PALMER’S VIEW,
Former premier says she hung around because she didn’t want to ‘leave a mess’
As Christy Clark tells it, she realized when the votes were counted in May that resignation was the price she would have to pay for losing the B.C. Liberal majority in the legislature.
“Looking back, I knew in my heart from election night that it was time for me to leave,” she said Monday in the first media interviews since her decision to throw in the towel.
Still it took time for her head to catch up with her heart. On the night of June 29, when Lt.- Gov. Judith Guichon rejected her advice to call a second election and instead asked John Horgan to form a government, Clark had to be talked out of quitting then and there by her own staff.
“I was going to go out and tell you guys that I was going to step down, but I was persuaded not to do that,” she told Rob Shaw of The Vancouver Sun.
“It would have just been chaos for the party. We needed to move to opposition, somebody needed to open the office and hire the staff. You don’t want to just walk away and leave a mess.”
She dropped no hints about her drift as the weeks wore on, instead insisting she was ready, willing and able to take on the Opposition leader’s job. Of course had she said otherwise, the leadership race would have started right then and there.
When she did finally come out and announce her intentions at a caucus meeting in Penticton Friday, MLAs were caught off guard.
“They were grieving not being in government anymore, they were having trouble moving on,” as Clark put it.
“What they needed is a leadership campaign to refresh and energize and get everybody thinking about what’s next. They need to be looking forward.”
As to the timing of the decision, I gather one MLA had indicated privately that if Clark did not soon signal a willingness to go, he would break ranks and begin speaking out publicly.
But Clark insists she made the call without any pushing from within: “Everyone in that room asked me to stay.”
Then why did she choose to go now?
“When’s a better time to do this?” she replied. “I don’t think the NDP is going to call an election in the fall.”
She doesn’t expect the NDP to call an election this fall? How to square that with her advice to the lieutenant-governor back in June that the NDP-Green alliance wasn’t working and therefore she needed to dissolve the house for a second election?
“I think I did underestimate Andrew Weaver’s willingness to go along to get along,” Clark conceded in the interview with The Vancouver Sun. “He’s really decided he wants to be a part of the NDP … and that has really given the new government a lot more stability because there doesn’t seem to be anything they can do to throw a wrench into that relationship.”
So, to recap the highlights package of Clark’s recent reign of error, she lost the Liberal majority, misjudged the Green leader, and failed to persuade the lieutenantgovernor to grant a dissolution.
To her credit, she was paying the full price, spreading the blame nowhere else, and making what she characterized as a permanent exit from the political arena.
“You won’t see me again,” she told reporters Monday in a Christy-lite echo of that notorious exit line from the U.S., “you won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore.”
Of course Nixon came back a few years later. And so did Clark the last time she quit the provincial arena. She resigned from the cabinet of then-premier Gordon Campbell in the fall of 2004 and was back at it the following summer with a failed bid for the NPA nomination to run for mayor of Vancouver.
Granted this year’s experience was far more punishing for Clark — a gruelling campaign, with a relentless series of attack ads directed at her personally, some of the roughest I’ve seen in eight provincial elections.
“Politics is not a happy business,” she told reporters Monday, briefly abandoning her usual pose of unguarded optimism about public life. “It is not fun. But it is fulfilling.”
Granted too, as she conceded to reporter Shaw: “I’ll never have a job as fulfilling as premier. And there’s no other job in British Columbia that will allow you that much.”
Still, this is a person who by her own account, whetted her appetite for politics as a youngster, working on her father’s three bids for provincial office.
After hearing her protestations and demurrals Monday, I thought back to something Clark said the last time she took herself out of the political game, a comment as witty as it was telling.
“In the first six months after you leave you still remember the reasons why you left,” she told Marcie Good from B.C. Business magazine.
“And then a couple of years down the road, you’re sitting alone at night by yourself in your living room, maybe into a glass of wine, and you’re thinking, ‘God, that guy was great! I miss him so much!’ And you pick up the phone and dial.”
Clark’s only 52. The rumour mill already has the federal Liberals looking to her as a possible candidate for MP in 2019. Two years from now, I would not be surprised to see her back in the game.
What they needed is a leadership campaign to refresh and energize and get everybody thinking about what’s next.
CHRISTY CLARK, former Premier