Vancouver Courier
for September 6, 1998

Premier Clark is out of control. All the spin doctors in the world can't help him because he doesn't much like being told. In this one respect only, he's like Winston Churchill who said that while he didn't mind learning he didn't much like being taught.

The NDP have always had one very powerful arrow in their quiver - voter association of the B.C. Liberals with the federal party. Though Gordon Wilson took the B.C. Liberals out of the federal party back in 1990 there remains a large number of British Columbians - including me, frankly - which thinks they're joined at the hip .. or at least at the pocketbook.

Glen Clark has tried, with some success, to continue to hang this one on Gordon Campbell using three areas - constitutional, fisheries and natives. The trouble is, the timing has proved bad. A year ago, when it was all rhetoric not policy, he might have made it stick. Today he looks rather like Miss Haversham in Dicken's Great Expectations who, jilted by her lover at the altar, 50 years later, still wore her wedding dress and gazed upon her wedding cake. Glen Clark looks wistfully back at better days and mouths upbeat words outdated by events.

He came closest to inflicting permanent scars over the Calgary Accord. Sensing that the public would not tolerate any special deal for Quebec, he threw a couple of critical whereases and self serving clauses in the B.C. version and waited for the Liberals to begin scrapping. And, I'm told, they nearly did but Gordon Campbell, supported by old time Liberal Geoff Plant and political pragmatist Mike Dejong, the new forces to be reckoned with, carried the day and the Liberals supported Mr Clark's resolution.

In July of this year, in the miscalculation of his career, Glen Clark gambled that the public would be swept up in emotion and support for what he grandly calls the "Glen Clark deal" with the Nisga'a. They weren't and Clark must now jam this badly flawed deal through the legislature to the tune of Liberals, flouting federal Liberal policy, loudly and effectively expressing the deep and valid concerns of a public angry at having been shut out of the process.

But Glen Clark's main weapon was the salmon fishery and in 1997 he seized the initiative brilliantly. Playing off Federal Fisheries Minister David Anderson's overweening sense of omnipotence he played the role of Captain B.C. almost flawlessly. But a lot has happened since then.

Anderson got off to a near fatal start as he avoided talking to skippers of fish boats blocking an American ferry in Alaska preferring to go fishing in Labrador with friends. American bullying was blamed on Ottawa generally and David Anderson in particular.

Again the timing was bad because then was then and now is now. But more importantly, Anderson's competence began to show through his incredible arrogance. Slowly but surely Anderson began to exploit the various interest groups and convince British Columbians that conservation was the only issue and that he was the one best able to do the conserving.

Like a losing prize fighter, Clark is still able to land the odd counterpunch but as time goes by, they become further apart and less telling.

The desperate Mr Clark recently commissioned an independent inquiry to determine what should be done and it essentially recommended "follow the lead of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, David Anderson, prop."

So what does Premier Clark do? Try again, this time using former Newfoundland Premier Brian Peckford as a one man commission with a mandate to lay all the blame on Anderson.

The two of them, Anderson and Peckford, start out on equal footing in one area - arrogance. Thereafter it's Anderson's ball game all the way.

Peckford stands for a Canada which most of B.C. rejects. A Meechkin who viciously fought his successor Clyde Wells' reversal of Newfoundland approval of Meech Lake, he became an even more zealous advocate of Charlottetown.

He was Premier of Newfoundland when the cod fishery died. And when it comes to Ottawa Liberals, he's about as impartial as an old Dodger fan is about the Yankees. His credibility to those who know him is z-e-r-o. To those who will get to know him, we get into minus figures.

Clark will complain that Anderson won't let his department cooperate with Peckford but why should he? Peckford isn't seeking the truth but evidence, real or imagined, to discredit Anderson and DFO thus help Clark's forlorn election chances. That a Progressive Conservative would help out a New Democrat shows just how much Liberals and Tories in Newfoundland hate each other.

Now Gordon Campbell is talking about the "Liberal Coalition" in hopes that will send off the Zalmoid renaissance. And the Liberal identification crisis is far from over.

But the fact remains that Gordon Campbell with a bit of luck and a lot of skill has gone a long way towards relieving the deep-seated distrust of the name "Liberal" on the provincial election scene.