Richard McGuire
If there was any doubt before, the provincial election is now underway in Boundary-Similkameen.
It may take another couple of months before the writ is dropped to officially start the campaign before the May 9 voting day, but with fixed election dates, that’s more of a formality.
On Saturday, MLA Linda Larson opened an Osoyoos campaign office in her bid for re-election as the B.C. Liberal candidate. She’s already opened others in Princeton, Oliver and Grand Forks.
On Sunday, the NDP, who were slow off the mark, finally nominated their candidate, Colleen Ross, a Grand Forks city councillor and agricultural activist.
Larson is probably breathing a sigh of relief that she won’t be facing Brenda Dorosz, who fought like a pit bull with a juicy bone to save Osoyoos Secondary School.
As Dorosz said in her speech before the nomination vote, when she talked about the fight to save OSS, “We really just brought the Liberals to their knees. They couldn’t deal with us anymore.”
That’s not to suggest that Ross isn’t also a fighter. She described to party members how she and others faced tear gas, rubber bullets, pepper spray and water cannons during street protests in Hong Kong against decisions being taken at a World Trade Organization ministerial meeting.
But Ross comes across more as a policy wonk than a retail politician. Some might even call her an ideologue of the left. Unless she can step out of her bubble and listen to people across the entire political spectrum, she will have a hard time against Larson.
Prior to the nomination vote, one NDP member asked me what I thought would happen.
I told him that political parties often choose a different candidate than the broader public would choose.
Ross, I said, would probably appeal more to the dyed in the wool NDP base, while Dorosz would be more successful at mobilizing the broader electorate, despite her lack of partisan political experience.
With voting limited to those who were NDP members prior to mid-October, there simply wasn’t time for the candidates to bring new blood into their party.
So the long-time party stalwarts triumphed.
Larson, of course, has angered many people with her initial failure to go to bat for OSS, as well as her strident opposition to a national park in the South Okanagan.
And she’s sometimes expressed herself poorly, getting in trouble over such comments as those she made on residential schools, even though I don’t really believe her intentions were racist.
But the reality is that most people vote based on party and leader rather than the local candidate.
I’ve met both Premier Christy Clark and NDP leader John Horgan at least long enough to form an impression of them. Horgan seems sincere, earnest and a genuinely nice guy. I’d probably rather have a beer with him than with Clark. But I can’t picture him as premier.
Clark, on the other hand, is evasive and calculating, but she’s a highly skilled communicator. She’s a master politician who can match any premier in Canada in raw political skills.
The local election race will be important and you probably couldn’t find two candidates at more opposite ends of the political spectrum than Larson and Ross.
But ultimately, the local outcome will depend on whether there is a tide for change at the province-wide level.
RICHARD McGUIRE
Osoyoos Times
Richard McGuire is a reporter/photographer with the Osoyoos Times. His education is in political science and political economy and he worked 14 years at the House of Commons in Ottawa.
