B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell won his third straight majority last night, ensuring that he’ll see the province through the recession and the 2010 Olympic Games. (The STV vote initiative was soundly defeated, capturing 39 per cent, nowhere near the required 60 per cent, or the 58 per cent it garnered in the 2005 referendum.) Campbell’s pitch, in the country’s first election of the recession was remarkably consistent: “Ask yourself: Who is best able to lead us through troubled economic times?” He used “100 variations on those words, but the message was always the same: Don’t risk a change of government in an economic downturn,” writes Vancouver Sun columnist, Vaughn Palmer. It wasn’t a tough message to drive home. Right or wrong, the NDP, last in power when B.C. was a “have-not” province still bears the stain of having “destroyed” the provincial economy, much the way Bob Rae is tarnished in Ontario.