Are We There Yet?

For a lot of people who live outside British Columbia, today is probably the first news that B.C. has a Provincial Election on May 17. For most people in B.C., the corners on that fixed election date were sanded down to a general understanding we'd be going to the polls sometime around the Victoria Day weekend, and now would be a good time to start paying attention.

For anyone in the labour, environmental, and anti-poverty (among others) activist communities, May 17 has been stamped on our collective forehead for almost the past four years. Some of us are tired already as a result of the drawn out pre-campaign posturing. Some of us are disheartened by a parade of polls and punditry that the best the NDP can hope for are a scattering of moral victories. Some of us are itching to start campaigning for real, bouyed by the party's resurgence since the bloodletting of 2001.

Will the NDP win this election? I've already passed judgement as to what I consider winning. Can the NDP win a majority of seats and form a government? To that question I submit a qualified Yes: The NDP is a team a few games out from winning a pennant race: they can still win, but they need to catch a few breaks: concentration of supporters in key ridings, falters in the Liberal campaign, a stunning debate performance by Carole James, to name a few. If those things happen, anything can happen.