But looking at the numbers, it was actually quite close: the BC Liberals got 45.7% of the popular vote, compared to 42.2% for the NDP. This slim margin validates the Angus Reid polling camp, which came closest on estimating the popular vote, compared to a handful of others that put the Liberals ahead by 9-10% (I was leaning towards the Angus Reid polls mostly because they had much larger sample sizes of over 1,000 compared to just over 600 for the others, even though according to theory the gap should not change that much).

The Greens had 8.2% of the vote, enough for them to split the vote in enough ridings to make the difference (although it is not obvious that the second choice of Green voters is the NDP). Unlike the federal election, there was no talk of strategic voting in BC, perhaps because the NDP made the carbon tax its wedge issue. That backfired on them badly, with big swaths of the BC Interior and suburbs of Vancouver (those most opposed to the carbon tax) sticking Liberal. Just as Campbell did not know that after announcing the carbon tax, gas prices would shoot up by 40 cents a litre, James and the NDP did not know that those prices would fall so much when they chose to vigorously oppose the carbon tax last summer.

The election, like all Canadian elections that produce majority governments, is a winner-take-all for the Liberals, even though more than half of British Columbians voted against his party. Within the Liberals it is a winner-take-all for Campbell, due to the overly centralized power in the Premier’s office Many of the smiling faces we saw elected will not be seen again except as a backbench backdrop for cameras in the Legislature.

All of which underlines the irony that another opportunity to change the electoral system (to the Single Transferable Vote) went down in flames. Unlike the 2005 referendum, which came close to the 60% approval required to pass, this time it was not even close with 60% supporting the existing system. As several commentators have pointed out, the new Legislature looks a whole lot like the old Legislature, BC basically went for the status quo.

Attention will now turn back to the economy, with the Liberal narrative that they were the best managers through hard economic times. It is surprising that the NDP did not pick up on the string of economic bad news that flowed out of Statscan during the lead up and the campaign. They might have felt that doing so would only reinforce the Liberals’ economic manager frame.

Instead, the NDP ran an opposition campaign that offered no vision for the province other than ridding ourselves of Campbell. They hit the Liberals effectively by playing on a “crony capitalism” theme, manifested in the scandal over BC Rail privatization, and other privatization of new run-of-the-river electricity generation and certain public services. But ultimately their anti-Campbell yang lacked a yin that offered up some concrete changes that would improve the lives of British Columbians. Hopefully, this will provoke some soul searching within the party that leads to renewal.

Both parties were guilty of not being forthcoming about the impact of economic developments on the state of the BC budget. A small deficit tabled in February is surely much much larger, and it was not clear what either party would do if elected. So we will have to wait and see if the Liberals will let the deficit grow, or if they will attempt to cut spending to keep the lid on an ostensible half-billion dollar deficit. They seemed to leaning toward the latter during the election campaign but that was, well, the election campaign. If they wait until September before tabling a budget update, much of this will be easier to spin.

Another big question is where the Liberals now go on climate policy. They have received much praise for the first steps on climate action, including the carbon tax, but there was nothing in the platform that spoke of making the next steps. I seem to have been the only one in the campaign to have pointed out that the Liberals do not have a plan to meet their legislated 33% reduction in GHG emissions by 2020. So getting that done would be a good start, but I’m doubtful that we will see much, although more oil and gas extraction is definitely in the works and that will be a huge hurdle to meeting the legislated target.

Most of the attention on climate policy is likely to turn to the international stage in the lead up to Copenhagen in December, which will attempt to carve out a new global deal on climate change (with a helpful US government, we can only hope). And BC will not want to move ahead too much with a North American cap-and-trade system in the works.

So looking foward to the next four years, it is not obvious at all what we are going to get from the third Campbell administration.

Late last week, the BC Poverty Reduction Committee released its analysis of the three main parties’ platforms with respect to the call. In summary, here’s where they have landed:

The BC Liberal Party does not commit to a poverty reduction plan with clear targets and timelines. The Premier has written, “the Province of British Columbia has made promising steps to address the challenges associated with poverty and we are working on additional measures to put together a comprehensive plan to continue moving forward.” The closest the Liberal platform comes to suggesting a real target is in the area of homelessness, in titling the one-page policy section on housing, “Ending homelessness with new solutions.” The section describes various initiatives to date (outlined below). But this goal of ending homelessness is not linked to clear timelines.

