Election Coverage 2024

The tough mudder race to govern B.C. has begun

Elections are always mucky, but this one is turning into a real mud pit of a race.

Hello dear and loyal subscribers!

We’ve reformatted the website a bit and are now offering some special Election 2024 coverage. Woowee.

Of course Northern Beat stories will keep coming, but in the spirit of the season, we’ve temporarily added two new sections - Policy Primer and FactCheck.

Policy primer tries to keep up with key policy planks as they’re developed by each party. It’s rough and ready, not always pretty, but hopefully dense with useful information.

FactCheck is a list of public utterances and communication materials we’ve come across that didn’t ring quite right. So we dug around to correct the record. We’ll post them as we come across them. If you have any suggestions, or want us to look into some factoid you heard on the campaign trail, let us know.

Day 6

Since we’re only at the beginning of this election adventure – Day 6 – the current list of topics is in its infancy. We’ll add to it daily and tweak topics as developments occur and new promises are made (hourly sometimes!). Most parties have yet to release the bulk of their policy platform so there’ll be plenty more in both sections by election day.

Given the unprecedented everything about this election, there are many unknowable plot turns ahead. One fun thing about elections is you never can tell what a leader might spontaneously commit to. They have been known to blurt out major policy promises while out stumping, sometimes even setting staff on their heels.

Rumour has it, Eby’s flip on the Carbon Tax (announced in the middle of a press conference on another topic) was one such incident, but who knows.

It was the day after the only televised debate of the 2020 campaign when I asked John Horgan during a scrum if he was going to implement the Old Growth Review recommendations. To my surprise, he said yes. His commitment caught not only me, but ecologists, the authors of the review, and (it seemed) his own team, off-guard. There was definitely a few days lag before the new “paradigm-shifting” forestry policy appeared on the BC NDP platform.

At your service

However it shakes down, our team stands at the ready and we’ll keep an ear out for dramatic or exciting announcements in this election cycle.

The ‘blarney’ is flying fast and thick. It’s not easy to distill truth from taradiddle especially with a monsoon of party comms, speeches, news stories and rumours pelting us from every direction. We can’t promise to catch everything, but will share highlights of whatever we get our hands on.

We’ll also be sending summary newsletters as the policy announcements, press releases and attacks ads flood in… mostly in a desperate attempt to get them off our desks.

If you want us to add a topic to the policy page or look into some fishy thing you heard said for the FactCheck section, drop us a line – they’re both a work-in-progress and we want them to be useful!

Please also consider subscribing, or upgrading to a paid subscriber. Your dollars will go directly into the lint-lined pockets of our hard-working freelance contributors.

In the meantime, place your bets, steel your nerves and buckle up as we take this beautiful beast of a liberal democracy for a nail-biting ride to the finish line of Election 2024.

Don’t forget your driving goggles ‘cause it’s gonna get muddy.

Good luck to all the candidates and godspeed to the rest of us.

Fran

Questions, comments, feedback, contact Fran@NorthernBeat.ca

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