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On What Just Happened And It Being Time We Made Voting Mandatory

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by Sean Orr | First thing’s first. The election isn’t over and the Liberals didn’t win a minority government. There are 176,000 absentee votes left to be counted. That’s an average of 2024 votes per riding. There are 5 ridings where this could make a difference.

Second, make voting mandatory. 57% is shameful. It’s insane the resources wasted on get out the vote initiatives, and hey, the fines could be a potential win-fall.

Some positives? Cabinet Ministers Anton, Fassbender and Amrik Virk all lost their respective ridings. Also there was some great election night tweets:

So… What comes next? A primer on how the B.C. election will be decided.

Tristan Markle is optimistic:

Time to stop green-bashing. NDP minority (thanks to student absentee ballots, as mentioned) propped-up by Greens brings in proportional representation, then we have NDP-Green coalition governments for years to come. NDP may not like that, but they can focus on winning back working-class interior ridings while the Greens get a few more seats; meanwhile the Conservative-Liberal coalition fractures into smaller parties. Big picture, comrades.

Nicholas Ellan, not so much:

I predict the recounts put the Legislature at an exact tie: 42-42-3. Clark will agree to a watered-down version of electoral finance reform and another referendum on PR – probably with an arbitrary supermajority threshhold and ultra-strict rules on third party advertising (because finance reform!) – and make Weaver a cabinet minister, in exchange for Green support of a Liberal minority government. The Greens will agree to this, and point to the popular vote as a mandate for the Liberals to get first shot at governing as a justification to their membership. All of this will get done in a two-week summer session, probably in the second half of June, so it doesn’t interfere with anyone’s summer vacation plans.Then Clark will close down the Legislature until spring 2018, and leave everyone to argue about voting reform for the rest of the year, while the BCNDP stand there, helplessly.

Ricochet thinks that would be political suicide for the Greens: Weaver’s choice in B.C.: The NDP or the abyss:

Nearly 60 per cent of voters cast their ballots for a party other than the Liberals, and the pitch Weaver made to supporters was that a vote for his Greens was a vote to end the Liberals’ 16-year reign in government. “Either we [the NDP] have a coalition with the Greens,” wrote Vancouver comic and author Charles Demers on Facebook, “or they go the way of the British Lib-Dems.”

But that hybrid Buick is looking pretty nice:

Wishful thinking? Christy Clark is finished; NDP and Green Party now need to deliver the change B.C. voted for. Dock Currie:

All these articles that are, like, ‘Christy Clark lost,’ ‘Christy Clark is finished’ – beware: Christy Clark is the kind of RPG boss that when you grind it down to zero HP it changes form, has a full bar, and starts spamming gnarly vulns and crit attacks.

Clark doesn’t see it the way Tieleman does. She is predictably smug, insisting that the public mainly wanted the parties in the legislature to engage in greater dialogue and cooperation. “Trust the relentlessly cheery premier to interpret the election results as a call for more group hugs”. Vaughn Palmer: Forget group hugs, leaders cuddle with Green’s kingmaker. The idea of cuddling with Andrew Weaver makes me ill. Hopefully it will turn out something like this: “Woman learns the hard way that pythons don’t like to cuddle

All part of a Liberal effort to pretend they won the election in hopes of making it so. Clark even tried to enlist Lt.-Gov. Judith Guichon, saying that her honour had asked her to stay on as premier.

Any premier would be expected to stay on until the election results are finalized. Thereafter the key consideration will not be continuity, but whether Clark is still in a position to command sufficient support in the legislature to approve spending, pass legislation and otherwise govern.

As for the premier’s new-found enthusiasm for dialogue — “something I would dearly love to do” — it was difficult to reconcile with her long-standing lack of interest in the legislature itself, where she rarely attends.

Christy Clark Tried to Trump British Columbians. Although it’s no great feat, I did predict this even before Trump won.

As other media dug into that story, it was Christy Clark, like Donald Trump, who went on the attack against the news media, dismissing them as irrelevant to her fate. She snarked to the editorial board of the Victoria Times Colonist that she doesn’t read newspapers. Her team doubled down, floating the notion they paid no attention to even the once mighty Vancouver Sun and CKNW, though might deign to catch Global TV’s newscast.

But what happens when the media fights back? New York Times sues AdvantageBC over ‘secretive’ tax program.

PR of the day: Soldiers of Odin splinter in Canada over ‘racist agenda’ of far-right group’s leadership in Finland. Don’t fall for it. These people crashed an anti-racism rally.

Quiz of the day: Is He Into You, Just a Friend, or Trying to Get You to Join the Democratic Socialists?

Sports of the day: The fight for potty parity: how sports venue toilets value men over women.

Craigslist of the day: Suffed Poler bear – $6000 (North Vancouver)

There is 1 comment

  1. Mandatory voting is a ridiculous idea.

    What’s next, mandatory newspaper reading? Mandatory caring about issues you don’t care about, or else you pay a fine?

    C’mon man. You can’t force people to care.

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