The BC New Democratic Party platform does commit to “Developing a poverty reduction plan with targets and timelines that build on our initiatives that will raise the minimum wage, support jobs and skills training, increase affordable housing, improve child protection and change income assistance.” This is good news. However, the NDP plan does not specify what the poverty reduction targets and timelines should be (presumably this would be determined after the election), nor does it say if such targets and timelines would be legislated (which is key to accountability). The NDP commitment with respect to homelessness is more concrete. Their plan commits to “Ending the crisis in homelessness in 5 years.”

The Green Party has included poverty reduction as a priority in their platform, British Columbia’s Green Book: “The Green Party understands that immediate action is needed to ensure every British Columbian has a meaningful opportunity to share in the wealth of this province.” The key goals of their plan include ensuring British Columbians can all meet their basic needs, and “reversing the trend towards greater disparity between rich and poor.” Additionally, in the area of housing and homelessness, the Green Party has committed to “safe and affordable homes” for everyone living in BC. As the Green Party is not contesting government, they have not costed out their policies.

A more detailed analysis of the party platforms/positions with respect to the poverty reduction call can be found here.

Premier Campbell’s stubborn refusal to commit to poverty reduction targets has been particularly disappointing. During the election campaign, Premier Campbell has repeatedly been asked by reporters and citizens if a re-elected Liberal government would bring in a comprehensive poverty reduction plan with targets and timelines. On each occasion, he has refused to say yes. Instead, the premier has replied that his goal is “to have the lowest unemployment rate that we can,” because “a job is the best social program.” It is correct that job creation is important to poverty reduction. But most poor British Columbians are already employed in the low wage workforce (where they face a minimum wage that hasn’t moved since 2001), and record low unemployment over the past few years has not changed the fact that BC has the highest poverty rate in Canada. So clearly, a focus on employment is insufficient.

During last Sunday’s TV leaders debate, Steve Kerstetter asked (in a recorded question) what new initiatives the leaders would take to reduce child poverty. Notably, in his response, the premier did not mention any new initiatives, but rather, simply talked about things the province has already done.

Once again, the premier selectively noted that BC’s child poverty rate has declined by 15% since 2003. Why 2003? Because that’s when BC’s child poverty rate peaked at 19%. What the premier neglects to mention is that the latest BC child poverty rate of 16% remains 2 percentage points higher than it was in 2001 (when it stood at 14%).

What is surprising, however, is the lack of substantive discussion over the relative merits of each party’s proposed economic recovery policy, as stated in their platforms. Instead, we are repeatedly told that responsible economic stewardship involves keeping the business sector happy and anything that goes against the interest of “employers” (such as increasing the minimum wage, for example) is bad policy. The Liberals’ tactic seems to be to market themselves as friends of businesses while portraying the NDP as the employers’ enemy.

This tactic was used in the televised leaders’ debate last weekend, when Mr Campbell remarked:

“When you’re talking about the economy, I think it’s fair to ask the question: Why is there not one major employer group in British Columbia – in mining, in tourism, in forestry – that actually supports the New Democrats’ policies?”

Like most other over-simplified messages, this one is also incorrect. Good economic policy does not mean pandering to business-based interest groups. Yes, lowering business taxes and relaxing workers’ rights makes it easier for firms to reap higher profits, which encourages them to set up locally, creating jobs for the local population and increasing economic growth. However, economic growth alone is not a guarantee that everyone (or even most people) would benefit from the increased prosperity. In BC, we’ve seen this clearly over the last 25 years, when economic growth was strong yet poverty remained largely unchanged and income inequality increased substantially.

Where does this leave us? We need to keep in mind that the whole point of having a strong economy is to benefit society by improving the standard of living of people. We cannot continue to ignore our social and environmental problems in the name of having a strong economy. We need to balance the need of businesses to keep their costs low with the needs of workers to earn enough so that they are able to afford the basics like housing, child care, education to make sure we’re all set on the right path in life.

