Opinion: During her campaign, Findlay deliberately pitted Conservatives against Liberals, vowing to keep a purified party of the former out of the dirty hands of the latter
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VICTORIA — B.C. Conservative Leader Kerry-Lynne Findlay’s victory over second-place finisher Caroline Elliott was even closer than it appeared initially, judging from the raw voting numbers the party released later in the weekend.
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The results, as announced Saturday night, had Findlay with 51 per cent, Elliott at 49, a gap of two percentage points.
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Those percentages were derived from a points system, adopted by the Conservatives to equalize voting power among the province’s 93 ridings.
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The raw vote, released Sunday, had Findlay reaping 10,907 votes from party members to Elliott’s 10,847, a gap of just 60 out of almost 22,000 votes cast. Percentage-wise, it worked out to 50.1 per cent for the winner, 49.9 per cent for the runner-up, a gap of two tenths of one per cent.
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Either way Findlay won and either way she did it with a 50-50 split.
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The deep division in the voting ranks was not surprising given Findlay’s winning strategy.
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The B.C. Liberals, and Social Credit before them, defeated the NDP more often than not by drawing support from both Liberals and Conservatives.
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However, Findlay deliberately pitted Conservatives against Liberals, vowing to keep a purified party of the former out of the dirty hands of the latter.
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The strategy worked, but only just and not without salting the earth — to the great satisfaction of New Democrats and internet trolls.
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Still, when Findlay was asked about party unity, she made light of the challenge of putting the two halves back together.
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“Unifying the party and unifying the province are what the job entails, so I’m looking forward to it,” Findlay told reporters in her initial media scrum Saturday night. “It will be a lot of work, but we’re more together than you might think.”
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Less together was not an option — judging from the voting numbers at least.
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One other factor emerged from the voting details released on Sunday.
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When former B.C. Liberal cabinet minister Iain Black dropped as the low vote-getter in the third round, Elliott picked up many more of his votes (through second and third choices) than did Findlay — as expected.
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But some 2,000 of the ballots for Black made no further contribution because the voters who cast them did not express a preference for either Findlay or Elliott.
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Through all four rounds of voting, about 3,600 preferential votes were sidelined as “abstained” because of an absence of second, third or fourth choices. In a race as close as this one, those de facto abstentions loom large in any speculation about what might have been.
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Elliott’s organizers are probably kicking themselves for not pushing harder to recruit second and third choices from Black supporters.
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Speaking of the Black campaign, on Monday, I described Bryan Breguet as an Elliott supporter. He did indeed post on social media that his vote went to Elliott in the final round against Findlay. But before that, he supported Black.
