Monday, August 8, 2016

State of Nominations for the 2017 BC Election

I am quite stunned that it is the summer before the 2017 election and there are very few candidates actually nominated to run in the next provincial election.   If you are not the incumbent it takes a long time to build a campaign team that can give you a reasonable chance of winning given an electorate of about 40,000 voters.

The Greens will announce Andrew Weaver's nomination tomorrow which will be their first one followed by Adam Olsen on Wednesday

I believe independent Vicki Huntington will run again in Delta South but I have not yet seen anything to confirm this.

Among the BC Liberals 26 candidates have been nominated - 21 sitting MLAs and five new candidates, though one of those is Marc Dalton who was an MLA, resigned to run federally and lost.  
2013 we saw 18 of the MLAs elected as Liberals not run again which is why we going to see a much smaller number or retirements this time.  As of this time four Liberal MLAs are not running again.

I can only find evidence of a few nominations underway for the NDP with only Jagrup Brar being nominated so far.   I can not find any place on the NDP website showing who the candidates are.   There is no place where they highlight the team for 2017.

Three NDP MLAs have stated they will not run again.  Among the remaining 32 MLAs many of them have said they are running again but I can not find a clear list of who has stated they are running again and who has yet to declare.

In the last three elections the NDP had a lot of candidates nominated by this point in the election cycle.   The party needs to pick up a net of nine seats to get to government.   To have a chance of picking up nine seats the party needs to seriously try in about 20 ridings that it does not currently hold.   The NDP seems to be leaving things late and I can not figure out the strategy behind that.

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