This does not mean that we have to completely ignore the interests of the business sector. Policy-making in a recession involves some trade offs for sure, but it’s not the all-or-nothing proposition that the BC Liberals are trying to make it.

US President Obama summed it up well on March 10th, when he revealed the first details of his education plan (quoted widely in the media, for example here):

I know there are some who believe we can only handle one challenge at a time [but] we don’t have the luxury of choosing between getting our economy moving now and rebuilding it over the long term.

It’s time for our policy-makers to recognize that tax dollars are not simply a drain of resources from individuals or businesses but can and should be used for productive investments that would make the economy stronger and more sustainable in the future. These investments include building up physical infrastructure, as the current government is doing, but they also include making this infrastructure “green,” which they are not doing (as Marc explains here), as well as building up the social infrastructure we require to ensure that our children are well-educated and prepared to face the challenges of tomorrow.

The current US Administration is doing it. Let’s make sure that those we elect next week do the same.

Fundamentally, providing an accessible home and community care system for our frail seniors is not only the morally right thing to do for our elders, it’s also the smart thing to do in terms of containing health care costs. Caring for seniors in the community is considerably cheaper than keeping them in hospitals (which is what happens when there is no available spot in residential care for seniors who can’t live independently).

An op-ed published in the Vancouver Sun on Thursday calls attention to the serious problems in seniors’ care in this province. The authors, Jeremy Tate and Marcy Cohen, who co-authored a recent CCPA study An Uncertain Future for Seniors: BC’s Restructuring of Home and Community Health Care, 2001-2008, blame “years of poorly planned restructuring and a failure to maintain (let alone enhance) access to key services” for the decline in seniors’ care. They call for “leadership and commitment to transparency, public consultation, good planning and increased access to seniors’ care.”

But do the party platforms promise to deliver any of these things?

There are certainly important differences in the two parties’ approach towards seniors’ care. The Liberal platform mentions seniors 23 times, but seldom in the context of health care. The closest they come to seniors’ care is promising to invest in housing, more specifically 1,000 new homes for “seniors and people with disabilities.” Their health budget, however, tells us not to expect any meaningful increases in care beyond current levels.

The NDP platform, in contrast, explicitly acknowledges that seniors’ health care needs are not currently met as well as they should be, pledging to improve seniors’ care by adding 3,000 new residential care beds, re-opening some 300 beds in closed facilities (like Cowichan Lodge) and establishing a Representative for Seniors to address their issues and recommend policy reforms. There have been questions, however, as to whether the amount of money allotted for the cause would be sufficient.

BC’s Economic Challenges and the Liberal Platform

By Marc Lee

The BC Liberal platform features many feel-good photos and proud statements taking credit for the province’s recent boom. But read between the lines, and one realizes that after eight years in power, the Liberals have effectively run out of ideas.

The platform fails to offer any vision for the future. The Campbell Liberals made some progress on climate change actions over the past couple years, but the platform offers nothing new. Meanwhile, the Climate Action Secretariat, once residing in the Premier’s office, has been relegated to the Ministry of the Environment, which recently had its budget cut.

Premier Campbell deserves credit for bringing in the carbon tax, plus a variety of other climate measures that represent the low-hanging fruit of greenhouse gas emission reductions. While the carbon tax has its shortcomings, in my view it is a positive first step, and one that carries enormous symbolic value for environmentalists.

Still, the government enters the election without a plan in place to get BC to its legislated 33 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. And there are some glaring contradictions between the climate plan and other parts of the Liberals’ platform.

One of those contradictions is the oil and gas industry. Between 2001 and 2006, oil and gas industry emissions surged by far more than the carbon tax will ever reduce come 2020. Recently, Premier Campbell was in the Northeast, promising more new investment in oil and gas extraction, which may make it virtually impossible to reach our targets. And it is not like the oil and gas patch is a huge employer – about 2,200 direct jobs in 2008 – for all that pollution.

Highway expansion and the $3-4 billion Port Mann Super-Bridge also go against the climate-action grain. This expensive mega-project will only push more unsustainable, car-oriented development further up the Fraser Valley. This threatens valuable farmland, and means that congestion will be back within a few years. No jurisdiction in the world has ever built its way out of congestion problems.

