New Liberal Leader Wilkinson vows to end NDP-Green union
Longtime Liberal organizer and former party president Andrew Wilkinson won his party’s leadership contest Saturday, leveraging his strong ties with existing MLAs and a co-operative deal with rival candidate Mike de Jong to pull off victory.
Wilkinson, 60, won the race on the fifth counting round, squeaking out a narrow victory over outsider candidate Dianne Watts, a former Surrey mayor and MP, who had promised to reform the party. Instead, members tilted back toward Wilkinson’s status quo approach.
Wilkinson won the race with 4,621 points or 53.11 per cent of the vote, compared with Watts’ 4,079 points or 46.89 per cent.
In his victory speech, Wilkinson thanked former premiers Gordon Campbell and Christy Clark, promising to carry on their work.
“That is the heritage we have to build on as a party,” Wilkinson said to a ballroom of Liberal supporters at the Wall Centre in Vancouver. “That is where we came from and that is where we have to honour and respect.
“Those values of enterprise, allowing individuals and companies to get ahead in our society. That’s why we do this work. Thinking of fiscal responsibility, that we are the party that does not spend our children’s money.”
After the race, he told media he would attack NDP Premier John Horgan with everything he has.
“My task is to make sure we hold the NDP to account with smart incisive questions that will make their skin crawl,” Wilkinson said. He also pledged to fracture the power-sharing relationship between Horgan and Green Leader Andrew Weaver.
“Our job is to drive the wedge between them and make sure they are more and more uncomfortable with each other and get ready for an election,” he said. “That’s our job.” Wilkinson said he would reach out to young voters, do a better job of promoting the Liberal plan for the environment and wildlife management, and try to appeal to female voters. He also promised to fight to defeat the proportional representation referendum.
Wilkinson was advanced education minister in former premier Clark’s government. He had 13 endorsements from Liberal caucus MLAs, the most of any of the six candidates.
The support gave him toeholds in key parts of the province and an ability to tap the networks of popular MLAs in the Kootenays, Langley, Parksville-Qualicum, Skeena, Kelowna-Lake Country, Surrey, Prince George and the Cariboo.
Wilkinson also benefited from a deal signed with rival de Jong, in which both agreed to encourage supporters to make the other candidate their second choice under the preferential ballot system.
Wilkinson sought to remake his image early in the campaign, expanding beyond his reputation as an Oxford-education lawyer and a physician who represents one of the wealthiest ridings in the province in Vancouver- Quilchena. Instead, Wilkinson took pains to highlight his roots as a community doctor earlier in his career in remote and rural corners of the province.
His performances during the most recent leadership debates were marked by his aggressiveness, a trait he said would serve him well in the legislature as he seeks to push Horgan to lose his cool during debates.
Wilkinson’s victory should ensure a period of relative status quo within the party, given his long history as a B.C. Liberal. He helped Gordon Campbell unite the Liberal party’s modern-day free-enterprise coalition as party president from 1998 to 2001, before Campbell made him a deputy minister in his government.