Vancouver Province
for March 15, 2001

There’s a maxim in politics – all right, I just made it up – that when you try to be cute, it backfires. And governments never learn this. They’re like Charlie Brown with Lucy holding the football – it’s obvious from the start the ball’s going to be pulled away and you’ll fall on your ass. From my own cabinet experience I remember countless incidents when we thought we could polish a story and slide it past the opposition and media. Every time we’d get caught out and the matter was made worse – much worse.

Let’s look at three instances where the NDP were too cute by half.

When the Carrier decision came down in August 1999 it was devastating. Former Premier Harcourt, two senior ministers and a senior deputy were scathingly dealt with by the trial judge who made the unusual award of punitive damages to punish the government for egregiously contumacious behaviour. The Attorney-General of the day, Ujjal Dosanjh, apparently without reading the case (although he later said he had which story was amended to say he’s read highlights) recommended an appeal.

Now it’s not rocket science to conclude that this appeal had a hell of a lot more to do with politics than law. The trick was to keep the matter before the courts for the next election thus off the campaign trail.

But then Mr Dosanjh screwed up. Instead of calling an election right after he was made premier a year ago, he dithered. Suddenly the Carrier appeal was about to be heard. But, not to worry – the appeal would probably take six months.

Then, whammo! The government suddenly found some 46 boxes of documents they’d overlooked disclosing to the plaintiffs and they had to abandon the appeal. Now what?

Of course. Have an Inquiry just like Glen Clark did with the Nanaimo Commonwealth Holdings case thus keeping it from being an election issue. That’ll fool ‘em! And who better than to do the inquiry than former Chief Justice Bryan Williams? Let’s announce him!

Thanks to good spade work by the Province’s Mike Smyth it turned out that Mr Williams had once acted for at least one of the Indian Bands involved in the case. Moreover, it was common knowledge that he had been not so gently eased out of office by his fellow judges making it just a tad awkward for him to be seen as judging one them. Mr Williams, out of town when the premier had made his announcement, came back and promptly stated that he had not agreed to sit, leaving Ujjal Dosanjh to stammer that maybe Mike Smyth was right after all.

Not content with this, Mr Dosanjh thought it would be great sport to bring in, with 13 days notice to the entire business community, a wage parity bill granting equal pay to work of equal value and tart it up as simply an effort to give women equality in the marketplace. Surely no one would notice that the NDP, so enamoured of this idea in the dying days of their administration, had not in nine years brought this benefit to the public sector – that this was, far from being a little wage equality package, a hugely complex and controversial notion which, if implemented, would cost bundles of money. The Liberals, after a few stumbling steps at the start, are now preparing to endorse the notion in principle, thus taking the wind from the NDP’s tattered sails, then letting the public learn just what a complicated and expensive this exercise could become.

But, aha! There’s more, says Ujjal Dosanjh. Let’s solidify the women’s vote with a new law to give greater protection to women wanting abortions. That’ll sow lovely seeds of dissension in the Liberal ranks where we know, says NDP minister Joan Smallwood, there are 13 strong prolifers who’ll split their party on the issue. Trouble is, those 13 Liberals are nowhere to be found. Besides, Gordon Campbell need only declare two things – first, that a Liberal government would not interfere with the abortion laws as they stand and second, there’ll be a free vote so that the party can be seen by pro-choicers as being on their side - and by pro-lifers as a party within which there is some hope their cause will be heard.

Three times Premier Charlie Brown kicked at the football and three times he wound up, unceremoniously, on his prat.