Is the 'blue wave' in Prince George really more of a stable tide with an orange undercurrent? It's the post-election newsletter

Maps, charts and meet the new MLAs for our city

Oct 21, 2024

The trio of new MLAs who will be representing Prince George under the Conservative Party of B.C. banner: Kiel Giddens, Sheldon Clare and Rosalyn Bird.

On Saturday night, I was dispatched to the Conservative Party of B.C. campaign office in the old 10th Ave. liquor store where supporers of the party and local candidates, Kiel Giddens and Rosalyn Bird, had gathered. If you were simply looking at the people in the room and not the signs on the walls, you could be forgiven for thinking this was a B.C. Liberal event, as it was full of faces who’d been with that party right back to the Pat Bell days (including, later in the night, Bell himself). As I refreshed my phone to the CBC results page, I saw that Giddens himself was the first declared winner of the night, anywhere in B.C., followed quickly by party leader and riding neighbour John Rustad.

As I write this, we still don’t know who will form the next government of B.C. with both the B.C. NDP and Conservatives in a dead heat on virtually all metrics and several ridings still too close to call until the mail-in ballots come in.

But in Prince George’s three ridings — Prince George-Mackezie, Prince George-Valemount, and Prince George-North Cariboo, the results came quickly and decisively: a B.C. Conservative sweep, with candidates in all three ridings taking more than 50 per cent of the vote. To the extent that ousted Independents or jilted B.C. Liberal/United voters loyal to Shirley Bond had some folks predicting an upset, Prince George did what it’s been doing for the entirety of my adult life: sent the most popular right-leaning party in the province to represent it in Victoria, only now they are called the Conservatives instead of the Liberals, prompting headlines like this:

I’m not sure if a ‘wave’ is the right word, though.

Over in his newsletter, colleague Justin McElroy shared his own thoughts on the B.C. election, which includes this chart and commentary:

That’s the NDP’s percentage of votes in all 14 B.C. elections since 1972. It went down in their 2001 collapse, went up in the previous election, but otherwise has always stayed between 39 and 46 per cent.
Do you know how remarkably stable that is? I think you’d be hard pressed to find any major political party in the world who have had that consistent level of support with such minimal deviation for so long.
Of course, there’s a flip side to this — for 50+ years, they’ve had a pretty firm ceiling on their support, and except for 2020 had never won a majority without vote splitting from parties to the right of them on the political spectrum. As a result, the dominant non-NDP party has ran the province most of the time.

I’m glad he made this chart because I was working on my own. Here’s the Prince George election results for almost the same time period (I’m starting in 1979 because that’s when the Prince George North and South ridings, which preceded our current Mackenzie/Valemount ridings, were created).

Here’s Prince George North/Mackenzie:

Here’s Prince George South/Mount Robson/Valemount:

Here’s all three overlaid on top of each other (if you want to view any of these charts online where you can interact with them, here's the link).

What strikes me is you see a remarkebly similar pattern within the Prince George ridings and province-wide trends in favour of the NDP overall — the big difference being that after the 2001 collapes, the party never recovered as much locally as it has on a provincial level. But McElroy’s observation about consistent seems to largely hold for the Prince George NDP as much as it does for the provincial one: Post-2001 the party seems to have a solid 27-35 per cent level of support, which is good for baseline but challenging if they ever want to get an MLA from the region (it’s also fascinating that Prince George-based support for the NDP exceeded provincial averages in 1986 and 1991).

The last observation I’ll make in this section is that for all the talk of frustration with the NDP, it did avoid anything near the collapse in support it saw in 2001, even in Prince George — and it actually saw a decent rise in the Valemount riding.

Anyways, that’s just one party. Let’s take a look at both of these ridings, and how the major provincial parties have historically performed here.

