The Written Word
for April 23, 2000

I’m getting this funny feeling that Ujjal Dosanjh ought to have called an election coming right out of the leadership convention. I say that because I not only think things will get not get better but will in fact get worse. There is no doubt that the premier is well liked personally. He is a decent man and everyone knows that. But what is coming through loud and clear is that decent or not, he was in cabinet for Glen Clark’s entire term and was either part of all the decisions or deliberately avoided the process by which they were made.

Mr Dosanjh has a number of problems and one of them is to his credit. By committing to both a Spring and Fall session he will now have to call an election on the heels of one of them unless he waits until the very last minute, namely early next Spring … and I’ll deal with that in a moment.

Legislative sessions are bad for governments at best, nightmares at worst unless there is money in the kitty or a miraculous issue arises. Governments get hammered day after day in the legislature and the nightly news is invariably about what hit them in question period that day. If you can do what, in his time, W,A.C. Bennett did so skillfully, marshal your money so as to go out of a session into an election with a sack full of goodies, legislative sessions can be a springboard to victory, always remembering, of course, that there was no question period back then.

If you can seize an issue as Bill Bennett did in 1983, namely restraint, you can use the session to help you win an election. But Ujjal Dosanjh is not going to have money to spend and if he tries to conjure some up, he’ll get hammered.

But what about next Spring? Mr Dosanjh will have to at least call the legislature into session for a budget and it will be no better and probably worse than this last one. If he doesn’t, he will be running against a budget to come which the Liberals will rightly call cowardice and it will leave the Liberals to state that if the NDP had brought in a budget it would have been catastrophic – and on the NDP’s track record, the public will accept that.

So if Mr Dosanjh is waiting for a better day, what does he expect that to be? The Stockell case, no matter whether Mr Stockell wins or loses it, will spread a lot more manure on the political scene. There are at least two bad bits of news to come out of the many court and court related issues surrounding Glen Clark. And the amount of tax money being shelled out on the various Clark cases will become a bigger issue.

Does Mr Dosanjh expect good news on the health issue? If he is he’s dreaming in technicolour.

The only thing the Premier can really hope for is a big business turn-around and that could happen. But it won’t be enough because the voters, rightly or wrongly, think we only got into the mess in the first place because of the NDP and though that is somewhat unfair, politics has never been known for fairness.

The NDP at this writing are mired as deep in the goo as they were before the leadership convention. They are now behind Reform in the polls and will likely stay there. It’s now a question of survival and unless, in Mr Macawber’s words, something turns up, it may be difficult to even accomplish that.