has shown the NDP building a strong lead from the mid thirties to the high forties with the two others trailing in the low twenties.

Sure, there’s room for change around the edges.  The Liberals in particular have room to fall further.  But barring a sea change, the next election looks pretty decided today.

And if I were a bettor, I’d put my money on the BC Liberals to finish third in both by-elections with the NDP taking Pt. Moody Coq in a landslide and narrowly winning Chilliwack Hope.

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Posted in BC Liberals, BC Politics, BC Rail, Christy Clark | Tagged , , , , | 10 Comments

Open government the BC Liberal way, part whatever

Posted on April 13, 2012 by Ian

More BC Rail pages pouring out of government today – 2,968 to be precise – of which 2,963 were redacted in whole…

“Pages 1 through 1314 redacted for the following reasons: - S14

“Pages 1319 through 2968 redacted for the following reasons: – S14″

On top of a BC Rail public inquiry, I’d say there should be a complete audit of the FOI process

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Posted in BC Liberals, BC Rail, Christy Clark | 7 Comments

Coaltion talk = Conservative buzzkill

Posted on April 12, 2012 by Ian

Bill Bennett, back from a trip to the abyss in Chilliwack Hope, thinks there’s a chance for a coalition between the BC Conservatives and the BC Liberals.

Because….?

The quality of Bennett’s thinking goes a long way to explain the last year.

Here’s the truth.  If the BC Conservatives want to disappear forever they’ll jump at the chance to enter into an “arrangement” with the BC Liberals.

It would be one of the stupidest moves ever made in BC politics.  But even the suggestion of it could be very helpful to the BC Liberals.

The best way for the Liberals to kill the Conservatives’ momentum stone cold and return them to fringe party status would be to convince voters the Conservatives are prepared to sign on to a team with the sleaziest, most corrupt and pathetically empty government BC has seen in the last 60 years.

Think about it:  voters leave the BC Liberals for the BC Conservatives, disgusted with the governing party.  So the Conservatives snuggle up to the BC Liberals?  Talk about Buzz Kill.

Let’s take off the rose coloured glasses.  Bennett’s ruminations are the pathetic wishes of a doomed politician so out of touch with real humans that he resembles nothing less than a loose android from a Phillip K Dick novel.

Here’s the problem with those who are thinking that Bennett’s comments are plausible.  They, like Bennett, are forgetting why voters left the BC Liberals in the first place:  the people who have dumped the Liberals are finished with being hurt, cheated and lied to.  They want a change of government, not a change of names.

If the Tories take this stinking rotten bait they won’t be telling voters they are joining the Liberals to restore the free enterprise coalition.  They’ll be telling voters that they are no different than this corrupt, tired government.  They, like the BC Liberals, will be telling voters that they care only about power and nothing else.

It would be an incredible misreading of the Conservative’s current support and growth.  It would be thumbing their noses at everything their new voters believe.  It would be saying yes to the HST lie.  Yes to the BC rail coverup deal.  Yes to school cuts and stadium overruns.  Yes to deals for friends and insiders.  It’s a very long list.

But ruminating about a deal between the BC Liberals and Conservatives does help one party.  The BC Liberals need the bleeding to stop.  What better way than to do that than paint the other right wing party as no better than them?

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Posted in BC Liberals, BC Politics, BC Rail, Christy Clark | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

Road trip!

Posted on April 10, 2012 by Ian

You think you’re going to write but your mind is just pulling your leg.  Nobody writes on a road trip.

The trip started in Palm Springs, took us to Austin, then across the broad sweep of central and northeast Texas and into New Mexico.

Why Austin?  Because the husband was picking up awards, that’s why..

Each year the American Association of Political Consultants hands out awards for the best political ads of the cycle.  This year the ceremony took place in Austin

We arrived in time for the luncheon honouring James Carville and Paul Begala….. plus Karl “hates our kind” Rove.

I still don’t get the whole bi-partisan thing, especially when the guy you’re talking about is Karl Rove.  Enough said.

Carville – introduced as a brilliant and batshit crazy political guru – was surprisingly moving, saluting his friend and Clinton campaign colleague Begala.  Aside from the campaign yarns, like Begala, he talked about why most of us are in the business – to make life at least a bit better for people who need life to be better.

To underline the point he closed off with a scene from the War Room, where he saluted the Clinton campaign volunteers.  The short clip is one of the greatest speeches a campaign manager has ever made, not that they make many.

Then the awards.  American campaigns are plush with money and they have the ads to show for it.  If you’ve ever sat through an evening of TV down here during primary season you know what that means – wall to wall ads to elect “Beth Steve Bubba Louise Smith Smollett Harris Franklin” – indistinguishable candidate after candidate.

Breaking through that clutter to get at something that matters to a real voter is almost impossible.  The AAPC honours the ads that work.

Now Communications won 5 awards and an honourable mention, the best performance by a Canadian firm.  And they’re not even from Toronto.

The one gold prize was special to me.  It went to “Christy Crunch”, the ad Now did for the BC NDP just after Christy Clark won the BC Liberal leadership and before the BC NDP picked Adrian Dix as their new leader.

