… but the good people of Surrey–Panorama Ridge have decided to say thanks, but no thanks to Gordon Campbell’s New Era.
It wasn’t just that they threw the Liberals out. It was a rout; the Liberals got nearly exactly the same result the NDP did in 2001 – an election that practically annihilated us Dippers province-wide.
Campbell’s strategy of handing the Liberal Party over to the religious right may have backfired with the nomination of the Talebanesque Mary Polak; she and her book-banning allies on the local school board are the original fringe on top of Surrey.
Meanwhile, Green Party Leader Adriane Carr rolled the dice, ran in the by-election… and came up far short of the expectations she helped fuel. At the very least, she had to improve dramatically on the party’s 2001 showing: partly to show the party could be more than a spoiler, and partly to demonstrate she has some degree of personal appeal. Instead, the Green share of the vote dropped half a point to 8.4%.
Combined with her peremptory rejection of the Citizens Assembly electoral reform proposals, which raised some hackles among more than a few of her members, and the abject failure of her earlier electoral reform initiative, this fiasco just might be enough to unearth some of the discontent roiling beneath the party’s surface. And while a divisive internal leadership battle might be suicidal a few months before an election, well, the last accusation most people would level at the Greens is that they’re too politically calculating…
