We should have known it wasn’t going to be that easy.
With a much shorter campaign than either the last federal election or the 2016 U.S. election, most people in B.C. probably figured the provincial election was going to be nice, quick and easy.
Not so fast (in a manner of speaking).
Turns out the election isn’t going to over until next week, at the earliest, instead of the May 9 everybody was figuring on.
The really wild thing is not even the 40-some MLAs-elect who got more than 50 per cent of the votes in their riding know which side of the house they’re going to be on when the Legislature starts sitting again.
Nobody knows who the government is going to be, who the opposition is going to be, and whether there will be one party or two on one of those two sides.
I mean, up here in Prince George, it was pretty straightforward. Mike Morris and Shirley Bond each won fairly easily in a campaign which most people I spoke to found, for lack of a better word, boring.
There were no huge issues locally for the local candidates to debate, and there didn’t seem to be any big issues provincially that served as a focus point for the campaign.
When one of the biggest items for discussion seemed to be tolls on bridges in the Lower Mainland, you know it’s not the most stirring of campaigns.
But while the campaign didn’t offer a lot of excitement, the aftermath certainly seems to have that potential.
With some ‘specialty’ ballots still to be counted, there will already be recounts in two ridings, with the potential for requests for recounts in others. A friend of mine was wondering why they had announced the recounts for two ridings, when there were a few others where the initial returns were close enough that adding in the specialty votes could trigger a recount there as well.
I didn’t have an answer for him.
Just like I don’t have an answer for how a boring campaign turned into a nail-biting countdown.
But that’s B.C. politics for you.
