CKNW Editorial
for July 5, 1999

Over 80% of the people in BC, according to recent polls, want the NDP outta here and in a big way. And the Liberals are the ones able to get rid of them so that’s where the support is going. The business community, seeking any port in the storm, are holding their collective noses and giving their support, for which read cash to the Liberal coffers.

There is a problem with this picture – a very big one. Assuming that the NDP rascals get thrown out in May of 2001, which is when the election will be held, what sort of rascals are we throwing in?

What we are not throwing in is an all encompassing coalition of the right as the Socreds under Bill Bennett presented. I single out Bill Bennett rather than his father because under W.A.C. there was always a small but lively Liberal coalition (most of whom became Socreds under Bill Bennett) and a Conservative party which was, from time to time, politically active. It was Bill Bennett who threw the Social Credit doors wide open to people who had bitterly fought his father and his father’s policies.

The Liberal Party under Gordon Campbell has passed some tests but not any real tough ones. The Calgary Declaration a couple of years ago might have been tough had the NDP supported an undiluted version of it but they didn’t – they put enough iffies into it to effectively kill it so the Liberals could look to Daddy in Ottawa and say “look … we voted for the Calgary Declaration and it’s not our fault that those naughty socialists so tinkered with it that it doesn’t mean any thing.”

The tough test has come with the swallowing up of MacMillan Bloedel by Wehyerhauser. And this gets back to principles. For it is the duty of the opposition to oppose which, while it doesn’t mean it must obstruct what is obviously right, does mean that you must expose the bad parts of any proposed policy.

There are bad parts to this takeover – some very bad parts. But the Liberals, so in thrall to the businesses that support them and their squandering of money on a campaign two years early, that they won’t say boo to a goose. There should be some very hard questions publicly posed here and they are not being posed.

There is another matter that the Liberals, for the last five years have been remarkably silent on. There is an agreement that the B.C. Government, Alcan, and the Federal government pony up $50 million each to build a cold water release facility at the Kenney Dam so as to protect the sockeye in the Nechako. Last year thousands of dish were lost. Alcan and BC have indicated that they will pay their share but there hasn’t been a peep out of the Ottawa Liberals – nor the BC Liberals who were, to their credit, the first political party to see the calamity of the Kemano Completion Project and to fight it. Why haven’t the provincial Liberals fought this issue? One is tempted to think that just as they don’t wish to muddy the waters by questioning big business from whom they get their money, they don’t want to annoy their big Liberal brothers in Ottawa.

What we will elect in 2001 clearly will not be a made in British Columbia party. It will not be like the Bill Bennett Socreds at all. It will be a party that answers to big business at all times and is very careful not to offend the Federal Liberals. We should know that before we vote. I’m not saying we shouldn’t use the Liberals as a vehicle to throw this lot out just that we should have no illusions about the rascals we throw in to replace them.