On the eve of the election, all signs point to an NDP victory, with the only question being how many seats the party will win on Election Night.
Ah, yes, those seats! There are 85 of them, and the party to get to 43 first wins a majority (actually, 44 seats is a more comfortable target, since a Speaker must be elected and he or she comes from the government side).
There’s still a chance the B.C. Liberals could get to that magic number, but a number of things (well, pretty well everything) have to go their way for that to work. More on that a little later.
But the NDP “path to victory” is easier to discern. Let’s start with the premise that the party will hang onto all but one of their 36 current seats (that Chilliwack-Hope seat the party won in last year’s by-election may fall off the table, since it is not traditional NDP territory by any means).
So where will the NDP path to victory take them?
Start in Comox Valley on Vancouver Island. The NDP has won this seat before and they’re confident of knocking off incumbent Don McRae, who won by less than 1,400 last time.
Now, scoot over to the west side of Vancouver, where the NDP is confident of winning in Christy Clark’s home riding of Vancouver Pt. Grey and in neighboring Vancouver Fairview (the party held this seat a few years ago when Gregor Robertson won it for them, before he quit to do something else) and Vancouver Fraserview (which it lost by less than 800 votes in 2009).
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Now head over to Burnaby, where the party expects to win both Burnaby Lougheed and Burnaby North (which it lost by less than 600 votes last time). Turn south to Surrey, where the riding of Surrey-Tynehead comes into play. Long-time B.C. Liberal MLA Dave Hayer has retired, and the NDP expects to make up the 1500 vote gap that was there last time.
Now head back across the River, to Maple Ridge-Mission, which the B.C. Liberals won by a mere 55 votes last time. Given a series of polls that shows the NDP has a large (eight points or so) lead in Metro Vancouver and you can see why those razor-thin margins enjoyed by the B.C. Liberals last time may evaporate Tuesday night.
Time to head up to the south Okanagan. New Democrats love to point out the Green Party took 16 per cent of the vote in the riding of Penticton in 2009. That’s almost 3,700 people, and there’s no Green candidate this time, so how do those people vote? Presumably, most head to the NDP, which need to close a 3,000 vote gap.
That’s nine seats right there, and we haven’t even included Boundary-Similkameen, Vernon-Monashee, or Kamloops North Thompson (all ridings in the NDP’s cross hairs). If the gap between the two parties is significantly wide (greater than, say, four or five points), ridings like Vancouver Langara, Vancouver False Creek, and Coquitlam Burke-Mtn. come into play.
That’s the NDP’s path to victory.
So where is the B.C. Liberal’s path? it starts with the premise that the party will retain most of its existing 45 seats. If it loses a handful (such as Maple Ridge Mission, Vancouver Fraserview, and one Burnaby seat) it needs to win pretty well the same number in other areas.
The B.C. Liberals think their best bets for new pickups are: Delta North, Delta South, Burnaby Deer Lake (to which New Democrats say “yeah, right!), Saanich South and Fraser Nicola.
So there you have it. Two paths to victory for two different parties.
One is carefully marked out though, while the other, overgrown with weeds after years of neglect, is harder to find.
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