CKNW Editorial
for March 21, 2001

Gordon Campbell, who evidently has learned a thing or two about politics in the past few years, has selected precisely the right tactics to deal with Mr Dosanjh and the NDP. I suppose I shouldn’t mention that I gave him the right strategy for handling the Equal Pay for Equal Work bill and the threatened abortion bill … but coming up to a contract year as I am, I can’t let modesty get in the way of the truth. In fairness such a strategy is not a stroke of genius but pretty simple … it’s not the brilliance of the strategy that is worth mentioning but the utter stupidity of the premier. It’s been the invariable experience of all who have been legislators that whenever you try to get cute you get your head kicked in. Mr Dosanjh thought that by bringing in some printed figures that looked like a balanced budget and some legislation that would embarrass them he would pull off a coup. As always happens, the strategy has backfired.

In assessing his strategy a year ago, after winning the leadership, he really only had one question – when will the fortunes of my party be best … not when might I expect a miracle? I said to him at that time that the high water mark, as I saw it, was the premier’s leadership victory … that he still had the Glen Clark matter ahead of him and that every day closer he got to the end of his mandate, the worse it would be.
That sort of prediction isn’t rocket science. Governments seldom wallow in good news. To expect that a party, already badly divided over the leadership fight, and facing an opposition grown stronger and more mature, would see its fortunes improve was politically stupid.

Mr Dosanjh had another window of opportunity – last Fall when the governments increased revenues from natural gas came into the treasury. But the window was a narrow one and he missed it.

The NDP are now many times worse off than they were a year ago. Although the party came out of the leadership convention wearing open wounds, there had been a fairly successful to at least give the party faithful something to grasp on to. Here was a new, attractive leader to rally behind. The trouble is, new attractive leaders have a short shelf life, as witness John Turner and Kim Campbell. Once a little time passed, and no miracles were wrought, the divisions start to show. This is especially true if the new attractive leader doesn’t do all in his power, including a lot of swallowing of pride, to keep peace in the caucus.

There were three things Mr Dosanjh either didn’t bargain for or misled himself on.

The first was the deepness of the divisions in caucus especially when the premier didn’t include Moe Sihota in cabinet. This factor, combined with the fact of Glen Clark no longer inside the tent peeing out, but outside peeing in, has made the caucus a living hell for the premier. Had he been able to keep his caucus on side in the months since the leadership convention he might be in shape to win, perhaps, 15-20 seats.

The second factor was the Carrier decision. Now the decision came down in July 1999 and nothing changed except the appeal had to be abandoned. When that happened, the entire sordid mess came under the political microscope for all to see. The worst of it was, perhaps, the fact that the Premier, when Attorney-General, had authorized the appeal and had trouble remembering if he had read the judgment at all, had read it in its entirety, or had read the highlights. The Carrier case contains within it the image much of the public has of the party, once self proclaimed to be virtue itself, now a sordid gathering of questionable ethics and indisputable incompetence.

The third factor was the recent budget. No doubt Mr Dodsanjh was led to believe, or mislead himself into believing, that he could present a budget with a surplus. His problem was that his advisers couldn’t tell the difference between a windfall and a waterfall. The government got a windfall in a huge increase in natural gas revenues and didn’t get a waterfall in the sense that the weather went dry, changing BC Hydro from a goose to be plucked, to a gone goose. In fact, it’s pretty clear that Paul Ramsey’s latest budget is even worse than the famous fudgit budgets of 1996. As you will hear from David Austin, and as we have already learned from Hydro chair Brian Smith, it is not only imprudent to assume a $300 million dividend to the government next year it is more likely that BC Hydro will fall far short of breaking even. It will all depend upon the weather. If it continues dry, and water levels don’t rise to meet expectations, the low water storage levels will mean that Hydro may have to import power at a very high rate.

Then there is the matter of the Carrier decision. Mr Ramsey, when writing his budget, had to know that mediation had broken down and that the matter was again heading to court. A prudent guess at what that will cost the government would be $200 million and that may be conservative. Yet Mr Ramsey’s balanced budget makes no allowance for that coming expenditure.

So the government overstates its income by $300 million from Hydro that it won’t likely get and overlooks the huge damages to be assessed in the Carrier case – in themselves, a swing of half a billion dollars!

The problem is, the public expected the budget to be phony. What it wasn’t prepared for was a budget that was so obviously flawed. To make matters worse, Paul Ramsey is no doubt, a lot of things good but a good spokesman he isn’t. He presents an image of arrogance in the body of a platitudinous, preachy, patronizing kindergarten teacher talking down to a rather slow-witted audience. The public is in no mood for any further insults to the intelligence by this bunch.

These are three of the main problems that have beset Mr Dosanjh. To make things even worse, anything good that has happened has been rejected out-of-hand by most voters. They don’t trust the NDP and fairly or not, they are prepared to believe all the bad and disbelieve the good. That happens to all government that stretch their mandate. To make matters even worse yet, every day that passes without an election being called serves to badly annoy the voting public.

There is no advice from me to Mr Dosanjh because there is no advice to give. The situation is so bad that perhaps you just hold out until the last minute and hope that something will turn up. The problem with that is by stretching it there may be a half dozen NDP seats left in the province at this point, in two months time there will be none … not even Jenny Kwan’s or Joy McPhail’s … and not even that of the premier himself.