WHISTLER — B.C. Liberal Party members displayed a bold optimism Friday about their future prospects as close to 1,000 delegates met in Whistler for their final convention before voters go to the polls in May.

“We will absolutely win the next election,” party vice-president and former MLA Bill Belsey told delegates.

“Together, with hard work, believing in our coalition and with the determination of our leader Premier Christy Clark, we will win.”

The bravado was as much about rallying the troops as anything else — especially in the face of polls that have the party trailing the NDP by as many as 23 points — but behind-the-scenes party strategists say they believe the situation is nowhere near as dire as it may seem.

In an interview with The Vancouver Sun this week, B.C. Liberal campaign director Mike McDonald — who is also Clark’s former chief of staff — said he believes the party can close the gap to about 10 points by April, when the 2013 campaign officially gets underway.

“I think we’re on the right track into being in a competitive position come election time,” McDonald said, adding he believes narrowing the gap is absolutely “doable.”

And if the governing party can do that, McDonald said he thinks the province will have a real race on its hands.

“Incumbent governments show a certain resilience as election day nears because people have to decide if they want to get rid of them or not,” he said, pointing to the performance of Jean Charest’s Liberals in September’s Quebec election as the latest example.

“With everything they went through, worse than us — deep-seated corruption charges, all hell breaking loose, a real vote split there – they almost pulled it off,” he said, noting the former ruling party finished second to the Parti Québécois by a popular vote margin of just 0.75 per cent.

“That was after a weekend of headlines saying he was going to be third.”

McDonald reiterated his message in a recent note to party members that cited a September Mustel Group poll— the most favourable for the Liberals among recent measures — that had the Liberals trailing the NDP by just 13 points.

“Give me 10 points to make up at election time six months from now and we’ll eat the NDP for dinner,” he wrote in that note, obtained by The Sun.

In an effort to showcase its momentum, the B.C. Liberals on Friday trotted out well-known political figures, including former Conservative MP Stockwell Day, Senator Gerry St. Germain and former Liberal MP Sukh Dhaliwal.

“The socialists hordes, my friends are at the gate,” St. Germain told delegates during what the party called Free Enterprise Friday. “We’ve got to keep these socialists outside the gates and show them where they belong, because every time they enter into the gates they take us to a have-not situation.”

Added Day: “The last time the NDP were here we saw capital flight and human resource flight out of B.C. and going to other places ... . I say losing is not an option.”