Congratulations to the BC Liberals

Congratulations to the BC Liberals on a completely unexpected victory. The polls had it wrong and the closest to being correct was Forum Research which was showing a 2 point NDP lead. Despite what polls registered as high disapproval ratings for Christy Clark, the NDP vote went down three points from 2009 and they lost a lot of suburban and interior ridings with NDP incumbents to the Liberals. The only place the NDP improved its vote was in inner Metro Vancouver. The NDP vote dropped on Vancouver Island, mainly at Green Party expense, and the Greens picked up a seat and the Liberals retained two seats on the Island. It could take pages to analyse why the polls got it so wrong but one factor I believed cause the NDP vote to drop was centrist voters who in 2009 voted NDP because Gordon Campbell, despite himself being a Liberal and despite Campbell having done the left-of-centre step of implementing a carbon tax, was nevertheless too right wing for them on certain policies but felt able to support Christy Clark who on economic and social policies is often more centrist than her predecessor Campbell.
However, Clark also lost her own seat of Vancouver—Point Grey to the NDP. Vancouver – Point Grey I expect will now be the highest income NDP riding in all of BC. It was an odd result for the high income riding. However, for the two previous elections when the same riding was Gordon Campbell’s riding, the NDP also showed surprising strength for such a high income riding – receiving 37% of the vote in 2005 and 40% of the vote in 2009. But it seems odd that in an election that actually swung away from the NDP that the NDP vote went up to 47% in Vancouver—Point Grey. I never expected Clark to lose her seat on the off chance that she managed to win the general election. Yet the off chance of her winning the general election went from being an off chance to being a reality and yet she still lost her seat. This is odd. Don’t know how she plans to get some MLA who just won election in a safe seat to step aside for her to run in a by-election. As they said on CBC on election night, the BC Liberals would be crazy to dump Christy Clark after she won a miracle comeback for her party just because she lost her seat.

I think the NDP ran a terrible campaign and the Liberals ran a mostly perfect campaign. The Liberals’ economic message really resonated. The Liberal warnings of stalled economic growth because of the NDP’s policies of blocking pipelines in just about any circumstances resonated as well. The NDP leader Adrian Dix warned of oil tanker traffic in the Vancouver Harbour increasing by 9 times if the Kinder Morgan pipeline were approved. If that were true I wouldn’t want oil tanker traffic in the Vancouver Harbour increasing by 9 times but I think that was a gross exaggeration. I was starting to think that the warnings of the Liberals and the newspapers of a BC NDP government stalling economic growth with their policies was true.
I read in the news that the Ontario Liberals are buoyed by the BC Liberal victory. This makes sense for many reasons. Firstly, I think the Ontario Liberals are establishing closer ties to the BC Liberals than under Clark’s predecessor Campbell because of Clark’s more centrist policies. Secondly, I’m sure the Ontario Liberals like seeing a model of a strong female leader like Clark or in the case of Ontario, Kathleen Wynne, fighting the competition and winning. Congratulations again to the BC Liberals but I’m still scratching my head about the Vancouver—Point Grey result.

RIP Diane Marleau

RIP to Diane Marleau.

Diane Marleau, the former MP for Sudbury and the former Minister of Health in Jean Chretien’s government, passed away suddenly on Wednesday at the age of 69 of cancer. She had been diagnosed with cancer a year ago but the passing came very suddenly. Not many of her former colleagues in Ottawa knew she had cancer so her passing came as a shock to many of them. She was born Diane LeBel on June 21, 1943. A Franco-Ontarian, she married her husband Paul Marleau at the age of 19 in February 1963. After serving on Sudbury City Council in the 1980s, she was elected to the House of Commons for the Sudbury riding in the November 21, 1988 federal election. She served in opposition for 5 years and despite her somewhat soft spoken nature was not afraid to go after Prime Minister Brian Mulroney in the House of Commons. She served alongside then-Nickel Belt NDP MP John Rodriguez. The two MPs often shared plane rides between Ottawa and Sudbury. Rodriguez has positive memories of Marleau. For example, he remembers when the two of them went on a trip to Washington DC and met legendary Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan. Greenspan berated Marleau for Canada’s “outdated” banking system. Marleau gave a passionate defence of Canada’s banking system and held her own against Greenspan. Marleau turned out to have been right given how well Canada’s banks fared compared to the American banks in the 2008 financial meltdown. Marleau is best remembered for her passionate defence of universal healthcare. In the 1990s, she criticized her own government for not adhering sufficiently to federal universality standards during the 1990s neo-liberal period when the federal government was relaxing on enforcing federal standards and provincial governments across the country were making health care cutbacks, due both to federal cutbacks and efforts to balance their own provincial books. After Marleau was dropped from cabinet in 1999 she became a prominent supporter of Paul Martin’s bid to lead the federal Liberal Party. Upon Martin becoming Prime Minister in 2003, Marleau was not re-appointed to cabinet but was instead given a parliamentary secretary position. She was one of many MPs who faced pressure by same-sex marriage opponents for her pro-same-sex marriage stance. One at least one occasion, there was a protest outside her constituency office. But she stuck to her guns on this important issue. In the 2006 election, she faced the closest election thus far in her parliamentary career, winning by about 9 percentage points over the NDP candidate. Marleau was unexpectedly beaten by the NDP candidate in the 2008 federal election by about 5 percentage points. After this defeat Marleau retired to private life. She was enjoying a vacation in Mexico a year ago when she suddenly fell ill, cutting short her vacation enjoyment. She returned to Canada and was diagnosed with cancer in its late stages.
Also of note was that Marleau was a fierce advocate of women’s rights and served for a time as chair of the Liberal Women’s caucus. Fittingly, just four days before her death, Kathleen Wynne was selected by the Ontario Liberal Party to be Ontario’s first female Premier.
I will do a post on Kathleen Wynne soon.
Interim Liberal leader Bob Rae, who served with Marleau for a few months in the House of Commons in 2008, recently gave a great tribute to Marleau in the House of Commons. RIP Diane Marleau. She was my favourite Sudbury politician.