Christy Clark Defies Poll Pundits To Win Clear Majority

By Sunil Narula

The election results on Tuesday night came as a huge surprise to everyone, including diehard BC Liberal supporters. Only one person was not entirely surprised by the outcome. And that was Christy Clark herself.

All along Christy had been telling everyone that her party was going to win the elections and the BC Liberals did win in style taking 50 seats leaving pollsters’ favourite NDP far behind at 33 seats.

As Christy did say after the win, “it’s not pollsters, journalists and analysts who decide the outcome of the elections. It is the people who do it.”

Clark had reason to be skeptical about exit polls. Not too long ago the same political pundits were way off the mark while making such predictions in Alberta and Ontario.
Clark’s own team of analysts who were doing their research showed BC Liberals had a good chance of winning.

On Wednesday after the historic victory, Clark told reporters, “The polls do not tell us how people are going to vote, because voting day is the only day that they vote. It’s like me asking you what you’re going to have for dinner a month from now. You might make a guess at it, but your decision could change before then.”
Clark was bang on.

She went for the kill in the last days with more ferocity reminding everyone of the economic disaster that could follow if they risked bringing NDP to power. The voters were convinced with her aggressive style of campaigning.

Plus NDP`s own evasive, weak and unconvincing style of campaigning did nothing to help their own cause. NDP might choose to call their style of campaigning as positive. But the fact of the matter is you got to be more aggressive than that in politics, if you want people to vote for you. You got to tell them something. NDP told them nothing.

The Liberals had internal, more in-depth polling that showed it “competitive” with the NDP.

Dimitri Pantazopoulos, a pollster and political strategist with centre-right parties, did polling for Clark. He said according to their research the Liberals showed a steady growth in support.

“There was no wholesale change in public opinion in B.C. We definitely trended upwards during the campaign. The televised debate definitely had an impact,” he was quoted as saying.

Did Pantazopoulos predict the Liberals would win 50 seats? “On Saturday, I told the campaign committee that we would get 48 seats,” he said.

Veteran polling firm Angus Reid admits it needs to “earn back the trust” of Canadians after nearly all pollsters inaccurately predicted Tuesday’s BC election results.

Rather than trailing the NDP by the wide margins reported by many polling organizations, Premier Christy Clark’s Liberals actually gained seats over the shell-shocked NDP.

“We need to earn back their trust,” Mario Canseco, vice-president of Angus Reid Public Opinion, said Wednesday.

Angus Reid released a pre-election poll on Monday showing the NDP with 45 per cent support from decided voters, versus only 36 per cent for the Liberals — the exact opposite of how people voted on Tuesday.

“It was motivated voters, Liberals, who bested the NDP in the voting booth,” an Ipsos Reid release said after the results, crediting the Liberals’ negative-advertising campaign for the turnaround. “The Liberals had created enough momentum in the final days of the campaign for voters to put them over the top.”

The only rough point for Christy Clark was the fact that she lost in her own riding of Vancouver-Point Grey to NDP candidate David Eby. But that one is not a biggie. She has won the war. She just had to endure a loss in a personal battle.

On Tuesday night supporters of BC NDP were left shell-shocked as the results that came out showed the exact opposite picture of what had been predicted in various exit polls. In fact BC Liberals improved upon their showing from the last provincial elections to win 50 seats and NDP could get only 33 seats.

Many people thought BC NDP took it lightly and were complacent. Surrey resident Pardeep Sharma said NDP have only themselves to blame for the loss. “NDP thought they were going to win and so they thought all they have to do was to keep saying Time For Change. There is no expiry date on government. Like best before so and so date, so what exactly did they mean by Time For Change. NDP had to do more than that and talk decisively about their policies. But their leader was evasive,” said pardeep.

Another Liberal supporter from Surrey, Gurmej Josan said he had voted for Liberals but had not expected them to win a majority with so much ease. “When the results started coming in, I felt this is good for the Liberals. But honestly although I’m a Liberal supporter even I was not expecting them to win 50 seats. It just shows that people simply do not trust the NDP,” he said.

Another Surrey resident Omair Chaudhary felt Christy Clark knew what she was doing and was more aggressive. “I think the televised debate was also the turning point for the Liberals. While Clark was firm and came out with direct answers, Dix was evasive and did not give any clear answers. People were not sure what the NDP was going to do if it came to power. There was too much uncertainty with the NDP,” said Omair.

Some also felt that Dix was not strong enough. “There was too much ammunition that the BC Liberals had against Dix and they kept coming out with negative ads with attacks against him. Ultimately it affects the voters. Even the NDP had too many negative points that they could have talked about against the Liberals but they chose not to talk about that at all. I think that was a mistake. If you have so much ammunition against your opponent you have to tell people about that constantly and remind them. The NDP just did not do that,” said another voter from Surrey.

As for the NDP candidates they too did not have any explanation as to what happened. “I think we ran a strong campaign. Ultimately it is the people who decide. It was a tough race. I think we are victims of a negative campaign, the negative ads that the Liberals ran those ads did affect people. That’s what it is at the end of the day,” said Surrey-Fleetwood NDP candidate Jagrup Brar who lost to Liberal Peter Fassbender by less than 300 votes.

Surrey-Panorma NDP candidate Amrik Mahil too said he could not understand what went wrong. He lost to Liberal candidate Marvin Hunt. “I don’t know what happened. I simply cannot understand it. The Liberals did not run a good campaign,” he said.

Delta-north NDP candidate Sylvia Bishop lost out to Liberal Scott Hamilton. “I think people were expecting a different outcome. Certainly I was hoping for a different outcome in my riding. I’m very proud of the campaign I ran. We stayed positive,’ she said.

Ultimately it boiled down to the fact that the BC NDP wanted to stay positive and not attack the Liberals. The Liberals, on the other hand, ran a campaign which they thought gave them the best chance to win. And they won.

A bill proposed by a Conservative Party MP to make recruitment of youths in criminal gangs a crime has secured the support of the Canada’s justice minister and is set to become law.

Paramjit Gill, Member of Parliament from Brampton-Springdale in Ontario, has proposed legislation that will also inflict tougher penalties on criminal organizations trying to recruit youth.

The bill has received the support of Justice Minister Rob Nicholson and is set to be adopted before parliament breaks for summer June 21, the South Asian Observer reported Friday.

According to the report, Bill C-394 has passed the third and final hurdle in the House of Commons by a vote of 240-36 and has been submitted to the upper house, the Senate, for review.

The bill proposes prohibition of recruiting or encouraging a person to join a criminal organization. The new offence will carry a maximum of a five-year jail term and a mandatory minimum penalty of six months, if the person recruited is under the age of 18.

Gill, 39, said that, as a father of three, he was particularly concerned about addressing the issue of gang recruitment in Canada’s communities.

He appealed to all MPs to support the bill in its final vote.–IANS

After adapting Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children” for the big screen, Indo-Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta is working on a script based on Shilpi Somaya Gowda’s novel “Secret Daughter” about how two families are bound by an adoption.

Mehta is said to be busy penning the script for producers Jody Colero of Silent Joe Inc. and Hussain Amarshi of Mongrel Media, reportshollywoodreporter.com.

“Secret Daughter” tells the story of two families, one in Mumbai, India, forced to give a baby up for adoption, and another in San Francisco, raising a child from another culture.- IANS