Strong field contends for BC Liberal leadership

The race to find a new leader for the BC Liberal Party has officially begun, with several people following the first announced candidate, former Vancouver mayor Sam Sullivan.

Soon after the announcement by Sullivan, an MLA since 2013, Dianne Watts took the plunge. Watts is the Conservative MP for Surrey-White Rock and was mayor of Surrey for nine years.

They were followed by ex-finance minister Mike de Jong, former advanced education minister Andrew Wilkinson, former education minister Mike Bernier and Vancouver-Langara MLA Michael Lee.

Two more potential candidates are considering their options — Kamloops-South Thompson MLA Todd Stone, who was transportation minister under former premier Christy Clark, and Terrace businesswoman Lucy Sager.

Their formal entry into the race will boost the regional representation of the candidates.

Of the six who have officially declared, only one is from outside the Lower Mainland: Bernier, who hails from Peace River country.

The concentration from the Lower Mainland is both a strength and a weakness.

Half of the province’s 87 ridings are in and around Greater Vancouver. The Liberals lost power because they underperformed in that region. It makes sense to select someone with strong name recognition in these battleground seats.

That said, Watts is the most interesting candidate. She’s well regarded in Surrey, with its nine electoral ridings, and won her third mayoral race with 80 per cent of the vote.

She’s a new face, something the Liberals desperately need if they’re to remake the party. Most of the other prominent candidates were cabinet ministers under Clark.

Watts won’t have an easy path, though. Her announcement that she intended to run brought a withering broadside from de Jong.

Referring to the provincial election, he asked: “Where was Dianne Watts when we really needed help? … She was silent when we were fighting for our political lives.”

That’s a curious attitude. If Watts could have helped the Liberals last May, presumably she still could. But it speaks to an underlying sentiment.

Watts has rebuffed previous efforts by the Liberals to recruit her. Apparently, some hard feelings remain.

Yet there is a lesson to be learned from Clark’s last throne speech, in which she tried to engineer an alliance with the Greens by adopting many of their policies. It didn’t work, but it did illustrate a basic reality.

The business of politics has become intensely personal. When a party has held office for 16 years, and its leaders abruptly try to change course, their credibility suffers.

Voters associate policies with the people who enact them. They place as much importance on the singer as the song.

That doesn’t mean the next leader has to be a newcomer. It does mean, however, that candidates who held senior cabinet positions under Clark have their work cut out for them.

De Jong, in particular, will have to shed the reputation for excessive penny-pinching he acquired as finance minister.

Nevertheless, this is a strong field. The recent federal Conservative leadership race was a snoozefest. Likewise, the federal NDP struggled to gain attention for its leadership campaign, which ended Sunday with a first-ballot victory by Ontario MPP Jasmeet Singh.

But B.C. is no stranger to political drama, heightened in this case by the possibility of a snap election if the current minority government falters.

With the Liberal convention set for Feb. 3, the candidates have five months to fine-tune their message and sharpen their barbs. Let the fireworks begin.