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Advice for BC NDP: Court the Rich

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May election results reveal a surprising new voter bloc for the party.

By Tom Barrett, August 12, 2013, TheTyee.ca

As the B.C. New Democratic Party racks its neural tissues to discover how it blew a 20-point lead in the polls on May 14, it might be happy to learn that the news isn’t all bad.

Sure, the NDP was thumped in an election that everybody expected it to win. But it did make gains in some unexpected places.

Among the very rich, for example.

Final election results show the NDP made some of its biggest gains in some of B.C.’s wealthiest ridings. Ridings like Vancouver-False Creek, where the NDP increased its total by a healthy 3,479 votes over its 2009 showing. Ditto for Vancouver-Fairview (up 2,768 votes) and North Vancouver-Seymour (up 2,343 votes).

All three of those ridings are among the 10 constituencies with the highest median after-tax incomes, according to BC Stats. In fact, six of the 10 ridings where the NDP made its biggest gains May 14 are on that top 10 income list. (The figures, while the latest available for income by constituency, come from the 2006 census and are a bit dated. But heck, a riding that was wealthy in 2006 is probably still doing pretty well today.)

The table below shows the wealthy ridings where the NDP vote increased the most. The margin columns show who won the riding in the last two elections and the winner’s margin as a percentage of the total vote.

 

Riding

2009 Margin

2013 Margin
Vancouver-False Creek Lib 28.9 Lib 15.5
Vancouver-Fairview Lib 4.9 NDP 5.1
North Vancouver-Seymour Lib 31.8 Lib 18.0
Vancouver-Point Grey Lib 10.1 NDP 4.4
Surrey-Cloverdale Lib 32.9 Lib 30.5
West Vancouver-Capilano Lib 53.0 Lib 44.7

As shown, two of these wealthy ridings, Vancouver-Fairview and Vancouver-Point Grey, abandoned the Liberals for the NDP. And the Liberals’ victory margins fell in all of the other four. Clearly, in B.C. the class war is riddled with quislings.

As the NDP pores over its election flop, there is an obvious message in these numbers: it is time for the NDP to go after the crème de la crème. For whatever reason, British Columbia’s plutocrats are starting to take a shine to the left. New Democrats would be fools to rebuff them.

No big electoral shifts

It’s true that marketing the NDP to the one per cent would present some challenges. The party grassroots would be sure to cause a fuss, and making gains among the economic elite would require a long-term strategy.

Most of the ridings on the table above still boast pretty fat Liberal margins. If the trend from May 14 continues, the NDP won’t capture West Vancouver-Capilano, for example, until the election of 2037.

Still, that kind of long-range thinking might be what’s needed to succeed in B.C. politics. As the graph below shows, things haven’t changed much lately.

BCElectionGraph_600px.jpg

Ever since British Columbians recovered from the 2001 Liberal landslide, all the scandals and fevered rhetoric that B.C. politics is famous for have produced bupkis in terms of big electoral shifts.

Even the one bit of movement that shows up on the chart — the uptick in the Conservative vote — is misleading. The Conservatives ran 24 candidates in 2009. They ran 56 official candidates in 2013, plus another four candidates who weren’t listed as Conservatives on the ballot because of a paperwork snafu.

So, while the party’s overall share of the vote went up on May 14, its vote per candidate didn’t do much. In 2009, the Conservatives got 1,435 votes per candidate. In 2013, they got 1,532 votes per official candidate — 1,483 votes per candidate if you include the four “unofficial” Tories.

On the other hand, the other third party, the Greens, saw their share of the total vote stay flat at just over eight per cent. But that masks a remarkable increase.

In 2009, the Greens ran a full slate of 85 candidates. This year, they ran only 61 candidates. The Green vote per candidate jumped to 2,403 from 1,584 — an increase of 52 per cent.

The Green vote more than doubled in seven ridings, all but one of them in southern Vancouver Island.

And, if you’re wondering, while the Greens won their only seat in wealthy Oak Bay-Gordon Head, they didn’t make any real gains in the other most-affluent ridings.

Which still leaves the champagne-slurping fat-cat vote wide open for the NDP to exploit. [Tyee]

Show Canadian Parties Who’s Boss

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Voters, think yourselves employers, and would-be politicos your job seekers. Give ’em hell.

