"The NDP is like the guy that shows up on moving day, sits on your sofa, eats all your pizza and drinks all of your beer and then says that was a lot of work."
Premier Christy Clark smiled and paused, letting the laughter and clapping from her Prince George audience fill the Civic Centre.
Then she got serious in her attack on her opponent in the upcoming election.
"The NDP say they support workers but they don't support work," she scolded, listing major resource development projects that John Horgan opposes, in whole or part.
No doubt that line will be part of her repertoire when she hits the road next month, once the official campaign gets underway.
Confidence oozed from Clark during her appearance at the premier's dinner two weeks ago at the Civice Centre, a soldout B.C. Liberals fundraiser. Area MLAs Shirley Bond, Mike Morris, John Rustad and Coralee Oakes worked the crowd, touching base with longtime supporters, pumping them up for the battle ahead.
Morris and Bond officially opened their shared Prince George campaign office on Friday with the same upbeat swagger.
That tone is markedly different from the same time four years ago, when it looked like the Adrian Dix orange wave was going to wipe out the Liberals. They were behind by double digits in the polls and pundits were calling for a bloodbath, with the Liberals reduced to as few as 10 seats. Then there was the 801 movement, led by a group of cranky party insiders plotting to oust Clark at 8:01 p.m. on election night, one minute after the polls closed.
Bond and Morris were worried, well aware that the two Prince George ridings have historically swung towards the government of the day.
If the trend held true, local NDP candidates Bobby Deepak and Sherry Ogasawara would be the new MLAs heading to Victoria to report to Premier Adrian Dix.
Even after an exclusive Citizen/CKPG poll came out three weeks before the vote, showing Morris with a seven point lead and Bond up five points, there was still plenty of apprehension in the Liberal camp.
The release of the poll happened to be the same week that Liberals got what they still gleefully call the "Kinder surprise," Dix's Earth Day announcement that the Kinder Morgan pipeline project wouldn't happen while he was premier, regardless of what an environmental assessment found.
After that, the story goes, voters fled back into the arms of the Liberals and their enthusiastic leader who assured them that people could care for both the economy and the environment.
That's not what really happened.
The Kinder surprise is simply a convenient coincidence to attribute the pivotal moment of how that great Liberal comeback or that devastating NDP collapse started, depending on one's politics.
The reality is that the election for most people didn't even start until more than a week later, on April 29, the night of the one and only televised debate. Before then, the election was background noise for much of the electorate.
The Citizen/CKPG poll, like every other poll in the spring of 2013, overestimated NDP support and underrepresented the number of Liberal supporters. (The two news outlets won't be spending money on polling this time around but we will be collaborating again on an all-candidates forum - stay tuned for that).
The polls also discounted the significant size of the bloc of undecided voters. When contacted by telephone for an election poll, most people would rather say they've made their mind up and pick one than indicate that they aren't engaged and haven't thought about it at all.
The Citizen/CKPG poll had the number of undecided voters in Prince George-Mackenzie at 19 per cent a month before the election. In hindsight, that bloc was probably double that size or more.
It was only in the final week of the 2013 campaign that local Liberals said they felt the vote turning their way but that change was an optical illusion. The voters didn't change their mind from NDP to Liberal, they simply made up their mind when it hadn't been made up before.
The Liberals also know that their leader was the deciding factor in the last election, which is why that 801 campaign was dead by 8:02 p.m. on election night.
Voters found Clark's energy and charisma far more likable than Dix's skittish, absent-minded professor persona. They have no reason to expect it will fail them against Horgan this time around.
Still, beneath that Liberal confidence is wariness. Clark implored her local supporters two weeks ago to keep working until election day. Morris and Bond did the same thing with their teams on Friday, with Morris stressing that now is not the time for complacency. They know how quickly things can change.
While there seems to be no winds of change blowing at the moment (hence the confidence), that doesn't mean it couldn't happen between now and May 9 (hence the wariness).
The NDP, from Horgan down to Deepak and Natalie Fletcher, who is running against Bond in Prince George-Valemount, will need some significant "throw the bums out" anger to attract support.
Grumbling won't be enough to derail the experienced and well-financed B.C. Liberal campaign machine.
-- Managing editor Neil Godbout
