WHACK-A-WATTS
Dianne Watts pushed her unbeaten political streak hard and became a target for the other Liberal leadership hopefuls in a race too close to call
Dianne Watts jumped into the B.C. Liberal party leadership race with several advantages over her rivals.
She enjoyed a lofty public profile as the popular former mayor of Surrey and as a Conservative MP. She consistently topped opinion polls as the best choice to replace Christy Clark as new Liberal leader.
And, most of all, she knew how to win, having never lost an election at the municipal or federal levels — a key attribute for a defeated provincial party looking to regain power.
No wonder the Liberal leadership contest turned into a game of Whack-a-Watts, with opponents ganging up on her during often-heated debates.
“Taking the high road and having a united front — that’s the space I operate in,” Watts said in an interview. “But I learned fairly quickly it was not going to unfold that way.”
Now, with just two weeks to go until 60,000 Liberal party members make their choice for leader, Watts finds herself in the middle of a tight, tense and tough-to-predict fight.
Six candidates remain on the ballot: Watts and current Liberal MLAs Michael Lee, Todd Stone, Andrew Wilkinson, Mike de Jong and Sam Sullivan.
The biggest surprise of the contest has to be the performance of Lee, a rookie MLA first elected last year with little public profile.
Lee, the son of Chinese immigrants, is a downtown Vancouver business lawyer who has worked hard to sign up thousands of new party members to vote for him.
“I think people are looking for something different and I’ve brought a fresh perspective,” Lee said. He also brought along a crack campaign team, including strategist Mark Marissen, Christy Clark’s ex-husband.
The result: a consensus that Lee has signed up the most new party members — up to onethird of the 30,000 newcomers to swell the Liberal ranks during the campaign, according to the party grapevine.
But is Lee’s support confined to just a few ridings? That’s what his opponents hope, because the party is using a regionally weighted voting system, where every riding is worth 100 points, no matter how many members live there.
“The impression is the majority of his new supporters are concentrated in a small area of the Lower Mainland,” Wilkinson said. “Signing up 3,000 people in one riding only wins you that one riding. That doesn’t win you the race.”
Lee appears to have signed up a lot of new Liberals in Richmond’s Chinese community and in the Indo-Canadian community in Surrey. But he insists he has also grown his support outside of those power bases.
“We have good strength in Prince George, throughout the Okanagan, on Vancouver Island and across Metro Vancouver,” Lee said.
Todd Stone, though, thinks his support distribution is even better, especially among party members who supported him long before the leadership contest began.
“Those are the true activists, the hard-core party members who have been there through thick and thin,” Stone said. “Those are people who have known me and worked with me for nearly 30 years.”
But are significant numbers of Stone’s new members being disqualified by the party? That’s what rival campaigns allege, though Stone denies it.
The party has made 14,000 audit calls to make sure new members are legitimate and avoid a repeat of the 2011 leadership contest marred by fake members (including a cat signed up by the Christy Clark campaign.)
The party won’t reveal how many new members have been kicked out, and Stone rejected his opponents’ claims that his campaign has been hit by a large number of DQs.
“That’s simply not true,” he said, adding the percentage of his new members disqualified is in “the low single digits” and that all the other campaigns have had similar disqualifications.
“If the other campaigns are spending so much time worrying about us, then I like my chances,” Stone said.
Former finance minister Mike de Jong, meanwhile, has forged an alliance with Wilkinson.
Wilkinson and de Jong have agreed to encourage their supporters to mark down the other guy’s name as their second choice on the preferential voting ballot.
“Every member of the party makes up their own mind,” Wilkinson said. “But they may be induced to listen to suggestions on who should be the second choice.”
The last-minute deal-making could put pressure on the remaining candidates to forge their own alliances. Maybe Sullivan, who appears to be running behind, will cut a deal. Maybe Watts and Lee — both federal Tories — will start talking.
Watts appears to have signed up the second-largest batch of new party members behind Lee. But she’s also hoping all Liberal party members — old and new — will be swayed by her winning track record.
“That comes up over and over again throughout the province: Who is best positioned and has the capability to win a general election?” Watts said.
Watts will continue to drive home the electability point, arguing she has the best chance to defeat John Horgan and the NDP in the next election.
It’s a strong argument in the home stretch of a too-close-to-call race.