CKNW Editorial
for May 30, 2000

If you stand back and look at politics in BC and the rest of Canada you don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

The federal Liberals couldn’t care less about British Columbia and never could. The most powerful B.C. Liberal in Ottawa is, we’re confidently and semi-confidentially told, is Senator Ross Fitzpatrick, a man who’s never been elected to anything in his life but has even better credentials than democracy going for him – he’s an old crony of Jean Chretien’s.

The #2 Party in the land has no leader right now and is undergoing a leadership race where everyone is trying to out "right" the other and at the same time offend not a single voter. None of the hopefuls with the exception of Keith Martin are talking about social policies even though most of us who are not supporters of the NDP believe in them. No, it’s just right wing, more right wing then some more for good measure. None of the leadership contenders spoke out against John Reynold’s cowardly and utterly uncalled for criticism of the judge in the Trott case. They’re afraid to. None have done or said anything of comfort to the middle of the road Canadian.

The #3 Party, the Bloc Quebecois, is a provincial party dedicated to the destruction of the country while the NDP are so irrelevant that they face a wipeout of epic proportions next time out. The once proud Conservative Party wallows in discord, unable to raise the banners of Prime Ministers past, especially not that of Mulroney, their next but last one, while stuck with a leader who’s thought and acted like a very old mind since he was a kid. There is nothing on the horizon either.

Perhaps Paul Martin will hang around but what makes anyone think that he will be different from any other Liberal. Steeped in the traditions of the party, half French Canadian, he too sees Canada as the great Upper Canada/Lower Canada debate and will, as his predecessors Chretien and Trudeau did, dance to the Central Canadian tune while occasionally throwing a few outworn pieties at the rest of us.

In British Columbia we have a slightly different variation on the theme. We have a premier who is probably better liked than his opposition counterpart but who is not only beset by the sins of his party but constantly stabbed at, like a falling Caesar, by his predecessor and his political pygmy pals. Applauding this bloodletting from the sidelines is much of the Labour Union movement and other traditional NDP supporters.

The man who would take his place. Gordon Campbell, has many enemies and the largest group of them are people who have never met him and either dislike him, don’t trust him, or plain don’t think he has the jam to win.

I have a different theory about Mr Campbell. Those who don’t like or trust him are former Socreds – and there are a hell of a lot of them around – who resent that Campbell didn’t change the name of his party to something that made all of the right wing welcome but preferred to rub their noses in it. Don’t underestimate this group – it’s numerous. They have always hated the Liberals and saw the detested party dance on the grave of Social Credit and now pretend that they’re not the same old Liberal Party but something quite different. Mr Campbell likes to point out that most of the old Socred backroom boys and many former Socred MLAs are under his banner – but this misses the point. The backroom boys and many politicians will take their ball to wherever the game is being played – we’re not talking about them. The problem Mr Campbell has is with the ordinary voter who supported the Socreds and for many of them it was because the Socreds were the enemies of the Liberal Party. It shouldn’t be overlooked that the old Bill Bennett Social Credit Party made its private peace with the Conservative Party but never with the Liberals.

Then there is Bill Vander Zalm, driven from office in disgrace, back with his shining 40 odd teeth in the voters’ face offering decent opposition to the Liberals, should they win, or even an alternative to them being government.

The country has no national party – not even the Liberals can claim that and British Columbia has no provincial party as the Socreds once were. Not only tough for the political pundits to deal with – but what of the poor voter facing these political alternatives, knowing full well, that all he or she can possibly do is vote for the lesser of a number of evils.