Vancouver Province
for May 24, 2001

Listen, dear readers, and you’ll find out how it all went so wrong – how we had nearly a decade of the most appalling government in the history of Christendom (well, of the province anyway). The fault was all Bill Bennett’s. At least it is in the sense of that old nursery rhyme about how for the want of a nail the war was lost.

Cast your minds – those who are old enough – to the Spring of 1986. We had survived, thanks to Bennett’s wisdom and courage, a recession and the world was our oyster. Bennett, who won the 1983 election handsomely on the platform of "restraint", was then almost physically driven from power when he did what he promised to do, by an enraged "left". By June of 1986 prosperity was back. We had Expo 86, a roaring success in spite of then Vancouver Mayor Mike Harcourt’s concerted effort to strangle it at birth and it all looked great – so great, in fact, that we told Mr Bennett (in the polls of the day) that we wanted rid of him and that, despite the record of the lamentable government of Dave Barrett from 1972-75, it was time for another great socialist experiment.

Bill Bennett did not like to lose and he wasn’t about to become Leader of the Opposition again, a role he played in the Barrett days and hated, so he retired. Fair enough. God knows he’d had a good innings.

But then it happened. You see, the NDP should have won an election in 1987 under poor old Bob Skelly ("poor old" so often preceded his name it almost became part of it.) But it didn’t because the Socreds held the irrefutable belief that it had a sacred trust to forevermore keep the socialists at bay. Though the party had several candidates who could have carried it to a graceful defeat, followed in 1992 by victory of a grateful public who’d just been again reminded how incompetent the NDP were, they blew it by selecting a leader who could win again.

The Socred leadership convention of 1986 was a glorious affair. It had everything – hoopla, beer and endless candidates’ tents full of goodies and occasionally even a candidate. Running dead last in the race was a future Prime Minister of Canada, Kim Campbell who mouthed the prophetic phrase about candidate Bill Vander Zalm that "charisma without substance is a dangerous thing." There was another prophetic comment on the record. One Rafe Mair, when asked on the eve of the vote by then CBC TV host Bill Good what would happen if Bill Vander Zalm won, said "in two years he will destroy the Social Credit Party". He won and he did. Then he won the election the Socreds should have lost which gave us the NDP for 10 terrible years.

But we can’t leave Bill Bennett with all the blame, for Grace McCarthy had a glorious chance to confine the damage to one term of the hapless and hopeless Mike Harcourt and keep the Social Credit Party alive and well at the same time.

In August of 1991, Vander Zalm having been purged and replaced by Rita Johnston, the Socreds held another leadership contest which really came down to either Ms Johnston or Mrs McCarthy, the grande dame of Social Credit. Most pundits agree that if Mrs McCarthy had won, even if she had lost the 1992 election, the party would have survived as a tough and able opposition. But she didn’t win because she dithered and entered the race a week too late – just late enough to lose by a whisker to Ms Johnston who, rightly or wrongly was seen by the party and the public as the embodiment of the right wing and thus of all that had gone wrong with it. This led directly to the terrible, for Ms Johnston and the Socreds, TV debate in the 1992 election which saw Gordon Wilson, leader of the seat-less Liberals pull off a one line zinger which won him 17 seats at the expense pf the Socreds.

Mrs McCarthy was given another chance finally winning the Socred leadership in 1992 but she lost a by-election and that out paid to her, the Social Credit Party and led to nearly ten years of calamitous government leading to last week’s smashing wipeout.

All because Bill Bennett hated losing and Grace McCarthy dithered.