How the Greens will win Kamloops for the Liberals

KAMLOOPS — Would you like to know who’s going to win the election? Of course you would, so I’ll tell you. The pollsters are calling it a horse race, too close to call. “It’s anyone’s to win,” a guy from Ipsos said this week.

The fact that the pollsters even disagree about whether the Liberals or NDP are slightly ahead gives more credence to the assessment that it’s very close. This is different from 2013, when the New Democrats were supposedly comfortably ahead, yet lost in the final days.

The pollsters say they’ve fixed whatever it was they screwed up so badly last time.

But here at home, it’s not nearly so hard to figure things out. What I’m about to tell you is based on gut, and a little logic. I’m not even going to qualify it with the traditional “but I’ve been wrong before.” Although that’s true, it won’t be the case this time.

Quite simply, the Liberals will take the Kamloops-South Thompson and Kamloops-North Thompson ridings, but for different reasons.

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Todd Stone will be re-elected comfortably because, in addition to being a BC Liberal, he’s Todd Stone. He walked away with it in 2013, winning by about 5,000 votes over NDP candidate Tom Friedman.

In Kamloops-North Thompson, Terry Lake was supposed to lose, but won by almost 3,000 votes over the NDP’s Kathy Kendall.

There’s a major difference in the political landscape this time. In 2013, the Greens weren’t in it here. While the BC Conservatives ran candidates in both ridings, they weren’t really a factor either.

But this is 2017, and we’re witnessing something of a Green surge under Andrew Weaver. Analysts are in agreement that the party has run an excellent campaign and might be poised for a break-through, depending on what your definition of break-through is. Could be a couple of seats, could be a half dozen. But it won’t happen here.

What it will do here, is take votes from the NDP. In Kamloops South, Stone would win anyway but Green candidate Donovan Cavers will come second ahead of NDPer Nancy Bepple.

In Kamloops North, where the New Democrats are traditionally strong, and the Liberals are weaker this time, Peter Milobar would be threatened if not for the strong candidacy of Dan Hines of the Greens.

Milobar is unlikely to win a majority, but the Greens and NDP will split the left, badly. The New Democrats (Barb Nederpel) will run second in the riding, but on election night Milobar should give Hines a call and thank him for the victory.

What about the rest of the province? It wasn’t clear to me at first, but it’s clear now that John Horgan’s strategy has been to write off the Interior, hold the Kootenays, the Island (and maybe take Comox Valley), and coastal ridings, make gains in the Fraser Valley and expand his hold in the Lower Mainland.

It’s a good strategy, one that had a chance of working, but won’t quite. The “path to victory,” as it’s now called, requires the NDP to keep every seat it has and flip several more from the Liberals. But that assumes the Greens make no gains, and any Green gains are most likely going to be at the expense of the NDP despite hopeful talk that they’ll actually take votes from the Liberals.

And that, folks, means another BC Liberal majority.

So if you don’t like the Liberals, should you vote strategically? Horgan hopes so, because he’s clearly worried about the Green effect.

Strategic voting, though, is a manipulation of the process and I don’t like it. We should all vote with our hearts and our heads, not with our calculators.