New Democrat campaign manager Brian Topp’s fascinating post-mortem of the 2013 election loss includes an inside account of the “moment.”
That was leader Adrian Dix’s announcement on Earth Day that he would oppose the Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion into Vancouver, because he didn’t want the harbour to become an oil port.
People have seized on that campaign event as the point where Dix blew the election. There has been a lot of speculation about how and why it happened. Topp’s explanation is the best yet, because he was in on all the meetings and played a role in the fateful call himself.
By his telling, the party was spooked after the first week of campaigning. Research showed they were suffering a slow leak and the B.C. Liberals were reassembling their electoral coalition.
“Everyone involved could see that we were not connecting effectively with voters ... . We needed a radical simplification of what we were doing.”
So the thinking was that Dix “needed to make some proposals people would hear and remember and want to vote for.”
Also in the mix was the need to appeal to environmentalist voters. Topp said they are “capable of doing some serious damage to the NDP” when the party takes the wrong stand, as it did with the carbon tax in 2009.
They were also worried about the Green party strength.
“In this election, we therefore aimed to avoid a confrontation with the environmental movement.”
Some earlier accounts suggested that Dix was just winging it when he abandoned the wait-and-see approach on the pipeline and came out against it at a Kamloops campaign stop on April 22. But Topp says it was carefully calculated.
“Our team settled into an extensive, detailed, exhausting and difficult debate about environmental policy that would continue through much of the night and then resume in the morning.”
He said it engaged the policy and communication teams in drafts and redrafts “right up until our leader stood in front of the microphone.”
In the next moment, Dix played the card. Since he took over the leadership, his position had been that the NDP would pronounce on that project once the company had actually applied for approval.
But at the podium on Earth Day, in the environment minister’s riding, Dix changed horses.
“Radically transforming the Port of Vancouver into a major oilsands export facility is not a good idea,” he said.
Topp recounted it as an effort to be consistent.
He said it was well-received, at first. But then the Liberals and the media started challenging them to explain the flip-flop.
“We struggled to do so — and, objectively, lost the exchange.
“Undecided voters began to switch to the Liberals in our tracking, and would do so quite steadily for the rest of the campaign.”
Dix had been clear on Vaughn Palmer’s Voice of B.C. TV show just 11 days earlier about why the wait-and-see approach was best. Topp said the Liberals turned the apparent inconsistency into a character issue about Dix, and then stressed that changing to “Risky Dix” was a big gamble for B.C.
How do they feel about the decision now? “Extremely rueful” is the phrase Topp used.
It turned out to be a historic blunder. If it didn’t cost them the election outright, it was a big contributor to the surprising loss.
All the smart people in the room were focused on the immediate tactics. But Topp acknowledges that the NDP caucus, which could have been expected to know the strategic fallout, was kept out of the loop and not consulted.
It cost them dearly.
Just So You Know: Although he outlined the moment vividly, Topp said it wasn’t the real game-changer.
He said the real turning point was the NDP’s decision to drop the quick-wins ethnic-vote scandal.
They pursued it in the legislature in February and built a 20-point lead in the polls, but then dropped it after Premier Christy Clark apologized and fired an aide.
Leaving off the pursuit was a “terrible misjudgment,” Topp said.
“Our opponent was on the ropes, and we let her get up.”
