Thursday, February 3, 2011

Where to now with recall?

With the spectacular failure of the Oak Bay Gordon Head recall campaign, what happens with recall in general?

The problem all other recall campaigns are going have now is that they have to show their situation is somehow different than the Oak Bay Gordon Head recall.  Without a convincing narrative, no one in the media is going to pay much attention to the Comox Valley or Kamloops North recalls.  All the pundits in are going to say "no chance" and people will quit paying attention.

Oak Bay Gordon Head had the advantage that is was the first recall and had all the energy of the recall campaign behind it.   Each campaign from now on is going to be weaker.    Oak Bay Gordon Head also had the advantage of one of the most stable populations in BC.

What can recall campaigners do?   Short of finding some unique wrong doing by the MLA, all they have is their progress in the campaign.   Comox Valley needs to come out with a press release in the middle of next week stating they have achieved more than 5,000 signatures.  Anything less and they will not be able to achieve the 19,348 they need within 60 days.  

The Comox Valley Anti-HST petition achieved 10,215 verified signatures, or 21.3% of eligible voters.   This was done in 90 days, they need to achieve this in 14 days to have any real hope of making recall work.  They have 110 registered canvassers, Oak Bay Gordon Head had 289.   The campaign in Comox Valley is so far from where it needs to be that I see no hope.

If Comox Valley is in trouble, Kamloops North is even worse off.   With only 56 registered canvassers and no presence online of any sort.

So Oak Bay Gordon Head fell flat and the organizers are looking for all manner of excuses and blaming the process even twice before recalls have achieved the number of signatures.   It looks like the next two campaigns will not do as well as as Oak Bay Gordon Head.  This will likely be the end of the serious recall campaign in BC, though I am sure die hards will continue on and find reasons to be angry that the people of BC do not share their views.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

http://www.kamloopsrecall.com/

Bernard said...

Thank you for the link, I have been looking for it for about a week