The NDP will win the next election.
That was made crystal clear in Thursday’s two byelections. The NDP won Port Moody-Coquitlam by a sizeable margin, as was expected. They had a popular candidate (and former Liberal) in recently-retired Port Moody mayor Joe Trasolini, and results were much as expected.
The real surprise and key result was in Chilliwack-Hope, where the NDP won a seat they have never held.Gwen O’Mahony took the seat in a three-way fight, with the BC Liberal vote melting away, and the resurgent BC Conservatives coming third with 25 per cent of the vote, despite a poorly-funded and disorganized campaign.
Liberal candidate Laurie Throness got 4,399 votes and 31 per cent of the vote. This compares with Barry Penner in the 2009 general election, who got 8,985 votes.
So the Liberals, in the course of three years, lost more than half their support, with a large proportion of that going to the BC Conservatives, whose candidate John Martin got 3,548 votes. The Conservatives did run a candidate in the riding in 2009, and he got 1,148 votes.
There is another factor that most media outlets have ignored. That’s the voter turnout. In the 2009 election, 16,865 votes were cast in Chilliwack-Hope. On Thursday, despite the intense scrutiny this race has been under, and numerous visits by the premier and other party leaders, 14,013 people voted.
That means more than 2,800 stayed home — likely because they wouldn’t vote for the Liberals, and did not want to vote for anyone else. If the Liberals can convince most of those people to come back to them in the next election, the Liberals will win seats like Chilliwack-Hope next year.
However, the vote splits in other ridings ensure that the NDP will win a majority government. The Liberals won a number of seats in 2009 by narrow margins (one by just 88 votes), with little or no Conservative opposition. The Conservatives only ran 24 candidates in 2009 and their leader, Wilf Hanni, was an unknown.
In Langley, MLA Mary Polak may have a battle on her hands in 2013. The NDP’s Kathleen Stephany got 8,400 votes in 2009 to her 13,895. There was no Conservative candidate.
If the Liberals can convince enough disaffected voters to come back to them, they will hold onto some seats. But in three-way fights, they will lose a lot of seats they now hold — and Langley may well be one of them.