10 Percent Of Surrey Residents Vote For Single Party Majority!
By R. Paul Dhillon
SURREY – Surrey’s elections results Saturday night were shocking for many candidates and parties, especially for those who spent a lot of money, time and energy only to see Linda Hepner-led Surrey First run away with a big win, with Hepner and her team getting more votes than the combined total of the losers – Doug McCallum and his Safe Surrey Coalition and Barinder Rasode and her One Surrey party, both of which were not a factor separately but could have given Surrey First a battle if they had a combined slate.
When the dust settled, the results were shocking for only one reason – that it wasn’t even a fight after polls predicted a close race.
In fact, the results were closer to the Surrey First’s own polling firm instead of always wrong Insights West, which again blew it in Surrey as they did with their polling numbers in the last provincial election.
Surrey First won 82 percent of the polls in Surrey on their way to sweeping all mayor, council and school board positions.
Sometimes expectations can cloud one’s vision but reality always comes with a Big Bang as it did for some of candidates who expected it to be a close fight or expected to win!
The bottom line was that Barinder and Doug split the vote. There was a significant vote increase in Surrey and almost all new voters went with Doug and Barinder but they were unable to break the vote bank of Surrey First, which kept its vote from last time and won easily.
And both McCallum and Rasode didn’t bring the fight to Hepner, when they needed to be on attack mode. They needed to really attack Surrey First’s record of overspending on city hall and so forth and really target Hepner with the voters, saying she is not ready to be mayor with her fumbling off important issues which they never really did.
They chose to attack her only on crime which is a big issue in Surrey with the rising crime rate but mostly a fringe issue that didn’t really resonate with voters as much as the people running thought it would.
You can’t run your campaign on a single issue no matter how much that affects a city as that is putting all your eggs in one basket.
Ironically Barinder who polled high when it came to crime had the lowest votes out of the three main mayoral candidates. And in an embarrassing turn of events, Barinder also polled nearly 7000 less than her party mate Kal Dosanjh, who showed some real muscle (no pun intended) in the political game by finishing 11th overall with nearly 28,000 votes. He is already being scouted by all major provincial and federal political parties to be a candidate.
In municipal elections it’s usually tough to win on council if your slate leader doesn’t win!
In every election that is supposedly close or has a big undecided vote, the people running only have one or two opportunities during the campaign to get on the top and you have to be bold with your ideas for change.
In fact, no one really used CHANGE as a slogan.
An interesting analysis by Surrey Now also showed that Surrey First has 100% power with support of just 10% of people who live in Surrey.
“Democracy is often described as being the “tyranny of the majority.” First coined by U.S. President John adams in 1788, and later popularized in the 1835 book Democracy in America by alexis de tocqueville, the term has come to be known as a scenario in which minority groups within a society are doomed to be marginalized by statistics,” the Now wrote in their editorial.
“Indeed, of the 698,499 votes cast for council candidates in the Surrey election, 347,723 were cast for people not belonging to the Surrey First slate. By a statistical hair, the majority (50.2 per cent) of the votes went to Surrey First.”
