Vancouver Courier
for August 26, 1998

At this time of the year I find myself more reflective than at New Years. The schoolkids back in the crosswalks, the traffic back to its normal terrible instead of the summer hot-as-hell terrible, and everyone back where you can find 'em and I find myself reflecting on what's been and what's on the way.

It's election countdown time and I think it's fair to say that we've all learned some lessons. For example, the NDP aren't less corrupt than the bad old Socreds but infinitely worse. In fact, if you fairly evaluate the Vander Zalm/Johnston years (1986-91) you find that most of their corruptness was in the minds of the opposition or Mickey Mouse or both.

There was a fuss about a pub licence .. an environment minister found himself with a few shares of a forestry company in his RRSP portfolio .. a Tourism Minister awarded a lottery money contract to a firm headed by a staunch political supporter .. and a premier entertained a personal business client at Government House and took $20,000 cash from him in a hotel room in the middle of the night.

It was chaos all right, no question. Everybody was squabbling, senior ministers were resigning, government MLAs were leaving caucus - all great grist for the opposition and media's mill but about 1 at best on the corruption scale.

A feature of those years - in fact it may have been the feature - was the high moral tone of the NDP. If a cabinet minister picked his nose it was a resignation offence - or so it seemed. The NDP, donning the mantle of undiluted virtue, thundered incessantly at the lack of Socred morality.

Now Tammany Hall or Richard Daley style corruptness is not a big tradition in British Columbia. We simply abandon principles whenever it seems politically profitable to do so.

In fairness to the NDP, by this definition, the W.A.C. Bennett Socreds of eons ago were corrupt. So, sometimes, was the Bill Bennett government of which I was a member for five years. But the point is that the NDP weren't supposed to be this way and have turned out far, far worse than anything they criticized in those endless, tiresome lectures which now read like one long morality play.

Look at the record.

We had "Nanaimogate" which implicated most of the Barrett government and much of the Harcourt bunch at least in the sense that many NDP MLA's knew or ought to have known there was something wrong.

The Harcourt government mishandled the file from the get go and 25 years after the mess began the end is still not in sight.

Then there was Charlottetown which the NDP would like to forget. On October 26, 1992, they staked every principle they possessed on the "Yes" side even wearing "Yes" buttons in the Legislature in defiance of the rules. Fair enough, except after Charlottetown was trashed by the voters, they underwent a volte face which makes the conversion of Saul on the way to Damascus look like a slight alteration of opinion.

We've had an attorney-general who not only took a keen interest on behalf of his feminist supporters in a proposed prosecution of an anti abortion activist, but denied it under oath. Since telling untruths under oath is perjury one might have expected the attorney to resign but instead he appointed crown counsel, who had taken almost $150,000 in fees from his office the previous year, to investigate - counsel decided that the untruth was not deliberate.

Then came Hydrogate where, as events unfolded, the only question became how the hell does the Minister of Finance get out of this one? It turned out the answer was easy - force the Premier out office and become the Premier yourself then appoint a friendly chap whose lifelong conservative lethargy would guarantee that nothing would happen before the next election and very little thereafter.

Then there was a budget deliberately falsified in order to cheat, successfully, the Liberals out of the 1996 election.

We had the traditional resignation offence in Ottawa, a phone call from a Minister (in this case through his lawyer) to a judge to try to influence him. Of course there was no resignation. Neither this case nor the Attorney-General's false affidavit quite met the standards of conduct demanded of Former Socred Attorney-General Bud Smith who in a private phone conversation overheard, said unkind things about a lawyer. To the NDP, bad mouthing a lawyer is a resigning offence - swearing a false affidavit or phoning a judge isn't.

Now it's taken a new twist - the premier's busy retroactively exonerating his government and their pals from lawsuits.

As I say, we're in an election mode. Let's hope we hear no more from the NDP on morality - otherwise we may have an ongoing provincial upchuck.

Besides, a debate on political morality would only distract us from the real issue - the worst 7 years of government this province has ever seen.