Vaughn Palmer: Campaigns matter, and B.C.'s election history proves it

In 1996, the Liberals under Gordon Campbell won the popular vote, but lost in the all-important seat count. Photo by RICK LOUGHRAN /Postmedia News

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VICTORIA — Notes from 40 years on the B.C. election beat.

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The first provincial election I covered, in 1986, pitted Social Credit premier Bill Vander Zalm against New Democrat Bob Skelly. Vander Zalm surfed a wave of publicity from his recent win in a leadership convention.

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Skelly got off to a wretched start with a panic attack in front of a live TV audience (“Can we start again?”). But the New Democrats recovered, while Vander Zalm’s charisma-without-substance wore thin over the campaign.

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The Socreds still won, but the seat count and popular vote at the finish was closer than at the start.

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The 1991 B.C. election delivered a stronger demonstration that campaigns matter. Premier Rita Johnston, Vander Zalm’s ill-fated successor, was doomed from the outset and New Democrat Mike Harcourt was positioned to win.

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But in the last 10 days of the campaign, the upstart B.C. Liberals surged to the forefront thanks to a strong showing in the election debate by the party leader Gordon Wilson.

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Harcourt still won on a vote split. Wilson came second, making the Liberals the vehicle of choice for centre-right voters for the next 30 years.

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The 1996 election was a close call. The Liberals under new leader Gordon Campbell (he’d supplanted Wilson in a coup) won the popular vote.

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But NDP premier Glen Clark (whose supporters had a hand in sending Harcourt to premature retirement) won the seat count in a reminder of the NDP’s formidable ground game on election days.

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The 2001 election was the most one-sided in the 100 years since party politics emerged in B.C. Campbell won all but two seats in the legislature. But his refusal to recognize the surviving two New Democrats as the official Opposition ensured the NDP would begin picking itself up off the floor from Day 1.

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The New Democrats were sufficiently competitive under Carole James in 2005 to ensure that the B.C. Liberals lost 30 seats, leaving Campbell in power but also in a bad mood for some time to come.

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The Campbell-James rematch in 2009 had a similar result. The aftermath added a lesson about what is and is not said in election platforms.

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Ten weeks after the election, Campbell introduced the harmonized sales tax, a possibility that was barely mentioned during the campaign and then only as not on the radar screen.

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The postelection doublecross doomed the tax and Campbell’s political career as well.

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The New Democrats were ahead at the start of the 2013 election under new leader Adrian Dix and the opinion polls had him ahead at the end. I also called it wrong.

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I missed signs I saw only in hindsight, including Dix’s comment during the election debate that he was “only 35 years old” when he backdated a memo to protect his former boss Glen Clark and that the B.C. Liberals under Christy Clark had focused resources on 50 ridings — winning 49 them.

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Afterward, I said “campaigns matter” should be posted on the wall of every newsroom and pundit. Someone sent me a crocheted picture of the legislature with those very words on the bottom. I look at it every day.