With five days left on the provincial campaign trail, it appears the race for premier and ruling party is tightening.
A new poll commissioned by the Times Colonist newspaper and released this morning suggests the New Democratic Party's lead has narrowed to just four percentage points.
Oraclepoll Research Ltd. says that if an election were held today, 41 per cent of those polled would back the B.C. NDP and another 37 per cent would vote to re-elect the B.C. Liberals.
BC Votes 2013
The latest from the campaign Last week, a similar online survey conducted by Angus Reid Public Opinion predicted that if an election were held at that time, 41 per cent of decided voters and leaners would cast a ballot for the B.C. NDP candidate, and 34 per cent would vote Liberal.
The new poll also suggests, as last week's Angus Reid poll did, that the B.C. Green Party is on track to get 12 percent of the vote, with another 10 percent of decided voters backing the B.C. Conservatives. Undecided voters were counted as 24 per cent of those interviewed.
Are you an undecided voter? Try out CBC's Vote Compass tool to explore your views
Polls done in March suggested the NDP had 20-point lead over the Liberals, and polls conducted as recently as last month had suggested the NDP was enjoying a 17-point lead.
Oraclepoll's telephone survey randomly selected 1,000 British Columbians who were reached between May 5 and 7. The respondents were asked, “If the provincial election were held today in British Columbia, which party's candidate would you most likely vote for?”
If the respondent was undecided, he or she was also asked, “Which party's candidate would you be leaning towards at this time?”
I am not into politicians and party politics. I look for what they will do for all of us as the paying populace. Generally, not much.
The B.C. Liberals will hopefully keep the status quo and the NDP is giving us unachievable promises without great increases of personal and small business/corporate taxes. How can they keep on spending money without any revenue coming in?
Gone under the NDP would be Kinder/Morgan, Enbridge and LNG, mining and head offices located here.
NDP appeasement of environmentalists show desperation and basically untruthfulness on their policies. Canada is a commodity-based economy and the bulk of the tax revenue comes from it. It might be better to permit those ventures but institute stringent safety laws pertaining to their actions.
Oil is here to stay for quite a few decades. We don’t have yet real alternative to fossil fuels. We certainly don’t have the generating capacity needed to have electric cars as our main transportation.
Oil tankers mishaps? The last one was 12 years ago. With all the improved navigational capabilities, that risk is minimal.
Steven Velecky, North Vancouver
Study what NDP has done in the past
Hello? Anyone remember the Dave Barrett NDP? Wow, the whole of British Columbia was almost shut down when it came to unions and work. Then, under NDP premier Glen Clark, the FastCats just showed up on our doorsteps but were deemed useless shortly after, costing us as taxpayers a fortune.
Come on people, start your search engines and take a look before it’s too late!
Susan Summers, Mission
I can’t back Adrian Dix
Blind loyalty to a single party is not my philosophy.
However — a huge however — I cannot bring myself to cast my vote for NDP leader Adrian Dix. His wanton, blatent forgery of a document to afford illicit protection to his boss, former premier Glen Clark, is unconscionable.
Like all of us, Clark has her warts, and while I have no burning desire to see her elected premier, I do have a burning desire to see Dix, that unscrupulous forger, not elected.
bad VS very bad ecnomy
very closed right now
vote liberal!
there are 24% undecided votes hope them recall the bad days of NDP in power and vote for liberals
they all will made decition to vote liberal now
because rules is:if the score was leading 43%.......still have 24% undisided...the resault ls they was not want vote that NDP they dont trust
The Liberal will win logicly
If Adrian Dix and the NDP win the British Columbia election next Tuesday, they will become a larger problem for Canadian national unity than Quebec.
Adrian Dix doesn't want to separate B.C. from Canada. He wants Canada to separate from B.C.
His central campaign promise is an economic blockade of the rest of us.
Dix has announced he no longer wants B.C. to be the gateway to the Pacific, a central identity of British Columbia for more than a century, and a key role for B.C. within Canada.
It seems trite to say it, but the Pacific is a big reason why B.C. is part of Canada at all, instead of another U.S. state connecting Washington to Alaska.
There were many reasons to build a railway across the country 130 years ago, but connecting Canada to the sea, and B.C. to the rest of us, was a main one.
It's why the middle name of the CPR is "Pacific."
It was economic and military. But it was also about our grand national identity. It's even Canada's motto: "From sea to sea."
Well, not if Dix has his way.
The rest of Canada needs to sell things to the booming economies of Asia, which is why the Port of Vancouver is the busiest in the country. Much of that is sent by train.
But a Canadian company called Enbridge wants to build an oil pipeline from Alberta to the northern B.C. town of Kitimat, where another tanker port has been operating for years.
And a U.S. company called Kinder Morgan wants to expand its existing pipeline from Alberta to Vancouver, which has been operating since before Dix was born.
Between them, these two proposals -- the new pipeline and expanding the old one -- are $10 billion in infrastructure projects, where most of the jobs would accrue to B.C.
That's just the construction bonanza; the oil that would travel within them would be worth more than $40 billion a year to Canada's economy.
For comparison, the total value of all Canadian auto exports last year -- every Ford, Chrysler, GM, Honda and Toyota made here and sold to the U.S. -- was just $52 billion.
But Dix has opposed both pipelines before they've even been reviewed by regulators.
He's even said he opposes allowing the Port of Vancouver -- which is constitutionally a federal project -- to handle more oil, though as the Port Authority itself points out, it's been shipping bulk oil for more than 50 years and has "never had a navigational issue with an oil tanker."
Earlier this year, Statistics Canada announced that little Saskatchewan, with barely a million people, now exports more than mighty B.C., with four times that many people.
B.C. has simply stopped mining, logging, fishing and drilling for oil, and now Dix says he's going to "review" natural gas fracking, the one booming industry remaining in B.C.
Is he serious?
Ask his wife. She publicly boasts that she has no car or cellphone, and gives public poetry readings around Vancouver, lamenting the "sheep" who drive and praising public transit.
That post-industrial lifestyle might work for a small clique of university professors and eco-activists, but you can't run a province that way. Somebody's got to earn the money that the NDP plans to tax.
Trouble is, Dix doesn't just want B.C. to de-industrialize.
He wants the rest of us to do so, too. And he's going to blockade the rest of us,