With numbers at 4151 after two weeks, the campaign is in real trouble. As far as I understand is that they have managed to canvas a lot of the riding already. Michael Smyth in the Province does not have a flattering picture in his piece on the campaign, it sounds like refusals at the door are commonplace.
If the reports I have heard about the effort that has gone into the campaign, it would seem to indicate there is no danger of getting close to the 40% needed.
The people that are angry and motivated have all signed the recall petition. These 4151 are the low hanging fruit, the easy ones to get. They are barely over 1/4 of the way to the minimum needed and they will need some margin to ensure success. There are six weeks left to get at least 11217 signatures. Keeping in mind you can not canvas tomorrow, the 25th or the 31st. The 1st and 26th are also going to be bad days. Taking those days off, this means they need a pace of more than 300 signatures a day to get to the bare minimum to succeed. This is a faster pace than the campaign has managed to date.
The recall campaign is doing better than the Anti-HST petition did in the first two weeks. It took the Anti-HST petition four weeks to reach 4830, but that number is actually low because the way the campaign was run in this region it could take several weeks for a signature to reach the tally. Could it be that the campaign is holding back numbers? Maybe, though I am not sure why they would do this.
The Anti-HST petition managed collect more than 10,000 signatures in only four ridings in BC. The most they collected in 90 days was 11,512, which was in Saanich North and the Islands. The highest percentage of voters they managed was 34.7% in Kootaney West, not high enough for a recall.
The failure of this recall will realistically be an end to the recall campaigns across the province as it will take the steam out of recall movement, a steam that is already weaker than only a few months ago.
1 comment:
The Anti-HST petition was a petition against a thing, and an intangible thing at that. The Ida Chong recall is a campaign against a person. I think that, psychologically, people will have more difficulty signing the latter.
Post a Comment