One year after the British Columbia Liberal government was elected in a surprise victory, the party’s approval rating has dropped, according to a survey carried out by Insights West for Business in Vancouver.
In the survey conducted earlier this month, 38% of decided voters said if there was an election tomorrow they would vote for the Liberals, while 39% said they would vote for the New Democratic Party.
For the Liberals, this is a drop from the 44% popular vote they received last May that brought them into power.
It’s also a drop from the 40% of respondents surveyed in December who said then that they would vote for the Liberals if an election were held the next day.
On the other hand, support for the NDP has improved. While the NDP got 39.7% of the popular vote last May, only 36% of decided voters in December said they would vote NDP, a number that has now bounced back to 39%.
The Liberals have also lost ground on a number of issues. When asked if Clark and the Liberals have done a good or bad job in pushing liquefied natural gas (LNG), respondents were evenly divided, with 39% on each side of the fence. In December, 42% called the government’s LNG push good, with only 35% responding that they saw it in a negative light.
The biggest difference between this survey and the one held in December, said Mario Canseco, Insights West vice-president, public affairs, is the strong emergence of education as an issue.
“Six months ago, [education] was only at 3% as the top issue facing B.C.; now it’s at 10%,” Canseco told Business in Vancouver. “We see the ranking of the B.C. government’s handling of education dropping to 28%, and a large number of B.C. residents were disappointed with the way they’ve dealt with the BCTF.
“When you look at these three numbers together you start to make sense of how the strategy that they’ve been using to deal with the bctf has really backfired.”
Only 23% called the government’s ongoing negotiations with teachers good, while 63%, almost two-thirds, called it bad.
Another issue that has come up since December is the government’s move on the agricultural land reserve (ALR). Only 17% of respondents thought the government did a good job with the ALR, while 50% said it was bad.
The province has seen two new leaders emerge in the last couple months – John Horgan for the NDP and Dan Brooks for the Conservatives – and the survey showed that many respondents were not aware of them, said Canseco, who said that this could be a good thing opportunity for the NDP.
“[Horgan] had a good momentum score so there’s a lot to be said about what he can do in the next six months to make this work,” he said.
“There were a lot of people who said that the NDP was done and that there was no way they would win the next election.
“With a leader who is not well known, they’re at 39% so the numbers could be higher when we look at this down the road.”
