The debacle in Langley

The fallen BCCP banner sort of says it all

So the Conservative AGM is not only not going well, it is turning into a bit of a disaster.

1) Only 1115 members out of 3000 to 4000 members voted in the leadership.   50% turnout is bad, 33% is utterly abysmal.  

The people that did not vote do not have much interest in the party and really can only be considered paper members.   It means the effective membership of the party is only just over 1000 members, or a bakers dozen per riding in BC.   The party needs to have 100 to 300 members in each riding in the province.  Without enough numbers there is no way the party can win any seats.  One of the reasons John Martin did not win the Chilliwack-Hope by-election is because the party had so few active members.

The BC NDP has about 37,000 members and the BC Liberals upwards of 100,000.   The BC Conservatives membership is more like the member numbers of a single healthy riding association.  Even the Greens seem to be doing better than the Conservatives in membership it would seem.  I am not sure why the BC Conservatives have not been signing up active members for the last 18 months.

2) The vote in the leadership review was just about as bad as it could get for the party.   788 for John Cummins, 316 for a leadership review,   11 spoiled.   This is 70.67% for the leader and 28.34% against.   Any lower and he would had to have quit.   But it is also so low as to make his leadership utterly crippled.  

How do you lead a party when close to 30% of the members that could be bothered to vote voted against you?  I heard nothing from John Cummins that really welcomes the dissidents back into the fold.  Has the party effectively said good bye to 30% of the membership?

3) The departure of John Van Dongen - the fit has not seemed good for sometime between Cummins and Van Dongen, but without an MLA the party is that much further out in the wilderness.

4) Turn out at the AGM of party members seems to only have been around 200.  They say they have 50 active riding associations, that is only 4 delegates per riding.    They held the AGM in Langley, within easy reach of more than half the population of the province to go just for the day, but they could not get a decent turn out.   Where were the party organizers pushing to fill the space?  

Media scrum around John Van Dongen after he quit the BCCP