LEGACY OF BARRETT LIVES ON IN MANY AREAS

From farmland to Pharmacare, ICBC and even our neighbourhood pubs

For a politician who exited the premier’s office more than 40 years ago, Dave Barrett left behind him a long and, in many ways, a still living legacy.

The lasting protection of agricultural land. Public auto insurance. Pharmacare. Neighbourhood pubs. The Cypress Bowl recreation area. Robson Square. The B.C. Day public holiday.

The list goes on. The Art of the Impossible, a sympathetic account of the Barrett years, written five years ago by journalist Rod Mickleburgh and Geoff Meggs, chief of staff to the current premier, closed with a “partial and subjective list” of the Barrett accomplishments that ran to 97 items.

The Barrett government passed more than 400 pieces of legislature during its brief 3½-year term in office. Not all were good ideas and some were evidence of a government that tried to do too much, too soon.

Barrett would say that in coming to office after 20 years of increasingly ossified Social Credit government, the province’s first New Democratic Party administration had to realize that “we’re here for a good time, not a long time.”

But that’s a bit of historical revisionism. Premier Barrett tried very hard for a second term in the fall of 1975, legislating a cooling-off period for 50,000 workers in four separate labour disputes, then calling a snap election.

Labour didn’t like it and some unions sat on their hands. Still Barrett actually increased his vote count over the previous 1972 election by almost 60,000 votes, a considerable achievement given all the controversies that erupted during his term of office.

The NDP nevertheless lost 20 seats because the rightof-centre opposition, split three ways in 1972, combined under the leadership of Socred premier Bill Bennett, son of W.A.C. Bennett, whom Barrett had driven from office three years earlier.

Then a remarkable thing happened. Though Bennett and the Socreds rode to office by opposing many of Barrett’s actions, they proceeded to pay grudging tribute to the departed NDP premier by leaving many of his accomplishments more or less intact. The Insurance Corp. of B.C. and the Agricultural Land Reserve were foremost among them.

Barrett, ever the streetfighter, kept at it. Having lost his Coquitlam seat in the legislature by a mere 18 votes in the December 1975 election, he arranged for New Democrat Bob Williams to resign his in the safe enclave of Vancouver East and returned to the legislature in a byelection.

In the rematch with Bennett in 1979, Barrett came within a tantalizing 30,000 votes and five seats of returning to the premier’s office. The 46 per cent of the popular vote captured by the New Democrats in that election remains the high water mark for the party in any B.C. election, including the subsequent three occasions when it formed government.

Impressive as the 1979 result was in terms of a personal achievement for Barrett, it also set the stage for him to make a second try at a comeback four years later. Again, he held his vote, but so did Bennett, emerging with his third straight win over his NDP opponent. Barrett had to wear the defeat, having handed Bennett the edge with an ill-advised speech against fiscal restraint.

After that, Barrett had to go and did.

As a last service to the party, he carried his defiance of the re-elected Bennett’s restraint program to such lengths that at one point he was physically dragged from the legislative chamber for defying the chair of the proceedings. He then gave up his seat to Williams who had been waiting, not all that patiently, to return to the house for the better part of a decade.

Barrett dabbled briefly in radio before getting elected to Parliament in 1988. He also sought the national leadership of the NDP, losing to Audrey McLaughlin — and the country thereby missed a helluva show.

In the unforgiving modernday arena, where defeated leaders seldom get a first shot at a comeback, never mind a second, it seems incredible that the New Democrats stuck with Barrett long enough for him to lose three in a row.

But the explanation resides with the other memorable aspect of the Barrett legacy, namely his powerful and ultimately personal hold on his own party and his share of the electorate.

No one who heard Dave Barrett give a political speech full bore, all stops pulled, ever forgot it. He was a master of the populist style, able to segue from unforgiving denunciations of his opponents to withering ridicule in an instant, never unsure of himself, never less than formidable.

He could be funny as hell too, as when opponents called him a Marxist and he fired back “Groucho, Harpo or Chico?”

I covered Barrett only in his last year in the legislature, but I got to see him in action several times over the years when he was called out to speak at party conventions or help out in provincial campaigns.

“An old ghost” he would style himself, but there was nothing ephemeral about his energy level.

Sadly, near the end, he had faded from public life, plagued by similar mental decline as rival Bill Bennett, who passed two years ago.

But at his best he left a bigger mark on the province than many who served longer, but with less passion, vigour and determination.

He carried his defiance of the reelected Bennett’s restraint program to such lengths that at one point he was physically dragged from the legislative chamber for defying the chair.