The Liberal platform offers no real vision for the economy either, now that the great boom is over. Unemployment rose rapidly through early 2009, and with housing starts down 70%, the worst is yet to come, as construction workers finish their current projects and head straight to the back of the unemployment line.

The current economic collapse is not the fault of the Liberals, but then neither was the boom their creation. BC’s economic fortunes rest on what happens outside our borders, in particular in the export markets of the US and Asia, and in Ottawa, through the Bank of Canada and the federal government.

As cheerleader-in-chief, Premier Campbell may have pumped up the home team’s confidence, but let’s face it, the cheerleaders did not win this game. Like other parts of the world, low interest rates drove a bubble in real estate, leading to a massive expansion of construction activity. And high commodity prices driven by export markets made BC’s resource industries take off.

In February’s budget, the Liberals offered little in the way of stimulus, mostly re-announcing projects already underway or relying on federal stimulus dollars. There is much more that should be done to retrofit our infrastructure to be green – like public transit and energy efficiency upgrades – and to meet long-neglected social needs, like affordable housing, addiction and mental health facilities, or residential health care.

Bad economic times mean that the small deficit projected in the budget will inevitably turn out to be much larger. The Liberal platform promises that BC will “live within its means”, but faced with a $1-2 billion deficit, will a new Liberal government pile on more spending cuts and risk making the economic picture worse, or will it accommodate a larger deficit? What does that mean for the few new promises in the platform, like all-day kindergarten or U-passes for all Vancouver post-secondary students?

In politics, as in business, marketing is everything. The BC Liberals have branded themselves as the party of good economic times, but also the party with the long-term vision to tackle climate change. At a time when families in BC are concerned about the future on both fronts, the Liberals have put forward an unambitious “devil you know” strategy to win re-election.

Even during the good times, not all British Columbians were part of the boom. Poverty rates did not drop in any meaningful way, homelessness doubled, and inequality worsened with each passing year. BC needs a plan, with targets and timelines (just like climate change) to address poverty, especially as the recession deepens its grip.

With a lack of vision and too many contradictions, the platform does not provide any sense of how Campbell the Third will govern.

UPDATE (April 30): It seems that there is some confusion about the term Single Transferable Vote and its applicability to the 1952 and 1953 elections. Dennis Pilon, also from U Vic wrote to say that what was being called STV in the 1950s was a system designed to produce a majority government not a proportional outcome, even though some of the design features are similar. This issue came up when Ben ran the original piece in the Times Colonist, so he has revised the text as follows. I have also appended some of Dennis’ comments about the differences after Ben’s piece for those interested in the subtleties of voting systems.

The Ghost of Elections Past: The Transferable Vote in the 1952 and 1953 BC elections

By Ben Isitt

As the May referendum on electoral reform approaches, we should not ignore our history. Rarely mentioned in the current discussion is British Columbia’s previous experience with the Transferable Vote.

In the 1952 and 1953 general elections, voters ranked candidates according to an adapted “transferable vote” or alternative vote system. The ruling Liberal government of the day – BC’s last until 2001 – had amended the Provincial Elections Act to keep the opposition Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (precursor to the NDP) out of office. In the words of contemporary observer and future Liberal leader Patrick McGeer, it provided W.A.C. Bennett’s “ladder to power,” inaugurating the Social Credit dynasty that contained the CCF threat.

The 1950s was a period of social and political flux. The Liberals and Conservatives had formed a Coalition government a decade earlier, after the CCF won the most votes in a general election. This succeeded in keeping the socialists at bay, preventing a wartime victory like the one in Saskatchewan, where Tommy Douglas’s CCF took power. On the heals of the Douglas government’s innovative social policies, the BC Coalition enfranchised Asian and Aboriginal voters and implemented the Hospital Insurance Act before the 1949 election. But this new social program’s precarious financial structure produced spiraling cost-overruns and the Coalition’s collapse in 1951.

The final act of co-operation between the Liberals and Conservatives was passage of the Provincial Elections Act Amendment Act, introducing the transferable vote in the spring 1951 legislative session. Both parties had endorsed the voting system at conventions in the 1940s.

