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The B.C. NDP's election-review report has revealed plenty of warts in the party's handling of the 2013 campaign.

But the four coauthors appear to have pulled their punches when dealing with the leader, Adrian Dix.

Nowhere in the report is there any serious examination of Dix's alleged micromanagement of the campaign and alleged refusal to undergo media training, which were detailed in a blog post earlier this year by NDP insider Ian Reid.

Instead, near the end of the 19-page document, there's an oblique reference to disagreements between Dix and campaign manager Brian Topp.

"It is the responsibility of the Campaign Manager to keep the team focused and effective," wrote panellists Cindy Oliver, Eugene Kostyra, Andy Ross, and Pam Sihota. "It is also the job of the Campaign Manager to ensure that the Leader is following the plan developed by the campaign team. Where disagreements arise between the Campaign Manager and the Leader over details in the plan, it's the Leader's job to be the candidate and the manager's job to run the campaign. Any confusion on those roles and responsibilities undermines the entire campaign effort. The 2017 campaign needs to have those roles clearly defined and agreed to long before the writ is dropped."

The report had little to say about the candidate-selection process. It resulted in few NDP candidates having any experience in local government. The B.C. Liberals, on the other hand, loaded up their slate with former mayors and former municipal councillors, some of whom won upset victories in their constituencies.

The report noted that the campaign strategy was more about managing expectations should the party form government rather than speaking to the "aspirations and priorities of voters".

In addition, the provincial NDP didn't have its new voter-identification system in place in time for the election. That created another set of problems. Also, the campaign deviated from its original list of targeted constituencies, which was characterized as a "misstep".

"Add to that the failure to do polling and focus group testing linked to the target ridings and the possibility for error in how the overall campaign worked increased considerably," the report states.

The authors included a section on public polls, noting that they "over-weighted the views of those 35 years and younger, a group that has a low participation rate".

"In effect, the pollsters gathered the views of people who were unlikely to cast a ballot," the report states. "The polls also underrepresented non-English speaking households in their surveys."

But there was no strategy outlined in the report—such as engaging musicians to hold concerts or ramping up on-campus activities (such as occurred in Vancouver–Point Grey)—to improve the turnout among young voters in the next provincial election.

There was also considerable criticism directed at the party's strategy's for attracting votes of people for whom English wasn't a first language. In fact, the party had more candidates this time who could speak other languages than at any time in its history. Perhaps some of them just weren't the right candidates for those voters.

On the communications side, the report states that the B.C. Liberals under Christy Clark "followed a tightly scripted plan in which her core message and daily visuals were all about those issues".

"In contrast, our campaign did not follow a similar path," the report states. "Daily visuals of the Leader did not show the same connections, a fact that is at odds with the NDP's long history of support within the labour movement and for working families. The notion of a tightly scripted message within each campaign event was also a major failing. It remains unclear to our Panel as to how that failure was allowed to persist, but certainly competing views within the campaign team about how that scripting should work contributed to this problem."

The paragraph above suggests not all was well within the central campaign. It's hard to believe that the panellists didn't form any conclusions about why that was the case.

Yet this is how the report reads.

That is probably going to disappoint some NDP members who felt that this would be the year that the B.C. Liberals would finally be defeated.