Unlike the NDP, the right-leaning parties have come and gone with fast rises and declines. But if you stop thinking about SoCred, B.C. Liberals and B.C. Conservatives as different entities and instead see them as right-of-centre voters coalescing around 3 different parties in 3 different political eras, it does become a bit more consistent: a solid 40-60 per cent support for the dominant right-of-centre party in Prince George in every election since 1979, with the exception of 1991, the last year the Social Credit Party really ran a campaign - basically, their own version of the NDP’s 2001 collapse.

What is potentially more interesting here is that, at least when it comes to vote share, this is the best year the right-of-centre party has had in Prince George-Mackenzie — ever. Gieddens has, as of this writing, 61.1 per cent of the popular vote, just squeaking in ahead of Pat Bell’s 61.02 per cent in 2001. And he did that without the benefit of the NDP imploding.

Rosalyn Bird didn’t do quite as well, but her numbers are still solid — 55.4 per cent, just below Bond’s 2001 victory of 55.72 per cent. It’s not quite enough to meet Bond’s last 3 returns, as her star got brighter, but it’s very similar. This runs counter to the narrative that she would be harmed by Bond loyalists either staying home or sending their vote to the NDP (and yes, I’m aware this could be because overall voter numbers in this riding are down — we’ll have to wait and find out — but this is simply a comparison of the popular vote, and Bird’s numbers are Bond-like). And she, too, did this without an NDP collapse (again, in this riding NDP support actually grew).

Does this all mean something? I’m not a political strategist, I don’t know, except very clearly it is difficult to run a campaign as an Independent, even if you’re an incumbent. But I will say taking a long view of things, I’m not convinced that — locally, at least — this election shows anything more than the same pattern we’ve seen for decades which is 40-60 per cent support for the right-of-centre party and roughly 30 per cent support for the B.C. NDP.

For the record here are the current results for all three ridings:

Prince George Mackenzie

Conservative Party - Kiel Giddens - 10,534 votes - 61.1% share

NDP - Shar McCrory - 4,830 votes - 28.0% share

Green Party - James Steidle - 1,451 votes - 8.4% share

Independent - Rachael Weber - 421 votes - 2.4% share

Prince George-North Cariboo

Conservative Party - Sheldon Clare - 11,262 votes - 57.1% share

Independent - Coralee Oakes - 4,296 votes - 21.8% share

NDP - Denice Bardua - 3,323 votes - 16.8% share

Green Party - Randy Thompson - 848 votes - 4.3% share

Prince George - Valemount

Conservative Party - Rosalyn Bird - 8,882 votes - 55.4% share

NDP - Clay Poutney - 5,552 votes - 34.7% share

Green Party - Gwen Johansson - 1,583 votes - 9.9% share

Now for the maps!

https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/elections/british-columbia/2024/results/

These sorts of geographic breakdowns of riding results are popular, and useful - and also misleading. LOOK AT ALL THAT BLUE! you might say. Clearly, the Conservatives are what most of the province wants, compared to that tiny cluster of orange and green.

But let’s choose one of those chunks of blue— how about John Rustad’s riding of Nechako Lakes, and see what the voting results are there:

7,770 votes for Rustad — 67.7 per cent of the total votes cast in the riding.

Now let’s look at how many people voted for David Eby in Vancouver-Point Grey

11,976 votes — 4,206 more than Rustad. But that was only enough to get him 56.8 per cent of total vote in the riding. Why is that? Because Vancouver-Point Grey has a population of 56,818 people and Nechako Lakes has a population of 25,293 — one of the smallest in the province (source). Essentially, David Eby represents more than twice as many people as John Rustad.

Here’s another way of putting it — see this tiny speck of green off of Vancouver Island?

It has a population of 57,901. If Vancouver Island ridings had as few people in them as northern B.C. ridings do, there would be 2 or maybe even 3 Green MLAs being returned from this tiny speck of land.

