Next 10 days may turn B.C. politics upside-down
The wild ride resumes Monday with more revelations about the mysterious legislature probe and winds up with Nanaimo byelection
there’s another reason this is all so important: The razorclose standings in the B.C. legislature.
If Plecas were to resign, it would force the governing NDP-Green alliance to put up one of their own MLAs to be the new Speaker, potentially tilting the province into a snap election.
But there’s an even more imminent danger to the NDPGreen team and their narrow hold on power: The Jan. 30 byelection in Nanaimo.
The riding became vacant when popular NDP MLA Leonard Krog quit to make a successful run for mayor. The seat is considered a safe one for the NDP, but if the Liberals steal it in an upset, it would deadlock the legislature in a tie and likely force an election.
And now the Nanaimo outcome looks anything but certain.
A new opinion poll, by the ONE Persuasion polling company, shows the NDP holding a narrow lead over the Liberals: 42 per cent to 38 per cent respectively among decided Nanaimo voters.
The poll, commissioned by The Orca news website, has a margin of error of 5.2 percentage points, suggesting the byelection is a statistical toss-up.
The poll result is similar to another one causing much concern among NDP insiders. I am told a poll commissioned by the province’s big labour unions pegged the NDP lead at just three percentage points over the Liberals.
But even more concerning for the NDP is this: When the pollster applied a “likely-voter screen” to the results, it flipped the lead around, putting the Liberals ahead by two points!
What is a likely-voter screen? It’s a method pollsters use to weight a poll result based on the likelihood that a respondent will show up on election day and cast a ballot.
Here’s the problem: The polls suggest the Liberals have higher support among older voters. And older voters are more likely to vote than younger voters.
The ONE Persuasion poll also suggested Liberal voters are more motivated to get out on election day.
All of this comes on top of last week’s astonishingly boneheaded decision by the NDP to release unpopular details of its new speculation and vacancy tax on homeowners.
The Horgan government stubbornly inflicted the tax on Nanaimo over the objections of the previous city council. Then the government last week revealed its “negative-option billing” system of applying the tax, forcing all homeowners to file an annual declaration proving they are not real-estate speculators to avoid paying it.
Why the NDP would choose to detonate this stink bomb in the middle of a byelection that could bring the government down is truly mind-boggling.
If the NDP loses this seat, it could go down as one of the dumbest political moves ever in B.C.