At the end of every major election campaign, the leaders of the political party sit down with the campaign manager and staff for a post-mortem on what went right, what went wrong and what they learned.
With the provincial election results now final and the prospect of a minority government led by Christy Clark's Liberals or John Horgan's NDP, propped up by Andrew Weaver's Greens, the election post-mortem will have an extra sense of urgency. Whether the next election is as soon as this fall or sometime in 2018, it certainly isn't four years away.
For both the Liberals and the NDP, they will look at the 2017 campaign and see a lost opportunity to win a majority government.
Both parties were hurt by vote splitting. There was plenty of discussion on election night about the number of seats carried by the Liberals where the combined NDP-Green vote was greater.
Much less was said about the number of NDP seats won where the Liberals and the Conservatives had more combined votes. That was the case in Courtenay-Comox, which the NDP won by nine votes on election night and eventually by 189. The B.C. Conservative candidate there received 2,201 votes, costing the Liberals the win and a majority in the Legislature.
Take that variable away and there was still a path to a majority for both of the major party leaders.
For Clark, she and the Liberals simply had to offer something new. As the Victoria Times Colonist's Les Leyne pointed out in a column in the wake of the election, the Liberals had been warned.
The party had brought in Barack Obama's 2012 campaign manager in 2016 to speak to their convention. Jim Messina stressed to them that the surest way to seize defeat from the jaws of victory was to run the same campaign as 2013.
They ignored his warning.
After all, "jobs, jobs, jobs" and "remember the 1990s" worked great then, so why not now?
Campaigns are less about politics and more about sales for the significant portion of voters that pay little attention between to government between elections.
Selling the same old wares works great for the tried-and-true party supporters but the message it tells undecided voters is that this is a party and a leader with no new ideas.
In their dislike of Horgan and the NDP, Clark and the Liberals forgot that stealing ideas from political opponents and making them part of your own platform is a tried-and-true method for continued electoral success. The Liberals could have easily taken donor reform on, cutting a major plank away from both the NDP and the Greens. Clark could have apologized to teachers about class sizes and pledged more for schools. She could have announced the eventual elimination of MSP premiums to help both businesses and individuals. Paying for it would come from the proceeds of those balanced budgets and the economic prosperity her government fostered.
Something, anything, to show that the Liberals loved more than the sounds of their own voices saying how great they are at governing.
If Clark simply had to repackage parts of the NDP and the Green platform into her own for a majority win, Horgan should have looked out of province for the NDP's 2017 election playbook.
Justin Trudeau shocked both Tom Mulcair's federal NDP and Stephen Harper's Conservatives by admitting up front that, if elected, a Liberal government in Ottawa would run deficit budgets for several years to get social programs back where they needed to be and to fix nearly 10 years of Harper's tight-fisted management.
It worked for Trudeau and it would have worked for Horgan. He would have had Clark on the defensive for the entire campaign if his core message had been: "of course I'll have to run deficits for three years because it's going to take that long to clean up 16 years of Gordon Campbell and Christy Clark sticking it to teachers, nurses, First Nations, seniors and everybody else who didn't have a seat at a Liberal Party fundraiser."
Instead, Horgan allowed himself to be hemmed in the same way Mulcair did with bland vows of balanced budgets and fiscal responsibility.
Horgan and the B.C. NDP brain trust thought B.C. voters would be scared away with a tax-and-spend platform focused on people and communities.
They were wrong.
Like the Liberals, the NDP looked back too much to 2013. Instead of just throwing out the bath water (Adrian Dix) and keeping the baby (government spending to benefit B.C. residents), the NDP turned into fiscal conservatives in 2017, at precisely the wrong moment.
Ironically, to receive Weaver's ongoing support in the Legislature, both Horgan and Clark will have to do what they should have done to win a majority in the first place in order to keep their government afloat. If the history of minority governments in Canada is any indication, that adaptation will pay dividends when the coalition inevitably crumbles and voters are called back to the polls.
-- Managing editor Neil Godbout