By Crawford Kilian, August 9, 2013, TheTyee.ca

Ever since the failure of the B.C. New Democratic Party to win the May election, dissidents within the party have blamed everyone from Adrian Dix to campaign manager Brian Topp and party president Moe Sihota. Plenty of outsiders have offered their own analyses and recommendations, not always well meant.

No doubt the usual suspects deserve the criticism, but I suspect the real problem is voters’ failure to remember that a democracy is an enterprise where the voters — not the parties — are the boss.

Politicians pay lip service to that idea, but they’re happier with promoting themselves as “leaders” we should happily follow. The media take the cue from the politicians, running endless stories about what the prime minister, premier, or some cabinet minister is doing. Then they profess to be scandalized to report how politicians are exploiting their perks and charging $16 orange juice to the voters’ tab.

Running in parties is a convenience for politicians, who get a better chance of election in exchange for accepting party “discipline.” The parties are less convenient for voters because party promises rarely match performance. This leads to cynicism among politicians and voters alike, and that leads to apathy and still more political abuse. A democracy can’t prosper with absentee owners; someone’s got to mind the store.

While voters have ignored their responsibilities, all parties have ignored the demographic, environmental and economic changes transforming Canada along with the rest of the world. Older Canadians may still be voters, but they notably failed to bring up their kids to take voting seriously. Robins are showing up in the Arctic while swallows vanish from the Lower Mainland. Technology has made countless industries obsolete.

Reframing the parties

We won’t solve our political problems with a reformed or abolished Senate, or a more civilized Question Period, or less whipping of backbenchers. We can’t get rid of parties, but we should reframe them, so they always remember that they’re just so many job applicants. We are their employers, elections are hiring interviews, and once hired they had damned well better deliver on what they promise.

Here’s what every federal and provincial political party, regardless of ideology, should offer Canadians:

1. Its own concept of a social contract, explaining its view of taxes and what we can reasonably expect from our investment: a country where we collectively look after basic support systems so we can individually get on with our lives. The difference between parties would be in the definition of “basic support.”

2. Redefinition of the role of MP/MLA, not so much as “people’s representative” but as “people’s agent,” like the agents of movie stars and athletes: MPs would look after the details to ensure their constituents have both immediate work and meaningful long-term careers. Like agents’ income, MPs’ income would depend on that of the voters. Government MPs and MLAs would take pay cuts based on double their home riding’s unemployment rate: a five per cent unemployment rate this quarter means 10 per cent less on the MP’s next-quarter take-home pay and eventual pension. That might make backbenchers less whippable.

3. A detailed business plan for the province or country. This wouldn’t be just to go on doing what we’ve always done, but also to argue what we should plan to do when the resources run out or a natural disaster hits. The Finnish government is currently working “to make Finland the most competent country in the world by 2020.” Canada could and should give the Finns some competition on that score.

The business plan would include how to fund full healthcare, with demographic sustainability over next 50 years, minimum; provide free education to all as an investment to ensure sustainability; strong support for young families; and active recruitment of immigrants who can also maintain cultural and trade links with their home countries.

The plan would also include heavy support for scientific and technological research and development: R&D will drive change in all countries, so we need to keep pace. The next tech revolution could come in computers or synthetic biology, or something completely unforeseen. So the party wouldn’t bet on training particular kinds of workers (which would subsidize industries that may already be finished), but on the general education of highly literate citizens who could well invent a scientific revolution we can’t even imagine yet.

A party without such a business plan should be shown the door.

4. A vision of the poor not as a problem to be solved but an opportunity to be seized, through better education and the provision of more meaningful work. With so few young workers and so many retirees to support, we can’t afford to waste the productivity of any worker. We may quarrel about levels of support, but not about support itself.

Listening like smart employers

When elections come, we should consider ourselves employers listening to very anxious job seekers who want control over very large sums of our money. They should be able to tell us what they’d do with that money, and what kind of return they’d get on it.

Smart employers know bullshit when they hear it, especially when it’s obviously what the applicant thinks they want to hear: “Gee, I’m a team player, I’ve got ideas that will save you money, I’ve got a passion for this field, you won’t be disappointed if you hire me.”

Better to hear an applicant who looks you in the eye and says: “You’ve got big problems. This is what I think they are, this is what they’re costing you, and this is how you might start to fix them. If you don’t agree, thanks for your time and good luck.”