Now, I’m not making an argument here that things need to change one way or another. Some people see this and think we need to dramatically reduce the relative electoral power of the more sparsely populated parts of the province, or adopt proportional representation, or something that gets us closer to an “every vote is equal” system than what we currently have. Within B.C., that is somewhat adjusted, in the words of the 2023 report on B.C.’s Electoral Boundaries Commission:

This system of “representation by population” is based on the idea that one person’s vote should carry the same weight as another person’s vote, regardless of where they live in the province. In order for that to happen, the population of each riding must be roughly the same.
The principle of representation by population in British Columbia is intertwined with the equally important principle of “effective representation.” Effective representation recognizes that elected representatives not only sit in the legislature and vote, they also play a vital role in helping their constituents deal with government bodies. The courts have called this the ombudsperson role. Effective representation is based on the idea that everyone should have equivalent access to their elected representative, especially in the ombudsperson role, regardless of their riding’s geographic size, population density or infrastructure.

Later, they write about the possibility of increasing the geographic size of B.C.’s six least populous ridings, to bring them closer to the average population of all ridings (Nechako Lakes is included here). They write:

We are convinced that any such changes would deprive residents of these districts of effective representation. The very large geographic size of many of these ridings, their challenging terrain and weather, along with limited transportation options and very poor internet connectivity, persuades us that it is truly necessary that they retain their current boundaries in order to receive effective representation.
With our proposals, the weight of a vote in the province’s least populated riding will no longer be four times more than the weight of a vote in the province’s most densely populated riding. The difference will be about three to one. In our view, this is the necessary consequence of balancing the principles of representation by population with effective representation over a maximum of 93 ridings, as the Act requires.

And so that’s why it is the way it is. The main reason I bring this up is to serve as a reminder that as much as those of us in the northern part of the province may feel the current system doesn’t represent us, because a map can be covered in blue while the organge party forms government, there are people in those orange parts whose vote counts for about 1/3 of a vote from the blue area in terms of deciding who is in charge.

Meet your new MLAs

OK, so now that we’ve gone through all that, maybe you want to meet the trio of MLAs now representing Prince George. Here, once again, are the stories I could find on them, already shared in the election guide.

Kiel Giddens - Prince George Mackenzie

And from election night:

Sheldon Clare - Prince George-North Cariboo

Conservative Party website
Facebook
Twitter/X
LinkedIn
Clare announced as BCCP candidate for Quesnel (Quesnel Cariboo Observer)
Conservative Party of B.C. select Clare as PG-North Cariboo candidate (My Prince George Now)
Clare confident he’ll remain the B.C. Conservative candidate (Black Press)
A statement from Sheldon Care, the Conservative Party of British Columbia candidate for Prince George-North Cariboo
First Nations leader Says BC Conservative Candidate’s Residential School Postings are ‘Outrageous, Disgusting and Very, Very Sad’ (PressProgress)
Sheldon Clare ready to help (CKPG)
Meet the candidate: Sheldon Clare, B.C. Conservative (Black Press)
Sheldon Clare ready to help (CKPG)
Prince George Citizen Q&A

And from election night:

Rosalyn Bird - Prince George-Valemount

And from election night:

Other election news:

We’ll have the non-election news in tomorrow’s newsletter.

Northern Capital News is a free, daily newsletter about life in Prince George. Please consider subscribing or, if you have, sharing with someone else.

Send feedback by emailing northerncapitalnews@gmail.com. Find me online at akurjata.ca.

Charles Menzies

Oct 21

I suspect the drop in NDP votes since the 1990s in the Prince George ridings could well be place at the foot of the decline in organized labour and a shift in the forest sector away from vertical integration (which created unified unions) toward subcontracting (which created a non-union sea of 'small business'). Some major changes took place in the industrial sector between the 1980s and 1990s that led to reduced labour force throughout the region. I also put some of the responsibility at the door of anti-Indigenous sentiments in the resource extraction sectors wherein First Nations rights are seen as antithetical to the small to medium sized non-Indigenous owned businesses.

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