Oak Bay Gordon Head Recall at the half way mark

The campaign is at the halfway mark and they are very far from success.   According to the details in yesterday's Globe and Mail article on the recall campaign, the campaign had 5000 before Christmas and added another 1000 since then.   This puts the campaign at 6000 signatures out of roughly the 16,000 needed.  They blame the holidays for the slow down in their numbers.

The campaign had to manage an average of close to 300 a day to have any realistic chance of succeeding - I have factored out some days for the holidays out of the 60 and assume a small margin is needed to be certain of success.   In the first two weeks the campaign managed to almost meet this number but even during the timeframe that they would get all the easiest signatures they could not exceed 300 per day average.

There is a month left now to achieve 10,000 signatures.   This means they have to average more signatures per day than they did at the start of the campaign when all the motivated people signed.  I am not sure where they are going to find these people, within a month I would have expected every motivated person to have signed the petition, the 10,000 signatures now need to come from people that are not keen on recall or are not interested in politics at all.

The 6,000 people that signed the petition is roughly the same as the core NDP vote in the riding - I base this on the amount of support the NDP managed to get in the 2001 election in Oak Bay Gordon Head.   The NDP seems to have a 20-25% core support base in the province and then another 20% of people in the province willing to consider the NDP.   I only make this observation to give people a way to measure the potential source of the keenest people willing to sign the petition.

I would be very surprised if the campaign managed to get more then 12,000 total signatures, I am guessing the final tally will be around 10,000.   The Anti-HST campaign submitted 8997 signatures of which 7266 were verified by Elections BC.    To even get to 10,000 means the campaign needs to get several thousand people to sign the recall petition that were not motivated to sign the Anti-HST petition.

11,316 is an important number for the recall campaign to achieve as a minimum.   If it can not reach this number they will have been less successful than the NDP was in the last election.

I do not see there is much chance of the recall coming close at all to succeeding and is realistically not going to get more signatures than Ida Chong got in votes.   All the signs are there of a colossal failure.