The new system required voters to rank candidates by preference (first, second, third, fourth choice). Candidates receiving the fewest votes were eliminated and preferences transferred until one candidate received a majority of ballots cast. Distinguishing itself from the modern BC-STV model, the system in the 1950s employed different counting procedures in both single-member and multiple-member constituencies, such as those in Vancouver, Burnaby, and Victoria.

The Liberals expected to receive second preferences of Conservative voters, while Conservatives expected to be ranked second by Liberal voters. One or the other party was anticipated to retain power and keep the CCF out. But William Andrew Cecil Bennett, the eclectic Kelowna hardware merchant and erstwhile Conservative who had left the Coalition in its dying days, stymied their plans.

Bennett aligned himself with the ruling Social Credit party in Alberta (in office since 1935) and another dissident Tory, Tilly Rolston of Point Grey. He toured the province by car and invested $10,000 of his own funds propping up the skeletal campaigns of 45 Social Credit candidates – none of whom had served in the legislature. They were accountants, school teachers, musicians, and small-town businesspeople, political “outsiders” like himself who resented the political clique ensconced in the Vancouver Club and Victoria’s Union Club.

On election day, 12 June 1952, British Columbians went to the polls. The results were unclear for a month, as ballots were counted by hand through the new voting system. Initially, the CCF received the most first-preference votes (which would have translated into 21 seats in BC’s 48 seat legislature under the old voting system, a strong claim for a minority CCF government). But as the second, third and fourth preferences were redistributed, Social Credit emerged as the victor, the second choice of supporters of the established parties.

Social Credit – untested and untainted in the legislature – edged out the CCF, 19 seats to 18. The Liberals and Conservatives fell to six and four seats respectively. W.A.C. Bennett became premier with a minority Social Credit government. The next spring, he engineered his defeat in the legislature, won a majority mandate in a snap election, and promptly repealed the Provincial Elections Act changes. British Columbia returned to the old first-past-the-post voting system that prevails to this day.

Except for a brief NDP interlude in the 1970s, Social Credit ruled BC until 1991 as the new form of Coalition, benefiting initially from the transferable voting system and later by campaign donations from major resource companies. Mired in scandal, this Coalition fractured for a time, translating into a decade of NDP rule, but the Liberals returned after 49 years in opposition, as the dominant free-enterprise Coalition in 2001.

The new premier, Gordon Campbell, appointed the Citizens Assembly on Electoral Reform to explore changes to the voting system. The assembly, aided by staff appointed by the government, recommended a “BC-STV” model, which received support from fifty-eight percent of voters in 2005 and will be decided again in May’s referendum.

Dr. Benjamin Isitt is Assistant Professor and Postdoctoral Fellow of History at the University of Victoria.

Comment from Dennis Pilon:

When this piece originally ran in the Times Colonist myself and others wrote in to clarify that the 1952/3 system was actually the alternative vote, not STV. It is a common mistake, indeed it was one committed often at the time the system was used in BC then, but it is and was nonetheless wrong. BC did not use STV in 1952 and 1953. What gets confusing is that the ’1,2,3′ preference voting aspect can be combined into two very different voting systems, one a majority voting system, and the other a proportional one.

BC used what Australia calls the “alternative vote” where the point was to assure that elected members had a majority of the votes in a riding. The STV system was used in 19 municipalities in western Canada at various times and for urban ridings to the provincial houses in Alberta and Manitoba from the 1920s to the 1950s. The confusion over the terminology in 1952 so incensed Enid Lakeman, director of the British Electoral Reform Society, that she wrote to various Vancouver papers at the time correcting on their misuse of the term STV.

In the study of voting systems there are three broad families: plurality systems, majority systems, and proportional systems. These voting systems are comprised of three distinct parts: a formula, a districting rule, and a ballot structure. Formula choices include plurality, majority, and proportional (thus the family names), the districting choices include single or multi-member, and the ballot structure varies from nominal (x-voting) and ordinal (1,2,3 etc). Thus if we examine AV (BC’s 1952 voting system) and STV (the one we are voting on May 12), they typically share only one feature: the ballot structure – voting by preference using 1, 2, 3 etc. I say typically because 1952 saw BC use multi-member AV ridings as well, though voters were randomly given ballots in those ridings with pre-structured choices of candidates to choose from (e.g. in a two member riding, the two CCF, Liberal, SC, etc. candidates would be split between the two ballots). Arguably the crucial difference between the two systems, and thus why the family names take on this
particular characteristic, is formula used to count the votes. In AV it is a majority formula while in STV it is a proportional formula.

