ABANDONED BY HIS PARTY
Former premier details scandals, schemes and strife of the NDP
As former Premier Ujjal Dosanjh tells it in a just-published memoir, one of the biggest challenges he faced on taking office in early 2000 was his own New Democratic Party.
The party and government were both on “life support”, down in the opinion polls after a bumpy decade in office, and divided internally by the forced resignation of Glen Clark as leader and premier the summer before.
The ex-premier was not inclined to forgive Dosanjh, who as Attorney- General had broken the news that Clark was under investigation by police in connection with a casino-licensing scandal.
Clark (who would later be charged and acquitted) remained in caucus during Dosanjh’s brief term as premier, where he and his supporters continued “to make mischief.” Dosanjh had temporarily relegated Moe Sihota, his longtime rival in the Indo-Canadian community, to the backbench, where he seethed and schemed as well.
One of the first acts of the Dosanjh government was to legislate a settlement with school support workers. But where the party had mostly accepted back-to-work legislation under Premiers Dave Barrett, Mike Harcourt and Clark himself, it now turned on Dosanjh.
Clark and two of his supporters vacated the house for the vote on the bill. The party executive and governing council joined labour leaders in condemning the legislation.
“I felt totally abandoned by both the party and the labour movement,” writes Dosanjh. “The party had been through back-to-work legislation several times during its reign in B.C., but was now acting noxiously sanctimonious.”
Then came his struggle to implement the balancedbudget legislation: “No one believed the NDP any more on fiscal issues, and rampant public cynicism was the price we were paying for our past sins.”
The internal opposition was personified by Clark’s former chief of staff, Adrian Dix, then slumming as a newspaper columnist. Dix weighed in with a “brutal critique” of balancedbudget legislation.
Amid threats that enough NDP MLAs might boycott the vote on the legislation to put the government majority at risk, Dosanjh played hardball.
“To call the dissidents’ bluff, I declared the vote on the bill to be a confidence measure: Vote for the bill or face an election that none of us was ready for.”
The threat worked and the NDP caucus delivered enough votes to give the province its first balanced-budget legislation.
The legislation did the job, too. Although Dosanjh presided over only one complete provincial budget during his brief turn as premier, it was certified as a $1.2-billion surplus, albeit only after he was driven from office in May 2001.
Not that the surplus or anything else could have saved him or the party at that point.
“The life had been sucked out of the party by years of internal wrangling and scandals,” he writes. “People were mad at us and ready to vote us into oblivion.”
They did too, stopping two seats short of a complete wipeout. Dosanjh accepted his share of the blame on election night, announcing his resignation as leader in his concession speech. Soon afterward, he let his party membership lapse as well.
Next time he surfaced in the political arena, he was making a successful bid for a seat in parliament in the 2004 federal election as a member of the Liberal Party of Canada.
His decision to bypass the federal NDP was grounded in his time as B.C. Attorney-General and his handling of the prolonged showdown between police and armed native activists at Gustafsen Lake in the B.C. Interior.
The standoff ended in September 1995 with no loss of life, earning Dosanjh well-deserved accolades across B.C. But not so from the federal wing of his party. Then-national NDP leader Alexa McDonough led calls for a public inquiry into Gustafsen Lake while the party’s socialist caucus demanded an investigation into Dosanjh’s own role in the affair.
“I found the federal NDP’s position on Gustafsen hollow and morally bankrupt,” he writes. “The federal party was not an organization worthy of my allegiance or commitment.”
But this focus on politics overlooks the rest of Dosanjh’s lengthy memoir. Journey After Midnight, the book is called, a title that refers to the author’s birth in a dusty village in Punjab just a few months before the wrenching partition of his Indian homeland at midnight on Aug. 15, 1947.
The first three-quarters of the 400-plus pages are devoted to Dosanjh’s life and career before he was elected to the legislature, including his brave challenge to Sikh extremists that led to him being beaten within an inch of his life in 1985.
Still, for pundits and politicos, the book’s value is the insights it provides into that most fractious of political parties, the NDP.
Although many supporters of the provincial NDP vote for the federal Liberals (and vice versa), Dosanjh fully expected a backlash in responding favourably to the 2004 recruitment pitch from then-Prime Minister Paul Martin.
“I realized that joining them would mean angering the cultists in the NDP,” he writes, referring to those for whom the party is “God” and can do no wrong. “My punishment would be condemnation, excommunication, and derision.”
When reading that passage, I thought back to a speech that Adrian Dix delivered to a provincial NDP convention during his brief turn as leader a few years back. While recounting the accomplishments of past NDP leaders and premiers, he skipped right over Ujjal Dosanjh as if he’d never existed. Having left the party, Dosanjh had become an un-person.
The party had been through back-towork legislation several times during its reign in B.C., but was now acting noxiously sanctimonious.
UJJALD OS A NJ H, former ND P premier