CLARK MAKES POPULIST PITCH
B.C. election coverage on
Flanked by an excavator, surrounded by two dozen workers and wearing her trademark blue hard hat, B.C. Liberal Leader Christy Clark delivered the kind of campaign speech that suggested how she hopes history will remember her.
The Fort St. John speech highlighted the image Clark has crafted for herself in the Interior and across northern B.C., where she’s shifted her government’s power base and made her most ambitious gamble: the $9-billon Site C dam.
To her vocal critics, Site C is a hydroelectric white elephant that will saddle the province with unnecessary power at overly expensive rates. To Clark, it’s a glimpse into how she defines her six years in office.
“B.C.’s electricity is clean, reliable and low cost, because we have had premiers in the past that have the courage to look forward, not one year or two years, but 10 years, and endowed us with this incredible dam system we have that’s given us this clean energy,” she told the April 18 rally at Inland Concrete.
“Why do we have the fourthlowest rates in North America today, and why are we able to work mostly from clean power in B.C.? Because a generation under W.A.C. Bennett made that investment in our future. Our kids deserve that from us.”
W.A.C. Bennett, B.C.’s 25th premier, looms large over Clark’s premiership, both as an inspiration and comparison. He holds B.C.’s political longevity record at 20 years in government. The B.C. Liberals will match it if Clark, B.C.’s 34th premier, leads them to re-election on May 9.
But it’s more than just Bennett’s tenure that Clark seeks to emulate.
She has steeped herself in his legacy as a builder who ambitiously grew B.C.’s modern highway and ferry system from 1952 to 1972. As a risk-taker, who famously nationalized what is now B.C. Hydro amid a dispute with Ottawa over the Columbia River Treaty, and then called a snap election to increase his majority. As a visionary, who brushed aside short-term criticism to build the dams on the Columbia and Peace rivers that today form the backbone of our modern-day power system. As the grandfather of populist politics in B.C., who ran his government like he ran his Kelowna hardware store, while fighting against the business elites and unions who’d shunned him in Vancouver and Victoria.
“W.A.C. Bennett is the greatest premier British Columbia ever
had,” Clark said in an interview. “What always impressed me about him was his ability to look into the future and see what was needed. And he endured all the critics who couldn’t see as far as he could, and who criticized him and said this isn’t needed. In so many cases, especially B.C. Hydro, he ended up being right.”
And where he wasn’t right, he knew how to pivot. Bennett’s famous “second look” saw him dramatically change government’s course if his fine-tuned political instincts sensed it was out of step with public sentiment. He would do it all with his trademark Cheshire cat grin, in place at all times, no matter how bad things got.
Clark certainly has the instincts, the populist touch, the pivot and the smile.
Those were most recently on display last year, when she abruptly introduced a 15 per cent foreign buyers tax, after months of insisting foreign buyers weren’t distorting Metro Vancouver’s housing market. The Opposition, media and pundits howled at her for flipflopping. But Clark, like Bennett, believed only one thing really mattered: showing the public she was listening.
Clark has surrounded herself with the Bennett legacy. She holds his old riding in Kelowna (“the cradle of free enterprise,” as she once dubbed it). Bennett’s grandson Brad is campaigning alongside Clark for the second time. Her two closest aides, Adam and Jordan McPhee, are the grandsons of the late Robert Bonner — W.A.C. Bennett’s attorney general, closest adviser and perhaps the only colleague he ever really trusted at the legislature.
Clark also shares some of the same criticisms directed at W.A.C. — mainly that she’s all politics, all the time, and that a perpetual desire to run for re-election appears to overshadow her governing.
Clark’s personal life has been well documented over her almost 20 years in politics. She’s a 51-yearold single mother of 15-year-old Hamish. If you ask (and even if you don’t), she’ll regale you with stories about his musical theatre, teenage ways, protective instincts and the challenge of finding enough quality time for the two of them. Her exhusband, Liberal strategist Mark Marissen, remains one of her most vocal public supporters.
Clark’s personal appeal was certainly part of her come-frombehind victory in 2013. But since then, with no internal critics and complete control of a legislative majority, Clark’s had four years of unopposed freedom with which to govern.
And yet, as her critics point out, she’s made only a few dramatic moves during that time. She spent her early days setting up a tax regime for a liquefied natural gas industry that has failed to materialize. Her jobs plan has remained largely unchanged for years, although she credits it with giving B.C. the lowest unemployment rate in Canada. Her budgets have tended to feature constrained spending and service cutbacks, although most recently they have been awash in cash from the booming (some argue out-ofcontrol) real estate sector.
W.A.C. Bennett was his own finance minister because he trusted no one else with the numbers. Clark, said her longtime friend and former chief of staff Mike McDonald, operates more as a chairman of the board.
Clark said she’s never understood the management style of browbeating colleagues into yes-people. “We’re made better when we are surrounded by smart people. And why have smart people around, then, if you won’t let them talk?” she said.
Although Clark shares similarities to W.A.C. Bennett’s brand of populist leadership, she’s not quite the mirror image of the legendary premier, said veteran political scientist Norman Ruff.
“His populist sign was that the big businesses are against me, the big unions are against me, the people are for me,” said Ruff. “Whereas I’m not so sure that she comes across as antagonistic to big business. So the whole populist jigsaw isn’t quite there.”
Clark has nonetheless tapped into Bennett’s “politics of resource exploitation,” which remain a bedrock of B.C. political success, said Ruff.
Despite W.A.C. Bennett’s legendary political antenna, he lost the pulse of an evolving province at the 20-year mark, as B.C. transformed into the modern welfare state, including social assistance and universal health care, leaving behind his vision for The Good Life, which advocated job creation in natural resource industries and through expansion of the province’s transportation network of highways and ferries.
“In nature you have two laws, both opposites — a law of growth and a law of decay,” Bennett told biographer David Mitchell for the book W.A.C. Bennett and the Rise of British Columbia. “The older a tree gets, it starts to decay. The older a government gets, it gets into some problems. ... We’d been in office longer than any other government in the history of the province. People thought it was time for a change.”
W.A.C. Bennett could be a deeply unpopular and polarizing figure as well. One major criticism was he appeared to care more about the economy, at times, than people. It’s a critique that has been levelled at Clark, too, especially because she helms a government that has refused to raise the welfare rate for a decade.
The NDP has painted her as a cold elitist, whose argument that the unemployed should find jobs is a reflection of a mean-spirited character. Clark said that’s unfair, and has recently begun speaking about her late father’s mental illness and alcoholism, and how his job as a teacher was for many years the only thing that kept him alive.
“When he retired, that was when he started to die. And he died pretty fast after that, because it was work that allowed him to find the meaning in life and give him an identity in the world ... that allowed him to live with his untreated mental illness,” said Clark. “It was after he died, I spent a lot of time thinking about that, and that was when I realized how much a job matters.”
Back on the campaign trail, Clark’s Bennett-inspired stump speech continues to evolve.
“This province was not built by people without guts. This province was built by determined, hardworking people who were prepared to put their backs into it,” she said at a recent Prince George rally.
“That’s what built resource communities like Prince George, and that’s what’s built every single inch of this province. We in the B.C. Liberals have not forgotten working people, and we have not forgotten hard work.”
It’s a speech you could almost imagine W.A.C. delivering.
B.C.’s electricity is clean, reliable and low cost, because we have had premiers in the past that have the courage to look forward.