New Democrats target battleground B.C. in lead up to October vote

VANCOUVER — Tom Mulcair will spend much of this week on the East Coast, but his party is targeting political battlegrounds on the opposite side of the country as the New Democrats plot a path to power ahead of next month’s vote.

The NDP has long seen British Columbia as a key area for growth; ground-game organizers have been working for months on energizing supporters in a part of the country where insiders believe they could win as many as 24 seats in the House of Commons, twice what they held at the dissolution of Parliament.

The party has invested energy in promoting star candidates such as Mira Oreck, a longtime activist who has contributed to Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson’s campaign and currently works for the Broadbent Institute, a policy-based organization founded by former NDP Leader Ed Broadbent.

Oreck, who also worked on U.S. President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, is running in the new riding of Vancouver Granville, which pulls together territory that had belonged to all three main parties. It’s a seat — among many others in the province — the party is confident it can win.

“In British Columbia, there are many former Conservative voters who, after 10 years of Stephen Harper, are looking for change,” said NDP senior campaign adviser Brad Lavigne.

Lavigne, a longtime confidante of former NDP leader Jack Layton, said the party is keen to appeal to a demographic that likely didn’t exist before the 2015 campaign: “blue-orange switchers,” those voters who are liable to move their support between the New Democrats and the Conservatives.

Mulcair has visited B.C. a number of times and will “continue to do so over the course of the campaign” as the party’s prospects there improve, Lavigne said.

“We are having events that … are twice as big as the events with the prime minister so the momentum is measurable on the ground. Our challenge is to capture the momentum that is building.”

One pollster, however, said that while the NDP had the upper hand a few weeks ago, there are now signs the race could be tightening.

“Only a few weeks ago, polls were suggesting that the NDP were running away with it, with the Liberals fading into a distant third … that’s no longer the case,” said Abacus Data pollster David Coletto.

“Our most recent numbers suggest it has tightened up. Add to the fact that the Green party is doing better in B.C. than in other parts of the country and you could have some wildcards, especially on Vancouver Island.”

Coletto said his firm’s polling indicates it’s “very much a three-way race in B.C.” but the NDP is positioned to win more seats, perhaps even achieving Lavigne’s goal of doubling their 2011 tally.

NDP candidates say their approach to environmental issues and resource development has been resonating with B.C. voters.

“The Harper government has put all its eggs in the basket of exporting raw materials, raw bitumen, raw logs, raw minerals,” said NDP candidate Peter Julian, who is seeking re-election in the riding of Burnaby-New Westminster.

“The sense that we start to use the resources more effectively, value-added, is something that rings true as well when we talk about the economy on the doorstep.”

In his own campaign efforts in B.C., Conservative Leader Stephen Harper has tried to remind residents of the decade-long legacy of the provincial NDP, who were in power from 1991 to 2001, in order to discourage voters from choosing their federal counterparts.

“British Columbia — industrious, innovative, talented, resource-rich British Columbia — became a have-not province in Confederation in a few years,” Harper told a rally in Richmond last month.

“Friends, that is the NDP’s record in B.C. and we’re going to make sure it never happens to this great country.”

Harper has also acknowledged another intriguing new political reality for the West Coast: the Conservative government’s changes to election laws mean voters in the Pacific time zone will be allowed to know how the rest of the country has voted before their polls close, meaning they could be uniquely positioned to influence the outcome.

“The voice of British Columbians will matter more in the outcome of this election than it ever has before.”

— with files from Jordan Press

Kristy Kirkup, The Canadian Press

Note to readers: This is a corrected story. A previous version had the wrong spelling for Granville.