Watts still going against grain

Dianne Watts has had an unusual political career, and there are elements that a lot of BC Liberal members will find appealing.

Particularly the chapters to do with dramatic course changes that lead to overwhelming success.

She built a certain star quality during her three terms as mayor of B.C.’s Second City (Surrey). But it’s the manoeuvring that led to that mayoralty that’s more pertinent.

She started as a councillor in 1996, running as a member of a municipal party that featured more than a few B.C. Liberals, jousting with another outfit oriented to the NDP.

Then she parted company, accusing the incumbent slate’s mayor of being a bully, and carried on as an independent. Surrey has a set tradition of municipal parties, so being independent on council took some doing.

But it was nothing compared with what came next. She took on the mayor (Doug McCallum) directly, as an independent, and beat him by 10,000 votes. Toward the end of her first term, she created something that’s unique in B.C. It’s a municipal political party that denies it’s a party, and functions more like a corporation.

Surrey First, as it’s called, put together a slate of candidates and Watts led them in the election, beating a relatively low-profile challenger by an astounding 43,000 votes. Everybody else on her slate won, too.

By 2011, Watts was so powerful and well-regarded that she intimidated people off the ballot. Seven long shots put their names in for mayor of Surrey, and Watts trounced them. She won 80 per cent of the vote. The nearest challenger was 49,000 votes back.

Former Vancouver Sun reporter Kelly Sinoski outlined around that time how Watts’ non-party party worked. It called itself a coalition of independents, and all the command and control were held by a board of directors, headed, of course, by Watts.

Potential Surrey First candidates didn’t have to sign up members. They needed to get approval of the board of directors, which hand-picked them following the society’s constitution, which committed everyone to “maintain independence and work to keep partisan politics out of city hall.”

It’s the exact antithesis of how provincial and federal parties are set up and run, although more than a few leaders of those parties would privately dream of having such iron control over their teams.

Surrey has always had huge reputation problems related to crime and sprawl. No one would say Watts solved them, but she chalked up some accomplishments in grappling with them. Enough that she has been heavily scouted for years by provincial and federal parties. She let months of speculation run before taking herself out of the 2010 B.C. Liberal race.

Following a life plan that called for three terms maximum as mayor, she wrapped it up in 2104 and segued into the federal Conservative Party. She won a Surrey seat for the Tories in 2015, one of only five in the Lower Mainland to do so.

So she has had two years to get used to the way regular political parties work. Her days of total control and overwhelming public support are a thing of the past. And Sunday, she ditched the Tories — currently idling in opposition — and set her sights on replacing Christy Clark as leader of the B.C. Liberals.

Clark won in 2011 as an outsider, beating all the caucus veterans in the race. Watts wants to do exactly the same thing.

Would she revert to her Surrey First days, and adopt a Gordon Campbell approach to leadership?

Or have the two years of consultations and cajoling required to get along in any major party set her up for all the compromises needed to keep a team together?

Her Surrey launch went well, although she was flat in a couple of Monday media interviews and didn’t have much to say about specifics. She deserves full credit for going all in, announcing she plans to resign as an MP. Running when you have a fallback position is one thing. Putting it all on the line demonstrates much more commitment.

With the leadership field approaching double digits, there’s unlikely to be a runaway winner. But Watts will be in the top tier of most rankings.