Vancouver Courier
for May 27, 1998

Fantastic! Mr Charisma himself, Bill Vander Zalm is back! For a media so swamped with dull, this is indeed great fun. Whether or not the public of British Columbia will enjoy the exercise is another matter.

Last weekend the flying Dutchman gave a rousing speech to the Reform Party Convention making it clear that he is back in politics. He's now a director of the party. If the wise men are right, he'll soon become it's leader.

All failed political leaders are convinced that the voters made a tragic error an error caused by a media that hates him. Most, however (perhaps after some debate, which the spouse usually wins), do go gently into the night appearing thereafter only at charity balls and book signings.

Mr Vander Zalm is not built like that. He craves - is there not a stronger word? - attention, especially media attention. It doesn't matter that the attention is unfavourable as he demonstrated during his criminal trial when he regularly showed up at adjournments where he was not required just for the pleasure of facing the cameras and mikes.

But he's been away for 7 years - why now and why the Reform Party?

He hasn't had a party with which to play. True, he's flirted with right-wing Christian groups and parties but Vander Zalm knows that they're never going to elect an MLA, not even him. There was no point staying with the Socreds - not only were they down and out, but he was the reason. Though once a candidate to lead the Provincial Liberals I suspect that he was like many immigrants and felt obligated to that party more than he felt attracted by its dogma (whatever that, from time to time, might be.) He certainly wasn't going to the NDP. The Tories, about as politically viable as the Rhinoceros Party, are led by an old Socred political foe, David Mercier. Vander Zalm had to bide his time - which he did once before, remember, when he retired from politics to await the demise of Bill Bennett.

The Reform Party is perfect. Small enough to be led by a one man band it's large enough to get the kind of attention Vander Zalm needs. He's tried his style on a large party, which he led to victory in 1986, and knows the perils. Large parties tend to have factions with different issues and different constituencies. Leading them requires consensus building and, unless it's built around his opinion, Vander Zalm will destroy any consensus along with the people in it.

All political parties want to get elected. Even the most responsible of cool heads will select winability over good policy every time.

Under Wilf Hanni, the Reform Party is going nowhere. But even with Wilf Hanni the party has been in the 15-20% range in the polls which tells you something. With Bill Vander Zalm that could easily get to the 20% hard support range.

What does this mean?

Well, among other things, it means that those who were telling Gordon Campbell that he should change his party's name and make its policy statement more inclusive were bang on. (Needless to say modesty prevents me from naming these sage advisers.) They were right because the failure to do so gave Reform time to recover from the loss of its leader Jack Weisgerber and the defection of Richard Neufeld to the Liberals. Had Campbell used his head, he would truly be the government in waiting.

There were two reasons Campbell did nothing. He did not accurately assess just what voter resistance there is to the name "Liberal" and he didn't want the bloody shoot-out with party bag man and devout Federal Liberal David McLean which a name change would entail. Which proves that at least to this extent, Vander Zalm is right - when push comes to shove, they're all Liberals.

But does this all mean anything? Surely the NDP are in such high odour that no matter what they do they're barely twitching corpses.

Not necessarily so. The election could be as late as May 2001. That's an eternitiy of eternities in political terms. When the next election comes, the economy will be better. Almost certainly, Captain B.C., Mr Clark will have a couple of new sticks to beat on Ottawa with. But here's, perhaps, the biggest threat to the non NDP vote. Many voters will believe that by voting Reform, they'll simply be electing "free enterprise" MLAs and will not be helping help the NDP by splitting the vote but just providing a prod to the Liberals to be more conservative. They'll be wrong on both counts.

There are thousands of voters who hate the NDP who will never vote Liberal under any circumstances. They are not enough to elect a government nor even perhaps an MLA. But they can defeat an opposition.

Look what Reform did in 1996 with 8% of the vote - think what they can do with 20%.