PUBLISHED IN THE VANCOUVER SUN
April 26, 2010
It’s been almost a year since the BC Liberals won the provincial election, and it’s pretty clear that apart from a lot of frantic waving of red mittens during the Olympics, they aren’t having much fun these days.
They’re still dealing with the fallout from a budget deficit four times higher than promised. The remarkably unpopular HST seems daily to grow only more so. They’re rolling out painful cuts in health and education after promising not to do that sort of thing. And then there is the polling. For six months they’ve trailed the New Democrats, and instead of a post-Olympic bounce the gap is getting worse. The Liberals are now 18 points behind the NDP according to an Angus Reid poll released last week, and their own support has slipped below the crucial 30 per cent threshold.
A bad run of luck, to be sure. But with three years left in the mandate, BC Liberals say there’s plenty of time left to turn their fortunes around.
Maybe, but there’s good reason to think that’s going to be pretty tough.
That’s because there’s more to this than just a string of broken promises, scandalous revelations, unpopular policies and bad polling numbers. The BC Liberals have overcome those things in the past.
The difference now is Gordon Campbell has dealt a serious and perhaps fatal blow to the one thing that allowed him to get away with all this in the past: economic credibility.
Mr. Campbell has never been particularly popular with British Columbians. Since long before his landslide 2001 victory and throughout his two subsequent election wins, he and the BC Liberals have been seen as uncaring, dishonest, unaccountable, untrustworthy, out of touch, mean-spirited and arrogant. And yet, he just kept winning those elections.
Why? Voters believed that when it came to managing the economy, he was good enough to trump all these other concerns, and better than the NDP alternative.
That started to change only weeks after the last election. When Mr. Campbell flip-flopped on the HST and fudged the deficit numbers, he made a lot of his own supporters very, very unhappy and left a lot of people realizing the BC Liberals weren’t all that good at the only thing they were supposed to be really good at. Last month, another Angus Reid survey showed that more people now trust Carole James – not Mr. Campbell – to find the right solutions for BC’s economy.
This is a very significant finding and suggests a major shift in the fundamentals of the BC political landscape, one that could make it very challenging for the BC Liberals to recover.
Much depends on what the New Democrats do at this point. The BC Liberals could recover their economic credibility over time, as the economy improves and the HST anger abates, or they could remake themselves under new leadership. Both will be harder to do if the NDP takes real steps to change their reputation on economic management.
New Democrats have traditionally stayed away from focusing on the economy, and for good reason. The majority of voters trust New Democrats on health care, education, care for the vulnerable and the environment – these are the issues on which the NDP traditionally wins elections. There’s an ongoing debate inside the party. Some worry new economic ideas and partners will take the NDP away from its core values. Others fret it’s tactically impossible to beat the BC Liberals on their ground.
The fact remains a lot of potential NDP voters stay away because they don’t trust them on economic questions. Carole James seems to have decided it’s time for the NDP to change that.
At the NDP’s November convention, James acknowledged the party’s weakness on economic issues and pledged a new focus on balancing social progress with economic strength. She spoke of building a bigger tent by seeking new connections with the business community, new, more diverse partners and new ideas for the post-crisis economic world.
Next week we’ll see the first concrete steps when Ms. James hosts discussions with leaders from across the spectrum: business, labour, environment, community and culture. The meetings are unlikely to produce any immediate policy announcements, but by showing voters she’s willing to bring change to the NDP and listen to a balance of voices Carole James is already making sure the BC Liberals’ problems have only just begun.
David Bieber was director of party communications for the BC NDP from 2003 to 2009.