Leftovers from this week's provincial election:
n Dan Ashton, the mayor of Penticton, was successfully elected Tuesday as the Liberal MLA of Penticton, forcing the city to hold a byelection for mayor. According to the Globe and Mail, Ashton himself has offered to foot the $35,000 bill to hold the byelection. When Peter Fassbender, the mayor of Langley who was also elected Tuesday as a Liberal MLA, was asked if he would follow Ashton's lead, he said not a chance.
"If I got hit by a bus and I wasn't mayor any more, they'd have to have a by-election and I wouldn't be paying for it from my hospital bed," Fassbender said.
True, except you weren't hit by a bus, sir, you made a conscious choice to run for a different political office while in the middle of the term of the office you already held. The taxpayers of Langley shouldn't have to foot the bill for your political ambitions, Mr. Fassbender. Kudos to Ashton for doing the right thing.
n It's not just the polls that were wrong Tuesday night but the people who believed the polls, which included virtually all of the province's journalists, opinion writers and political watchers. Some of them have come clean - see Les Leyne's column in Friday's paper - and more than a few haven't, preferring to offer their "expert analysis" of what happened, ignoring the fact their same analysis assured readers of the demise of Christy Clark and the Liberals just days before the vote.
As several alert readers have pointed out, I was one of those pundits who thought Clark was done (see Paul Serup's letter at the bottom of the page). I did mean myself as well when I used the "sloppy reporting" line earlier this week to admonish provincial news media for believing the pollsters without actually deconstructing the numbers, something us word people in particular are usually horrible at doing.
But seriously, it's human of us to want to know the future, which is why the horoscopes are still one of the best-read sections of any daily newspaper and why psychics still make a living. Both Dan Gardner (Future Babble) and Nate Silver (The Signal and the Noise - reviewed in Thursday's Citizen) have written excellent books about this human weakness. Gardner points out in his book that the more often pundits and pollsters are wrong, the greater the desire grows to find someone who is right, rather than a deserved skepticism towards forecasting.
Many of the economists who saw nothing but blue skies ahead in the summer of 2008 are still making predictions about the short-term and long-term prospects of the economy. And many of the people who lost huge amounts of money believing them still rely on them for a glimpse of the future.
Like Leyne, I believe this election was a reminder for journalists that, like the best scientists, they should examine all data with a healthy dose of doubt and then interpret that data cautiously, not boldly.
But I would like to point out I did win The Citizen's election pool. For $2 a line, staff members had to pick the winning party and the closest to the correct number of seats. I bought two lines last Friday - NDP 43, Liberals 40 and Liberals 43, NDP 40. I was the only one who predicted a Liberal majority (although two others entered a Liberal minority). I did believe last weekend that the polls were exaggerating the NDP lead and I also believed in what the Globe's Jeffrey Simspon calls "the 10-second SoCred" - the right of centre B.C. residents who don't care for politics but take 10 seconds every four years to do their part to make sure the NDP don't get into power.
I should also point out that it wasn't a member of the newsroom but an ad man who won the side pool regarding the three area ridings - Norm Coyne predicted a Liberal sweep and took the highest overall margin of victory. He earned $22 for his foresight.
I was wrong, as Mr. Serup rightly points out, in my earlier comments but I was correct in the end about the election, to the tune of $30 from my colleagues.
But let's face it - I made a good guess.
As my wise colleague Rodney Venis says, "once in a while, a blind squirrel will find a nut."
With humility, I accept my blind squirrel-ness.