“I want you to think about one thing. Think about the opening ceremonies of the Games next Feb. 12th. There will be lots of government officials. I expect the prime minister will be there. I expect the mayor of Vancouver will be there. I expect the premier of British Columbia will be there. Visualize those opening ceremonies with Premier Carole James.”

This riff only makes sense in the context of a long-running refrain that NDP government can only play the economic blues. In the weeks to come, we will be reminded about the bad old days when the NDP were last in power. But now that we can roughly compare two terms of the NDP with two terms of the Liberals, we find that there is little truth to the smear that the NDP have the cooties.

The average rate of economic (real GDP) growth under the Liberals has been 3.1%, whereas the so-called “lost decade” under the NDP saw average growth that was only slightly lower, at 2.8 %. But if we add in estimates for 2008 and 2009 (using latest projections from the private sector, which are too rosy in my opinion, and better than what the government itself is projecting in the budget), the average growth rate under Liberal rule falls to 2.6%, LESS than under the NDP.

In terms of family incomes, average after-tax income in BC (constant dollars) was $46,340 in 1991. By 2001 it rose to $50,248, an increase of 8.4%. And by 2006 (last year for which we have data) it grew to $55,583, an increase of 10.6%. This masks some important differences in distribution, with average incomes further down the income distribution lower than they were in the early 1990s, while incomes up higher soared much more than average.

How about employment? During the “lost decade” of 1991 and 2001, BC employment grew by 344,100, an increase of 22%. Between 2001 and 2008, BC employment grew by 392,700, an increase of 20%. However, BC also just lost 35,000 jobs in January, and the prospects for rising unemployment in 2009 are severe. By the time the election occurs, it could well be the case that more jobs were created under the watch of the NDP than under the Liberals.

In terms of the unemployment rate, it was about 10% when the NDP came to power, and fell to 6.9% in May 2001. In the following boom years, the unemployment rate fell to record lows of around 4%, but at last glance (January) it was 6.1% and rising. By the time of the election I would not be surprised if the unemployment rate was higher than when the Liberals first came to power.

My point here is not a partisan one – the NDP were far from perfect in office; they benefited from immigration to BC in record numbers; but also got sideswiped by the Asian crisis of 1998-99. Rather, it is to remind people that BC’s economic fortunes generally swing on decisions made outside our borders. Politicians will inevitably try to take claim credit when times are good, and just as quickly will shift blame onto others when times get bad. The BC Liberals have rode as astonishing wave of luck by coming to power in 2001, just as BC’s real estate boom got underway in the cities, and just as exports surged and commodity prices soared, taking with them the rest of the province.

The Thone Speech may claim that all new jobs in BC have arisen due to tax cuts implemented in 2001 and 2002, but the reality is that BC benefited from: low interest rates as determined by the Bank of Canada that launched a housing boom; an extra $3 billion per year in transfers from the federal government; huge growth in export demand from the US and Asia. At best the government can claim that the downturn of 2001 and 2002 was softened by its deficit-financed tax cuts, although even there so much of the gains went to the top earners in the province that it was a weak stimulus.

That the housing and commodity booms are now over, and BC is in a recession that is getting worse each week, points to structural weaknesses in BC’s economy that were not cured with a tax cut. Alas, the Premier is once again getting bit in the backside by his own penchant for populism, as BC’s fixed election date guarantees two and a half more months of bad economic news in the press in the lead-up to the next election. Given the choice, most politicians would have held a snap election last fall when plausible denial about the state of the economy was still possible (our Prime Minister even broke with his own fixed election date for this very reason).

But since that was not the call, expect a rugged and ugly election season, with a lot of finger-pointing and name-calling. That is a shame because now more than ever British Columbians need a real democratic debate about where the province is headed.