VANCOUVER -- This election is one for the history books for many reasons.

It’s the longest modern campaign, the costliest, and the first where three, rather than two, parties have legitimate shots at forming the government.

It will also be the first where the country is almost certainly going to have to wait until the votes are counted here on the West Coast to learn who forms the government.

In every other election, the TV networks tell us who is going to be prime minister the minute the polls in British Columbia close. It’s as if voters on the Pacific Coast don’t count.

But this time, a Pacific wave could wash Thomas Mulcair into 24 Sussex Drive and make him Canada’s first NDP prime minister.

Dozens of polls in the last two months have consistently shown Mulcair’s NDP are ready to clean up in B.C.

But that could change quickly as New Democrats found out to their chagrin in the last provincial election here.

In 2012, Adrian Dix and the BC NDP held a big lead going into the provincial campaign.

Then, days before the vote, Dix tried to seal the deal with an announcement that catered to anti-development BC Greens.

Christy Clark and the BC Liberals bet on a balanced, pro-development approach and pretty much refused to talk about anything other than the economy even when the pundits were calling her down and out.

What happened?

Dix blew a double-digit lead in the polls and Clark won a majority.

The flashpoint of that provincial campaign was what came to be known as “Dix’s Kinder Morgan Flip Flop”.

Kinder Morgan (Kinder rhymes with “tinder”) is a pipeline company that, for 50 years, has been safely sending Alberta oil to tidewater in Burnaby, B.C. via its Trans Mountain Pipeline. There, the oil is loaded on to tankers which sail through the Port of Vancouver out into open ocean.

Kinder Morgan wanted to “twin” that pipeline and add new capacity, meaning more tanker traffic through the Port of Vancouver.

But at the time of the campaign, Kinder Morgan had not yet gone through detailed environmental assessments.

Dix’s line on the project through the first part of the campaign was a sensible one: He couldn’t say if he was for or against the project until Kinder Morgan provided all the details.

But then, in mid-campaign, sensing that his party might be leaking support to the anti-pipeline BC Green Party, Dix changed his mind and said he was against pipeline expansion.

So far in the 2015 federal election, Mulcair has tried to sound like pipelines, including even Kinder Morgan, could get approved on his watch if they got through a toughened regulatory and environmental assessment process.

And yet, there will be NDP supporters in B.C. — even NDP MPs here, particularly in and around Burnaby — who are counting on Mulcair to at some point say “no way” to Kinder Morgan.

Stephen Harper and May, too, want Mulcair to take a stand on Kinder Morgan.

Harper hopes Mulcair rejects it so that, just as Clark did with Dix, he can pounce on the NDP as anti-development tree-huggers.

May hopes he tips his hand in favour of Kinder Morgan, Energy East and other pipelines so she can steal green New Democrats.

At some point, Mulcair will have to send a clear signal to British Columbians — as Dix and Clark did — and make a choice: Either Mulcair believes there is a way to bring Alberta crude to Pacific tidewater while protecting the environment, or he will have to say, as Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson and many other “progressive” B.C. politicians like Dix have said, there is no way to move Canadian crude out of a Canadian Pacific port.

Which view wins B.C.? Clark proved in 2012 that the first choice can be the winning choice.