Here we are finally, the BC election vote on Saturday. While I’m glad all the campaigning is over, I do worry about how it will all unravel. Our choices are: Blue: a 61-year-old Leo, Orange: a 48-year-old Leo and Green: a 54-year-old Gemini.
I didn’t listen to the radio debate, but I did watch the TV debate. Like Thanksgiving dinner with your dysfunctional family, the “open debate” sections were too much of a free-for-all. The moderator should have done her job and maybe we could have heard more. This was also noted listening to the radio debate. Both moderators were asleep at the wheel. No matter the medium, the format was the same and the sound bites were repeated. Who stood out? Sonia Furstenau. She was eloquent and called out both Rustad and Eby on their lack of action on many fronts. Eby was OK, but the continual poking gets to be tiresome. And Rustad? A toaster has more personality. It’s no wonder I don’t remember him in Crispy Clark’s cabinet.
Throughout the campaign all Eby and Rustad have been doing is trading insults about conspiracy theories and weak leadership and policy. Like the dysfunctional family dinner, it’s not pleasant listening to constant berating and pointing fingers. It’s unCanadian. Meanwhile, like the youngest sibling, we have Furstenau on the sidelines desperately trying to get our attention. And speaking of attention, what’s with the obligatory political right-hand gestures? Every high-level politician in Canada was trained by the same “message” therapist. Eby looked like he was trying to grab butterflies. Furstenau was shuffling cubes in the air. And “laser-focused” Rustad, well…
How did he ever get this far? He’s boring. Has no sense of humour. He seems to have just one expression: of a man who just ate uni for the first time and wants to spit it out but can’t. Rustad had a golden opportunity to “unleash” his human side, when he said “paper straws suck” with not even a smirk. (One of his lofty platforms is to bring back plastic straws and bags.) Someone on Reddit commented: “He is so slimy. If I were on crutches and there was an elevator that came once every 20 minutes to the 50th floor and John Rustad was in there alone, I would take the stairs every single time.”
After using my dysfunctional family analogy, on the radio debate Eby said, coincidentally: “I wouldn’t trust John Rustad to run my Thanksgiving dinner conversation with the family, let alone a hospital where my kids have to be safe, where parents and grandparents have to be safe.” And I wouldn’t let you boys sit at the same dinner table. Sonia, on the other hand, has an open invitation (but don’t forget the red wine).
And that’s the sad thing. Furstenau would make an excellent premier. She was clearly the winner in both debates. But the Green Party are full of tree huggers. They want more government intervention and industry accountability. The other two, want to fast track approvals for new mining projects – free from pesky regulations and oversight. Cut all that red tape into bits of confetti. Grow the green extractive economy – except it’s not friendly Avocado Green, it’s Army Green.
After the leader debates, someone commented, “Eby won just by not being bad.” With just over a week before election day, a poll from Ipsos Reid showed the BC NDP ahead of the BC Conservatives by a mere five percentage points. The most positive shift was for Furstenau and the Green Party, with 20% improved impressions versus 12% worsened impressions (50% stayed the same, 18% no opinion).
Both federally and provincially, we seem to vote more for our local politician versus for the leader of the party. I like Josie Osbourne. I’m not so keen on Eby. His platform is frankly not that different from Rustad’s and both have continually flip-flopped on key issues with nary a blink of the eye (especially Rustad’s). It seems the only way Eby differentiated himself in this campaign is to point out how crazy the other guy is and that has been his only strategy. Rustad has yet to explain how he will pay for any of his promises.
What is encouraging with this election, is a record 171,381 people voted on the first day of advance polls. That’s 45% higher than the previous record of 118,270 in 2017.
The NDP may have a slight advantage at this point, but the overall race is still scarily close. It’s going to be a nail biter of a weekend. We could go Pumpkin Orange or Cobalt Blue or an ugly mix of the two: Bittersweet Brown. Whatever the result, hopefully it’s with a Forest Green patina.
