The election has been over now for three weeks, and the media has been full of articles dissecting what happened in an attempt to explain what to many came as a shocking surprise.

It is easy to see what happened, if not why, but generally left unsaid is what probably will not happen with the Liberals getting another four years in government.

A friend of mine made note of that right after the results were in, and I think that it puts the whole event in a more accurate perspective than merely discussing how the election was either won or lost, depending on one’s point of view.

As my friend Marco wrote, for the next four years, there will be:

NO public inquiry into the BC Rail and BC Hydro scandals

NO comprehensive public Environmental-Economic Impact Assessment for major resource development projects (pipelines, mines, fracking, etc.)

NO restoration and repair to our damaged public health, emergency and education systems

NO restoration of curtailed Human Rights, Labour Code and Employment Standards, and Freedom of Information laws

NO serious effort to develop a more sustainable, democratic, local community-based economy and job creation (including co-ops, getting away more from oil dependency, etc.)

NO restoration of a fairer dynamic tax code based on the ability to pay, not on who you know or how well you can blackmail.

NO relief from skyrocketing personal debt, lack of retirement security, lack of access to skills training, declining air and water quality, ever worsening poverty and homelessness and chronic high unemployment

NO electoral or election finance reform or efforts to make government bureaucracy and crown agencies more accountable to the public, including the productive union workers who give them reason to exist.

So, how did this happen?  Polling before the election indicated that the public was fed up with the government, and that they would be defeated soundly.  It did not happen, and the reason that most did not see it coming as it did could be because the polls were asking the wrong questions and the election planners were running with misleading data.

There is no guarantee, however, that even if the right questions were asked and the data was different the opposition would have been able to unseat the government.  It may be that the organization as presently constituted cannot win elections because they are adverse to running the kind of campaign necessary to achieve victory.

The polls are probably telling us what people are thinking, but not so much how they will vote, or more precisely if they will turn their feelings into votes.  The fact is that from the middle of their first term onward the public was generally unhappy with the government.  The opposition lost three elections in a row that were theirs’ to win because they could not turn that dissatisfaction into votes.

For the last thirty years the province has seen a steady decrease in the percentage of eligible voters actually casting a ballot, with the exception of a minor increase in 2005.  The 2013 election had a turnout of just over fifty-two percent of registered voters, but not all eligible voters even bother to register.  The turnout of all eligible voters was just over forty-nine percent.

The government won re-election with just under twenty-two percent of the vote of those estimated to be eligible to vote.  The message here being that most voters, though unhappy with the government, also do not trust the opposition nor the system, and don’t bother to participate.

The root of current dissatisfaction might lay in the results of the 2001 election where after five years of concentrated negative attacks on the NDP government the current government won a landslide victory.  Unfortunately for them their campaign was more hype than reality, and instead of governing with the interests of the province in mind they proceeded to rip up social contracts and sell off public assets. They dropped in the polls.

The reason the opposition has been unable to capitalize on this situation may have roots in their 2000 leadership contest where the populist wing of the party was crushed in this rather unsavory event by party power brokers.  They lost the 2001 election which was no surprise, but losing it by the margin that they did was.

They continued in control of the party, managing to lose two elections with Carole James, and lost more credibility with the ham-handed way that they managed the uprising against Carole dating from at least the 2009 convention.  Now they have lost an election that was more than theirs’ to win, primarily because a majority of the people who do vote do not trust them, and much of the majority who do not vote, won’t because they do not have a good incentive to go to the polls.

What will happen in 2017, or possibly before, will depend upon whether the government can clean up its act and regain popular support (in the thirty polls taken by Angus Reid between August 2009 and May 2013 the government only led or was tied in three of them), and whether the opposition can clean house and energize the public to see them as a credible alternative.

Jerry West publishes The Record in Gold River, BC.