Prime Minister Harper will appear at an event on Tuesday at Brentwood College. Many will wonder at the sudden attention Cowichan is getting from the federal Conservatives – with Rona Ambrose also here recently, and there was a drive-by throwing around of money by Conservatives here during the summer too.

After all, many also think that the Harper government views BC as simply that pesky bit of real estate getting in the way of having Alberta bitumen flow into Chinese refineries. So why the sudden attention?

Math. The federal riding boundaries just got redrawn and Langford got added to Cowichan, while Ladysmith got chopped off. The result is that Cowichan has gone from a safe NDP seat to a toss up that the Conservatives would dearly love to take. To see the math in action, use this handy calculator at pollmaps.ca

So, get ready for a parade of Conservative bigwigs coming to Cowichan over the next 18 months. Who knows, maybe they’ll even give us back some of our money in the form of feel good projects to buy some local love, although there are already skeptics about the actual numbers.

Don’t expect any climb down from Oil-At-Any-Cost though. They don’t want Cowichan that badly.