Vancouver Province
for October 15, 2001

Settle back, children, while old Uncle Rafe tells you something that will shock you. In fact, two things. The polls are all wrong, always have been – and Gordon Campbell knows it.

Poll after poll tells us that the issues foremost in our minds are healthcare and education. Money doesn’t matter all that much. Reduce the lineups in health care and get rid of the portables and election will be certain.

I don’t know how much Premier Campbell knows of the political history of this province. He certainly is an admirer of the Bennetts, pere et fils - indeed if he isn’t patterning himself on Bill Bennett I miss my guess. He has Bill Bennett’s toughness – always there but not noticed until recently – and his sternness of manner when delivering homilies on government parsimony. More likely Mr Campbell, a native British Columbian, has a strong gut feeling about what British Columbians really want – to paraphrase the slogan from the south, it’s the money, stupid!

It’s hard for those of us of a certain age to remember that W.A.C. Bennett was so long ago. But he’s worth thinking about. He was not only a man of great vision – though, one must note, not a man who cared too much about environmental and social matters that interfered with that vision – but a man who knew people wanted massive developments coupled with lots of money in the bank. This seemingly impossible combination was mere child’s play to Bennett who simply created Crown Corporations, B.C. Hydro being the most notable, to borrow money in New York against the security of large hunks of concrete blocking rivers. In fact he was so good at this that while dams were springing up all over the province, he actually made a large loan to Quebec!

Back in the late sixties, with huge government guaranteed debts – Bennett called them "contingent liabilities" – the premier fired a flaming arrow into a barge on Okanagan Lake containing all the B.C. government’s debt. (He missed and a Mountie had to do the trick with a zippo cigarette lighter.)

When, in 1972, W.A.C. Bennett was finally ousted he left, according to his books, scads of money in the bank.

Dave Barrett’s NDP proceeded to squander the lot and then some. Bill Bennett came to power in 1975 on one issue only – where did all the money go?

Fast forward to 2001. Ten and a half years of the NDP. The issues, we were told, were health and education … then money. Gordon Campbell knew better and concentrated on the fiscal mismanagement of the past decade. 30 years after the Bennett Sr. days, he knew that money remained the issue British Columbians cared about most.

Now let’s look at what’s happening. Is Mr Campbell following the advice of the pollsters and attending, on an emergency basis, to long surgical lineups and disintegrating schoolhouses? Not on your tintype! First, with a paradox that would delight W.A.C., he gave a tax break to everyone secure in the knowledge that surgical lineups were for editorial commentators but money in the pocket meant votes. Now, after making it more difficult to do, he’s balancing the budget and seemingly postponing the pollsters’ priorities.

But Gordon Campbell is not so stupid as to be unaware of the longer term political, not to mention the social, dangers of having people die for want of the surgeon’s knife or kids languishing in moldy portables. He’s going to address this by going to the private sector. Of course this will cause a big hullabaloo but he also knows that this will come from the federal government, which most British Columbians see as an irrelevant nuisance, and the "left" who only exist on paper.

We will see two dramatic policies – revolutions in fact - before Christmas, unless I miss my guess.

There’ll be a "charter school" policy and an enhanced private school policy that will draw the private sector dramatically into the school building business and bring parent funding into what will be a third level of schooling, a quasi – private school sector.

The big change will be in health care where Minister Sindi Hawkins will invite the private sector into the hospital business, especially in the Long Term Care sector.

If W.A.C. Bennett could have dams and roads with money in the bank, Gordon Campbell reckons you can have schools and hospitals with a full purse.

Watch for it!