The departure of Adrian Dix as NDP leader last Thursday was an understated affair, free of ignomy and recrimination.
There were kind words from the B.C. Liberal government - only fair since, according to Vaughn Palmer, an Angus Reid poll pegged Dix as the number one reason voters flinched at voting for the NDP during the last election. The Canadian Press reported laughs and applause while John Horgan, who was acclaimed as Dix`s successor the same day, graciously commended the erstwhile leader of the Opposition for building a strong, united caucus.
Yet, exactly a year to the day you're reading this column, Angus Reid completed its final election poll, which showed Liberal leader Christy Clark trailed Dix by a "nearly insurmountable" nine points. In six days he would be the next premier of British Columbia.
Instead, Clark completed one of the greatest upsets in North American political history, handed the NDP its fourth straight general election loss and damned Dix for all time with the faint praise of being the man who should have been premier.
The trouble with hindsight is that it is blinding. A year later, Dix's defeat seems inevitable, a one-man-band tripping down the stairs clanging and banging with the Kinder Morgan flip-flop and a bizarre reluctance to attack Clark in particular and Liberal sins in general, all underscored by an unaddressed, unresolved voter fear of NDP government. But, as the pollster Angus Reid wrote in Maclean`s in July 2013, he'd pegged the NDP lead at nine points on May 8, after the weak campaigning and the Kinder Morgan reversal - Clark won by four points on May 14, a massive 13 point swing.
Reid wasn't alone among pollsters in missing the mark so widely. For all the wisely nodding heads, it still doesn't make sense Adrian Dix isn't reflecting on his first year in power instead of contemplating a future in Opposition obscurity. And for all the fingers pointed in his direction, Dix is but a symptom of the NDP's ongoing malaise.
In the pollster's post-mortem, Reid identified his firm's crucial mistake: the polls represented a traditional source of NDP strength, voters under 35, in relation to their share of the population (about 30 per cent) rather than their actual share of voters (closer to 15 per cent). Reid said had the firm shifted its methodology, that final poll would have showed a razor-thin three point NDP lead. The fickleness of youth ultimately doomed Dix and represents a painful question for Horgan: when will the future supporters of the NDP finally show up for the party?
That demographic weakness is one of the reasons why, ultimately, the guts of the Liberal's political machinery turned out to be more effective than the NDP's. Dix's spontaneous seppuku in announcing his opposition to Kinder Morgan's pipeline expansion alienated a large portion of the NDP's blue-collar union base, but the traditional heft of unions as a political force is waning; according to the Globe and Mail, numbers are declining, especially in the private sector, and they're polarizing due to the perception they're protectors of pampered public servants.
Reid, on the other hand, marvelled at the Liberal's "strong, high-priced private polling" that enabled it to microtarget key ridings, no doubt courtesy of their deep-pocketed business backers, and a powerful ground game that enabled it to turn out the vote in high numbers in the Interior, North and Metro Vancouver. In its own post-mortem, ThreeHundredEight.com said the Liberals basically won the election in the Vancouver area, taking 24 of the 40 ridings there instead of the 14-16 they were expected to take; they were amply aided in the Interior/North where the Liberals took 24 seats to the NDP's seven.
Powering that ground game and Liberal comeback was what Reid describes as the "palpable fear factor about the prospect of an NDP" government. And be it Dix or Horgan or whoever, the closer it gets to 2017, the more voters will balk at contemplating even a term of NDP rule.
And, while he seems affable enough, Horgan is very much like Dix - a former policy consultant and party stalwart from the nineties trying to convince British Columbians the party has changed.
The unfortunate fact is the party has changed but for the worse - its union base is eroding while its eco-activist core is growing more militant under the pressure from the proliferation of major natural resource projects and on the flanks from the Green Party. It's left the NDP's leaders balancing on an uneven two-legged stool of lunch-bucket concerns over jobs and ivory-tower teeth-gnashing over the environment. Dix couldn't pull it off; Horgan teetered on it Tuesday as he announced he had misgivings over the controversial Site C dam project.
There are NDP MLAs, reports the Globe, who would quit caucus on the Site C dam and another thorny eco-issue - fracking - if the party took less than a hard line on either. It's hardly a foundation from which to take the Liberals to task.
Dix, ostensibly the primary cause of the 2013 election defeat, is now a political footnote. The problem for the party and its new leader is there are still too many other reasons British Columbians won't vote for the NDP.
