The Written Word
for January 14, 2001

I have come, over the past couple of years, to use this space more often for rambling thoughts than hard politics. I hope you approve and I hope that my thoughts give you pause to think a bit.

We are going to have an election sometime in the next few months and many say, about time. By all accounts the NDP are going to be all but wiped out. And make no mistake about it, I will be voting Liberal – more as a gesture of disapproval of the NDP than any love for the Campbell crowd.

And this is today’s point. Hearken back, those who can, to 1991. Bill Vander Zalm had resigned earlier that year over a massive conflict on interest in which he found himself. The Social Credit government had come unglued mostly because Mr Vander Zalm, for all his many charms, was simply unable to get people to work with him. We had been through many scandals, most of them pretty petty, and then seen the new Premier, Rita Johnston, throw money around like a drunken sailor in an attempt to buy votes.

The mood was that we must throw the rascals out and that we did.

What we didn’t do is look at the NDP under Mike Harcourt with any sort of skeptical eye. When he said that he would run a clean government and would spend our money wisely we were so relieved at seeing the backs of the Socreds that we simply took him at his word.

Well, folks, there is a considerable danger in throwing another set of rascals in without a critical eye on what they’re likely to do.

The difficulty here is that the Liberals don’t have to be specific no matter how pointed our questions are. They know that short of all of them, collectively, being found stealing from the collection plate, we’re going to elect them.

Up until now, the Liberals have had the considerable luxury of simply criticizing what the government has done. I can assure you that this is a very easy thing to do since very few issues are cut and dried. Shortly they will have to deal with these complex and controversial issues themselves. We know what they’re against in health care, for example, but do we know what they themselves will do? As Kim Campbell so rightly observed, great issues of state are not appropriate for discussion in election campaigns. This is, of course, because political parties might have to be specific and have their policies actually called into question in some detail.

Will the Liberals abolish the present system of decentralizing the delivery of health care? If they will, what will they put in its place. If not, will they improve it and if so how? Will they make peace with the doctors and if so, on what terms? How will they deal with the nurses crisis?

Will they abolish the Corporate Capital Tax? If so, how will they replace that revenue?

What policies, other than simply replacing the NDP, will they bring in to encourage investment in BC?

The list goes on and on.

We’ll likely not get many answers and I suppose we must console ourselves with the thought that we can’t possibly get worse government than we’ve had.

But then we thought that back in 1991 too, didn’t we?