Conservatives gain ground in B.C., take seats back from Liberals
Credit to Author: Gordon Hoekstra| Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2019 06:38:04 +0000
At times, the big screen TVs rolling out the election results were louder than the crowd of 80 or so people at Conservative candidate Alice Wong’s celebration venue in Richmond Centre.
There was little doubt that Wong would win her fourth term but the crowd at the Austria Vancouver Club was not in the mood to celebrate the national results.
While Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives made significant gains in British Columbia, winning back seats from the Liberals lost in the 2015 election, it was not enough to offset the national picture.
The Conservatives had won 15 B.C. seats late Monday, with several ridings still counting ballots and too close to declare.
By the time the votes were being counted in B.C., it was already known there would be a minority Liberal government.
Wong, who entered the club to a round of loud cheers and music, said it was a night of mixed emotions. She was thrilled the people of Richmond Centre had re-elected a Conservative but disappointed the Liberal Party still held the most seats.
However, their minority status meant the Liberals would need to cobble together a coalition with at least one party, she said.
“I want to assure you that our opposition will hold this artificial alliance to the highest level of accountability,” said Wong.
South Surrey-White Rock Conservative candidate Kerry-Lynne Findlay celebrates her victory.
Among key seats the Conservatives won back was South Surrey-White Rock, where Kerry-Lynne Findlay defeated Liberal candidate Gordie Hogg, a former B.C. Liberal MLA who won the seat in 2015.
The Conservatives also took back seats in Pitt Meadows-Maple Ridge, Mission-Matsqui-Fraser Canyon and Kelowna-Lake Country.
Sheridee Lee was among a few dozen supporters who came down early to the Austria Vancouver Club to watch results roll in.
She was pleased that Wong was on her way to another election victory but disappointed with the national results. “In four years,” she said with a smile of the next election.
Lee took some consolation that the Trudeau Liberals would have a minority government. “We’ll have to have collaboration,” she said.
The objective in B.C. was simple: recapture as many of the 11 seats lost in the last election as possible.
The Conservatives understood that B.C. has been fertile ground for them in the past half a century, winning them as many as 80 per cent of its seats. While they were held to second place and just 10 seats in 2015, in the previous three elections they had won more than 20 seats.
The strategy to reassert their dominance in B.C. was the same as in the rest of the country, preach the message of putting more money in family’s pockets and remind the public that Trudeau had not lived up to all his promises.
Leader of the Conservative Party of Canada Andrew Scheer and family wave at the crowd at the Conservative headquarters at the International Trade Centre at Evraz Place.
In a nod to how important Scheer believed that B.C. could be to the Conservatives, he announced a major policy piece in the first week of the campaign in B.C.
The Conservative leader used a Surrey home as a backdrop to promise a tax cut for the lowest federal income bracket up to $47,630.
The Conservatives said it would save families $850 a year.
He followed that up with repeated visits to B.C. and ended his campaign with a stop in Metro Vancouver on the weekend before Monday’s vote.
But political scientist David Moscrop, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Ottawa’s department of communication, said Scheer ran yesterday’s campaign, in fact, pulling it directly out of former-prime minister Stephen Harper’s playbook.
In 2019, it’s hard to believe he did not get climate right and didn’t get social issues right, said Moscrop, a former researcher at Simon Fraser University.
“He ran a campaign on tax credits. People don’t care about tax credits,” said Moscrop. “Scheer misread the room.”
Scheer had made no secret of his support for the Alberta oilsands and its associated projects, including support for oil pipelines.
Not only did he support the $9.3-billion Trans Mountain oil pipeline expansion to bring more Alberta oil to Burnaby to be shipped to new Asian markets, he said he would restart consultations with First Nations on the Northern Gateway oil pipeline through northern B.C. scrapped by Trudeau.
Reopening the possibility of building Enbridge’s $7.9-billion Northern Gateway project, whose terminus was Kitimat, was part of the Scheer’s national energy-corridor strategy to access new Asian markets through deepwater ports.
The construction of oil pipelines is a highly charged issue in British Columbia, with business interests arguing the inability to build the project is killing investment and opponents drawing a line in the sand over its climate change implications and potential for oil spills.
Unlike the other parties, Scheer promised to scrap the carbon tax.
As he said repeatedly: voters had a clear choice.
The Conservatives’ platform also included a pledge to balance the budget within five years, in part, through slowing down already earmarked spending on infrastructure.