I love this ad.

“Christy Crunch” went viral just after it was launched, with the highest number of hits ever achieved by a Canadian political ad.  It belongs side by side with the best of the American ads.

We did more than conventioning in Austin.

We ate.

We walked before and after we ate.

And we checked out music.  SXSW had just roared through town so the amazing Austin scene was a bit subdued.  Still over two nights we saw some new soul and old tejan music.

The tejans were the original settlers, mostly from pre revolution Mexico.  When the border moved around them they stayed and taught newcomers to ranch.  Their brand of music is called conjunto and revolves around the button accordion.

We checked out conjunto at a 5 – 8 show at the White Horse Tavern.   There we met Manuel and Anita, two tejans who had retired in Austin after leaving it for careers in Wisconsin.  Between dances they filled us in on the original tejans, the changing social mores and conjunto music, which is undergoing a revival in Austin.

Think polka socials in a church basement in Saskatchewan with a lot of added pepper.  Odd time signatures and a crazy old time bounce to even the slowest song.   It was fantastic.

Before we headed out on the road we wandered around the State Capital, where I found this monument plastered with it’s own hundred and fifty year old spin.

The unnamed ‘right’ they fought and died for was, of course, the right to own a slave.  Funny how that escaped attention.

I saw this and thought a lot has changed and too little has changed.

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Posted in Travel, US Politics | 3 Comments

How long will she last?

Posted on April 2, 2012 by Ian

“Ms. Clark, chased down a hotel corridor by reporters seeking her reaction to the poll numbers, finally stopped and said she had no quick reaction”.

Rod Mickleburg, Globe & Mail

 

Will she last a month?  Odds?  Bets?

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Posted in BC Politics | 21 Comments

Vaughn Palmer vs. Bob Mackin

Posted on April 1, 2012 by Ian

Under RossK’s admonition over at the Pacific Gazetteer I went and read Bob Mackin’s take on the BC Liberal’s last month.  Then I read  Vaughn Palmer’s.

Mackin crushes it, while Palmer skates over the disasters that were.

I think Palmer is a very well informed and authoritative pundit.  But he has a blind spot a mile wide and the comparison to Mackin puts it in high relief.

Mackin tracks the disastrous policies and announcements of the last while and lets the actions speak for themselves until van Dongen puts the meaning to them.  It’s a show not tell piece.

Palmer tracks the politics.  It’s all tell and little show.  The authoritative voice has lost touch with the actual things that are driving people away from the BC Liberals.

In an odd way Palmer is just like them…  The roof, the Telus deal, BC Rail questions about the Premier, an orchestrated confrontation with the teachers, lies about transit and available pots of money – these are all just the normal day to day stuff.  No point getting your knickers in a knot.

But the game!  It’s all about the game in Palmer’s piece.  Who’s saying what.  Who’s up, who’s down.  What the other BC Liberal politicians are saying about the Premier.  The content is far less explicit, the reasons for the politicians’ unease are understated.

There is no anger about what is taking place, just polite observation.

Don’t get me wrong.  Palmer hasn’t written a bad piece.  Nobody can say he isn’t covering the Premier’s troubles.

It’s just that he isn’t saying what needs to be said.

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Van Dongen’s BC Rail questions part 3 – the plea bargain

Posted on March 30, 2012 by Ian

The agreement to pay the $6 million cost of the defence’s legal fees in the BC Rail trial was one part of a two part deal stitched together after the government realized the defence was about to drop a bomb on the trial, according to sources.

***

Two days ago former Attorney General Geoff Plant claimed that the deal to pay Basi and Virk’s legal fees in the BC Rail case was separate from the sentencing deal.  “What is clear is that there was no legally binding [indemnification] deal,” wrote Plant.  “There couldn’t be. The waiver of recovery of fees was not and could not be an inducement to plead guilty.”

But then, as RossK over at the Gazetteer perceptively noted, Plant went on to say “…it was understood that with guilty pleas, the claim to fee recovery would be waived.”

In other words the two parts of the deal – no matter what former and present BC Liberal politicians claim – had to be completely stitched together to make it work.  That “understanding” wasn’t created through telepathy.

***

The October 2010 deal wasn’t the first plea bargain attempt.  Special Prosecutor Berardino made several attempts before then.  All were rejected.

What happened to change that in the Fall of 2010?  What was it that Plant left out of his version of the story?

Two things:  What triggered the deal; and the means by which it was put together.

For years the Special Prosecutor offered nothing less than federal prison time in exchange for guilty pleas in the case.  That all changed in October 2010. In two weeks prison turned into house arrest and no indemnification turned into a $6 million government bill.

One thing explains the motivation to back away from old positions and get the deal done:  the prosecution’s announcement prior to the October 2010 break that former Finance minister Gary Collins would be the prosecution’s next witness.

That announcement gave the defence team an opportunity to play their trump card, kick starting a frenzied process to bring the trial to an end.

