Adrian Dix led sa国际传媒鈥檚 New Democrats to a shocking loss in last week鈥檚 election, but the party should not rush to judgment in deciding his future.
Any time a party leader loses an election, his or her leadership is almost always the first topic for discussion. When everyone inside and outside a political party believes a victory is a sure thing, as was the case this year, a loss makes the ice under the leader鈥檚 feet even thinner.
In the backrooms and living rooms of the NDP, the post-mortems are well under way. Those discussions have to focus on what went wrong before the party apportions blame for its loss of three seats.
Christy Clark and the sa国际传媒 Liberals ran a clearly focused campaign that emphasized economic growth to create jobs and hammered at Dix鈥檚 weak points. They painted him as someone who could endanger voters鈥� jobs and who lacked integrity. In response, Dix stayed on the high road 鈥� but his greatest failing was that he failed to articulate a vision that could draw people to him.
The NDP overestimated the residual anger over the harmonized sales tax and believed that all they had to do to win was not be the Liberals. Dix avoided committing to any decisions, promising study and research. When he made a sudden decision to oppose the expansion of the Kinder Morgan pipeline, he frightened many people who were worried about their jobs.
As the campaign continued, the Liberals鈥� polling, which they kept to themselves, showed the momentum going their way. Voters over 55 were favouring them and were strongly inclined to vote; younger people backed the NDP but were much less likely to vote. The NDP鈥檚 internal polling was less precise.
On election day, for all its vaunted election machine, the NDP couldn鈥檛 get its supporters out to vote, while the Liberal supporters were motivated to head to the polls. It appears that the Liberals鈥� negative campaign worked, and fear of what the NDP might do to the province was a stronger force than any desire for change.
The party must decide whether the mistakes in the campaign were made by Dix alone or by the team behind him. It would be a waste of time to hand Dix his walking papers if the blame lies with a party apparatus that will remain after he is gone.
Were party president Moe Sihota and other veterans from the NDP governments of the 1990s trying to relive their glory days by pushing Dix in directions he didn鈥檛 want to go? Was Dix just the face of the campaign or its architect, as well?
All these questions and critiques assume the NDP loss was caused by flawed strategy or leadership, rather than something more fundamental. If the NDP鈥檚 core beliefs and attitude toward governing remain unacceptable to all but a minority of voters, the soul-searching will have to go much deeper than the effectiveness of negative ads.
Inside and outside the party, Dix is widely praised for his work ethic, dedication and intelligence. The party would only wound itself by dumping him and opening up the kind of vicious internal battles that led to the ouster of Carole James as leader after the 2009 election.
On the other hand, Dix must take responsibility for what happened, beyond his role as the face of the campaign. If a team behind the scenes pushed him into a poorly conceived strategy, he is a weak leader. If he created that strategy on his own, he is a leader with poor judgment.
Those evaluations will come in the months ahead. It鈥檚 not time to replace Dix as leader. He and the party have a lot of work ahead of them.