We’re too big a country for populist micro-management. But on the day the government calls a new election, it should be legally obliged to submit a balance sheet on what it’s spent, what it’s borrowed, and how many of its promises it’s actually kept. The balance sheet would be drawn up by the Parliamentary Budget Officer, not by anyone answering to the government itself, and the Opposition would be free to present its own critique.

Reframing our parties along these lines wouldn’t solve all our problems. As the great American journalist H. L. Mencken observed, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

But we’re all the common people, and we sometimes learn from experience whether we like it or not. We don’t always fall for warmongers, racketeers, or pretty faces. If experience teaches us that the present party system (which has never been in any of our Constitution Acts) is treating us poorly, we can still remember who’s supposed to be the boss, and who are just the well-dressed flunkies we’ve hired to work for us. [Tyee]

Libs core review to look at ‘alternative service delivery’

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By Colleen Kimmett    Published July 31, 2013  http://thetyee.ca

 

Every hospital, university, crown corporation and government ministry will be under scrutiny in the provincial core review planned for this fall.

Energy and mines minister Bill Bennett announced today the terms of reference for the review, which aims to reduce spending by $100 million over the next two years.

“We intend to leave no stone unturned. We know government has already done a good job of managing costs, but we also know more can always be done. This review is about putting the taxpayer and families at the forefront of our decision-making process,” stated Bennett in a press release.

According to a ministry backgrounder, among the objectives of the review are:

– to focus ministry programs and activities on “achieving government’s vision of a strong economy”;

– to eliminate overlap and duplication between ministries;

– to reduce red tap and unnecessary regulations that hinder economic development;

– to ensure public sector management wage levels are appropriate.

The review will also “confirm government’s core responsibilities and eliminate programs that could provide better service at less cost through alternative service delivery models” a move which in the 2001 Liberal government core review meant privatization.

Resulting budget cuts of that review also eliminated thousands of jobs on a day civil servants called Black Tuesday.

Earlier this month, Bennett told The Times Colonist that with this core review, “you’re not going to see anything like a Black Tuesday or anything like that.” However, he also said, “I hope we’re able to find ways of spending less money without people losing their jobs. That’s definitely what I’m hoping. But I can’t guarantee that’s going to be the case.”

In an op-ed in the Vancouver Sun today, NDP MLA Shane Simpson said that, while “the idea of a core review is not in itself a bad thing. . . we don’t know whether this is to be a comprehensive review that will have real value, or if it will mean widespread service cuts to ministries already struggling to meet unsustainable budgets due to the Liberals’ unrealistic bogus budget being re-introduced this week.”

A working group on the core review is expected to have recommendations ready for cabinet approval by December 31, 2014.

Colleen Kimmett is a senior editor at The Tyee.

Five Ways the BC NDP Can Re-Invent Itself

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Simply replacing Adrian Dix won’t fix party’s problems, argues former candidate.

By Matt Toner, 24 Jul 2013, TheTyee.ca

In marketing, it’s understood that your brand isn’t what you say it is — it’s what your customers say it is. And in their ten second span alone in the voting booth, the people of British Columbia said a lot about the brand of the provincial NDP.

In May, we came face-to-face with an uncomfortable truth: many mainstream voters seemingly cannot bring themselves to vote for the BC NDP, no matter how dissatisfied they might be with the incumbents or how much they might agree with our ideas.

I would argue that this is largely due to the brand perception that our political opponents created around the BC NDP, one that has had years to take root and one that we have not done much to refute.

Because of this, the BC Liberals felt they still had a puncher’s chance when they lurched into April well behind in the polls. Based on the brand of the BC NDP — one that they helped establish in the public’s mind — they knew exactly where to hit us. They kept pressing their advantage; we refused to counter. They didn’t let up and it turned into a devastating knockout.

Following such a loss, change is inevitable. No one questions this. But it seems that much of the change being talked about starts and ends with the position of party leader.

This concerns me. Once we undertake what will be a protracted leadership contest, the party will expend a vast amount of energy. At the end of that process, will we still have the interest and momentum to deeply examine other areas where the BC NDP needs an upgrade? Or will we simply conclude that the mission has been accomplished and that we are now ready for 2017?

