Prince George, B.C. – When it comes to nominating candidates, the BC Liberals are way ahead of the opposition NDP.

The Liberals have around 75% of their candidates in place for next May’s provincial election while the NDP has just 16.

All of this as the BC Liberals converge on the Westin Bayshore for their party convention this weekend.

The big question is, does it matter?

“It’s probably never too early to nominate a candidate if you’ve got some high-profile ones in the wings,” says UNBC political science lecturer Jason Morris.

“I think it’s fair to take having a lot of candidates being ready-to-go early as a measure of election readiness even though this is early November and we’re looking at May 9^th next year for voting.”

Should it have New Democrat supporters concerned, including those in Prince George where no candidates have announced publicly a run for one of two nominations?

“It’s always hard to say what’s going on behind the scenes at the constituency association level and my guess is that there aren’t too many New Democratic party members locally who are too worried about that,” he says.

“I imagine they would start rolling up their sleeves for candidate selection early in the new year. If they don’t get started on that by then, then that’s an indication that the constituency associations are rather moribund.”

As for this weekend’s convention, he says it’s more of a chance for the BC Liberals to rally the troops more than anything else.

“BC Liberal conventions tend to be more about networking and socializing and election readiness, instead of the nitty gritty, hard work that many other parties do in terms of hashing out and debating and arguing about directions and policy,” says Morris.

“That’s something that’s more akin to opposition parties having to do and the BC Liberals are essentially just trying to maintain their game and not worry about losing any ground and playing it safe.

“We can look at the agenda of the conference and see it’s mostly get-togethers and dinners and speakers and not a whole lot of presenting of research and journal articles and social science statistics of what to do next.”

The Liberal convention is taking place in Vancouver and starts  shortly after noon on Friday,    and wraps on Sunday morning with the Premier delivering a keynote address.