There will be a rematch in the Maple Ridge-Mission riding in May's provincial election after Mike Bocking was chosen as the NDP candidate to run against BC Liberal incumbent Marc Dalton.

Dalton beat Bocking in the May 2009 election by just 68 votes.

"It'll be a rematch," Bocking said, adding that "we're just going to campaign really hard."

This time around, Bocking said he has more time for campaigning. The last time around, he was nominated as the candidate just six weeks before the provincial election. This time he has almost six months.

"We're happy about having more time to plan," Bocking said on Monday, the day after the nomination meeting.

Bocking said his party will be clear on what they plan to do.

"We want to run a government where people understand ahead of time where we're going," he said, referring to the BC Liberals track record on the harmonized sales tax issue whereby voters weren't told before the last election that it was being considered.

Bocking said an NDP government would also want to bring more balance to the province, as opposed to the BC Liberals who he said are doing work for large corporations, forgetting about the middle and working classes.

"We want to rebalance things so working families have a better deal," he said.

This doesn't mean class warfare, Bocking added, and business is important as well, but "they're not the only people in the province."

Bocking is a former reporter with the Vancouver Sun, but has been the union president for the newspaper workers with Communications, Energy, and Paperworkers loc. 2000 since 1988.

In addition to running in the provincial election in 2009, he ran and lost three times against Randy Kamp,

mrantanen@mrtimes.com