A new start for the New Democrats

I doubt that a leadership campaign — by itself — will do much to change the general public’s perception of our party. Barring the emergence of a Justin Trudeau-type, the old brand will still resonate and could very easily lead to the same kind of electoral outcome.

Interestingly, it turns out this concern is also on the minds of many rank-and-file members of the BC NDP. Since the May election I have talked to or been approached by a surprisingly wide range of people who believe it is time to fundamentally re-examine who we are as a party, something they did not feel necessary after the electoral loss in 2009.

Right now, many believe that “change for the better” is an idea we need to apply to ourselves. So if we’re going to re-imagine the BC NDP as a 21st century social democratic party, where do we start?

1. Be openly open to new ideas

Social media is pervasive, accessible and inexpensive, giving us a number of platforms through which we can explore a wide range of ideas. We should do so, openly.

We might be surprised at the issues about which our members are both concerned and knowledgeable. Genetically modified foods, temporary foreign workers, skyrocketing student debt and data privacy would all figure into the mix. And these are all subjects where the BC NDP should have an active opinion: after all, on a daily basis, Facebook touches far more people’s lives in British Columbia than any pipeline.

2. Allies are as important as members

Problematically, our membership base has been described as “old and aging,” and that isn’t likely to change any time soon. Hence the importance of recruiting allies; groups that would not consider party membership but might be tightly aligned with specific goals.

We saw this in the May election with the Save B.C. Film movement. Thanks to direct advocacy and relatively swift policy development, the BC NDP was able to forge an alliance with many in the film and television industry (and, to a certain extent, the gaming industry). Not only did this give the party a new angle on a relevant economic issue, our engagement absolutely translated to votes in key ridings like Vancouver-Fairview.

There are many other groups that could be similarly embraced between now and the next election. And while they may not be as directly beneficial to the party as a flood of new members, these allies build a bigger tent, generate fresh energy and offer relevant new perspectives. The federal Liberals have moved in this direction with their “supporter” class of members and have gotten promising early results. It is a practice we should emulate.

3. Understand what makes data relevant

There is another little-discussed reason the federal Liberals are so pleased with their new class of supporters: it gives them access to a wider range of voter data. The insights gleaned from this information will doubtlessly underpin the tactics of their next election campaign.

Such information forms the basis of a “moneyball” approach to political campaigning. Using these techniques, the BC NDP could develop a much better understanding of which tactics would produce wins under specific sets of circumstances. Right now, we are sitting on a wealth of information from the May election. It’s time to start crunching those numbers.

4. Update fundraising techniques

Although the BC NDP did better than ever when it came to corporate fundraising in this election cycle, we tested the goodwill of our membership through an ongoing campaign of repeated phone and email solicitations. As a result, we now risk a capital strike of sorts by our most reliable donors.

Moving forward, we need to diversify this approach. Techniques like online micro-donations (through tools like Kickstarter or Indiegogo) are part of the new frontier. The NDP campaign here in False Creek worked with IndieGala on such an initiative, with surprisingly good results.

5. Redefine voter engagement mechanisms

For the most part — much as we would like to believe otherwise — voters don’t really focus on election issues until the home stretch. At that moment of engagement, brand perception really counts.

But if the BC NDP has worked through the four points outlined above, we should have large clusters of new supporters and members that have helped define our new brand. They will be ready to be activated.

This activation can come in a number of forms, but one that worked well on my campaign was the “votemob” organized for people in video game studios. Working with private sector stakeholders, we spread the word via social media that the industry should come together at the same place, at the same time, to vote. We picked the Roundhouse on a Friday afternoon and crossed our fingers.

On that day, hundreds of people in their 20s and 30s filled the courtyard and waited for well over an hour to vote, many of them for the first time. Given that voter participation continues to dwindle, it’s hard to overstate the importance of that moment. Obviously, it didn’t produce a win for my campaign but it’s a very promising indication that such tactics could be a big part of our collective future as a party.

And that last point is perhaps the most important: what is our collective future?

Will simply changing our leader get us there? I don’t believe so.

If we aspire to be more than a party of opposition, then we need to do more than just furrow our brows at the failings of the 2013 campaign. We should instead spend our time and energy building a radically updated social democratic brand, one that will resonate across the broadest possible spectrum of like-minded voters in 2017. [Tyee]