I felt a bit like Dorothy landing in Oz when I woke up Sunday morning to what may be a largely NDP Richmond.
It’s been almost 50 years since Richmond has elected an NDP candidate to the B.C. legislature. That was Harold Steves in 1972. He was there for all of one term before becoming a city councillor.
Since then, Richmond has been solidly blue, supporting the right-of-centre Social Credit party, then the BC Liberals. In fact, there were past provincial elections where John Yap, MLA for Richmond-Steveston, was the first MLA called on election night because he had such a huge lead.
Granted, we’re still waiting for the final results, given that thousands of mail-in ballots still have to be counted. Regardless, just the fact the NDP has taken three of Richmond’s four seats based on advanced and day-of voting makes me think I’m in Oz.
So what happened?
Clearly enough voters in Richmond thought, as in the rest of the province, the NDP was doing a good job of managing the pandemic. And, yes, the lovely Dr. Bonnie Henry worked in their favour. But that wasn’t everything.
The fact two, long-time Liberal incumbents decided not to seek re-election played a role. Incumbents tend to be favoured and the fact Yap and Linda Reid, Liberal MLA for Richmond South Centre, opted not to run created a more level playing field.
Also, the fact we now have a fourth riding, Richmond-Queensborough, made up of East Richmond and a part of New Westminster was a factor. Although New West voters only make up about 14 per cent of the riding, they tend to be solidly NDP. Meanwhile, East Richmond is generally more NDP-friendly than the rest of the municipality. So, even though Liberal incumbent Jas Johal was a strong candidate — touted as party leadership material in fact — it was going to be the hardest of the Richmond seats to keep.
But perhaps the most significant factor was what happened in the last provincial election. Granted, all four of Richmond’s ridings went Liberal in 2017, but the NDP made huge gains. In fact, it made larger gains in the popular vote in Richmond between the 2013 and 2017 elections than it did this time around.
In other words, Richmond’s about-face wasn’t as sudden as all that. Speaking of the 2017 campaign, I remember being at Yap’s campaign office on election night. While he was clearly pleased with his win and relieved the Liberals would at least have a minority government, or so he thought, he was far from boastful. In fact, he was quick to note many of his constituents were feeling the pinch of unaffordability.
“That was something we heard very loud and clear,” said Yap.
But although Yap may have heard the concerns, the Liberal party as a whole was unable to convince voters it cared.
In a candid interview with Global News the day after the election, Jas Johal said, “Climate change, housing and affordability, health care, education, we have been slowly ceding ground on these issue to other political parties, and that’s one of the reasons why last night happened.”
Meanwhile, the NDP seemed not only capable of dealing with the pandemic, it had managed to not infuriate too many people even prior to the crisis.
It got a lot of love from the affordable housing sector for building new housing co-ops, establishing temporary modular housing and implementing the speculation tax — all without blowing a hole in the budget. It enraged some environmentalists with its LNG plans and approval of the Site C Dam, but that may have earned them votes from the “free market” types.
So back to Dorothy...
Indeed, there is no place like home and the truth is Dorothy had never really left — and nor have we. This is as much Richmond today as it was three years ago, despite a radically different election outcome.
Solid management of the pandemic and a sense that the issues that were being voiced “loud and clear” in 2017 were finally being addressed are what led to this so-called sea change.