And the trump card was an RCMP recording of a conversation between BC Liberal Party Executive Director Kelly Reichart and David Basi – a recording that has been revealed by  Alex Tsakumis who published the RCMP continuation report of the recording on his website.

According to the RCMP report Tsakumis published, the executive director of the BC Liberal Party is caught offering David Basi a “tip” to set up a meeting with his boss Gary Collins on behalf of a donor.  I’ve been told that that recording was critical to the defence strategy.

An alleged bribe for a government favour.  If proven, that’s nasty.  Just dropping that bomb would have been very big.

By calling Collins, the prosecution created the opportunity to do exactly that – drop the bomb.   And I’ve been told that trump card was conveyed to the government.

Now the second part: once it became known that the defence had that in hand how did the deal get done?

Plant’s kind of contradictory argument is kind of correct.  The two parts of the deal – the reduced sentences and the indemnification – came together without the direct knowledge of the Prosecutor or the government.

There was, as Plant put it, an “understanding” that the fees would be waived that together with reduced sentences would be enough for a guilty plea.  But – and this is the part Plant was silent on – to move from “an understanding to a plea bargain” someone had to do some sewing and put the two pieces together in real time.

I’ve been told a third party did the stitching, going between the three parties critical to the deal to ensure that necessary pieces were not just agreed to but in place – reduced sentences, indemnification and guilty pleas.

If you follow Plant’s logic, how could it be otherwise?  The understanding he speaks of had to be communicated and acted upon to come true.  And it couldn’t be done with all the parties in one room.

If I was van Dongen, these are the issues I would spend my time and money investigating and here some of the questions I’d ask:

  • Have the RCMP destroyed the Reichart tapes?
  • Will they release them?
  • How did the “understanding” turn into a plea bargaining?
  • Was there a third party, as I’m told there was?
  • Who was the third party who put the parts of the plea bargain deal together?
  • Was a third party paid?  Were favours involved?
  • Was the Premier’s office involved?  The Deputy AG?  The AG?
  • Was the “understanding” at sufficient remove that it was legal?  Or did it still constitute an inducement?

This happened a year and a half ago.  Why is it still important?

Because British Columbians deserve to know if the indemnification deal was in their interests – as Plant very weakly claims – or part of a continuing cover-up of shady and even illegal activities stemming from the RCMP investigation into the BC Rail deal.

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Posted in BC Liberals, BC Politics, BC Rail, Christy Clark | Tagged | 10 Comments

Former AG’s lame response to van Dongen

Posted on March 29, 2012 by Ian

Van Dongen’s BC Rail Questions, part 2

Yesterday, former Attorney General Geoff Plant, took on John van Dongen’s problem with the BC Liberal’s decision to cover the defence costs in the BC Rail trial – to the tune of $6,000,000.

The special payout overturned government policy.  Indemnification against legal costs is not extended to employees found to be guilty.   That all changed with the BC Rail trial.

According to van Dongen, no Premier has answered the many questions surrounding the payout.

Polls taken at the time showed the vast majority of British Columbian voters had major – vote altering – concerns with the government’s decision, believing the payment was more of a cover-up than a rational, legal decision.

With van Dongen’s defection putting the perceived cover-up back on the table, Plant took to the blogosphere to attack van Dongen and offer up an explanation for the decision.

His explanation is lame.  Make that beyond lame.

Here’s Plant’s argument:

“To summarize, guilty pleas had been proposed.  Discussions ensued about the fees.  The special prosecutor was not involved in those discussions.

“Government decided to release the three defendants from any claim for repayment of their legal fees.  The defendants pleaded guilty.  What is clear is that there was no legally binding deal.  There couldn’t be.  The waiver of recovery of fees was not and could not be an inducement to plead guilty.”

Plant goes on to argue that the decision to overturn the indemnity policy was based on a rational comparison of the cost of continuing the trial against the $6,000,000 cost of the payout.  Plant argues that the most they could have gotten out of either Basi or Virk were pennies on the dollar.

But here’s the problem with Plant’s analysis.  The scenario he paints could not have occurred.

Plant claims that the defence first made a deal with the prosecutor for a guilty plea in exchange for a sentence of house arrest.   Then the defence went to the government to discuss indemnity.

Plant’s logic fail occurs right there.  He says government weighed the cost of a continued trial against the cost of the indemnity deciding the indemnity cost was less.

But if there was already a deal to plead guilty -as Plant and the Deputy AG the trial was over.  Therefore there was no cost to weigh the indemnity cost against.

To put it another way, with the guilty plea in the bag as Plant claims, there would be no reason to waive the indemnity.

The government’s and Plant’s rationale doesn’t fit with the way they say the deal was done.  Either that or they gave away $6 million for nothing.

Neither makes sense.

Here’s what I’ve been told really happened:  The defence made it clear to the government that a deal would depend upon both a reduced sentence and a continuing indemnity.  If both weren’t in place, no deal.

And what convinced the government that it was in their interests to go for that deal – which they had rejected several times before?  We’ll look at that tomorrow.

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Posted in BC Liberals, BC Politics, BC Rail, Christy Clark | Tagged , | 14 Comments