LIBERALS POOH-POOHING POTENTIAL NEW LEADERS
Recriminations flying as party divides along factional and geographical lines
The race to succeed Christy Clark was just getting underway last week when I began hearing from Liberal party members why such and such a contender was a poor choice for the leadership.
Target: Todd Stone, the Kamloops MLA and recent minister of transportation and infrastructure.
Objection: Poor communicator. Ticked off Metro Vancouver with his clumsy handling of tolling policy and the transit referendum. And remember that brief flap in the 2013 campaign over him not displaying Christy Clark or the party name in largeenough type on his election signs?
Next up: Andrew Wilkinson, Vancouver MLA and former minister of advanced education.
Objection: Smartest guy in the room — just ask him. Overbearing. Not ready for the world beyond Cambie Street, never mind upcountry.
Before the weekend was out, the dissing was in full swing among Liberals.
Jas Johal, rookie MLA from Richmond: Who does he think he is anyway? Just joined the flock and already wants to be shepherd.
Mike Bernier, Peace River: Lightweight, indecisive.
Mike de Jong, Abbotsford, ex-finance minister: Shortchanged the party election platform, best-before date long gone.
Kevin Falcon, second place in last leadership: No time for Liberals to play back to the future.
Rich Coleman and George Abbott: ditto and ditto, though by the time the party’s trashtalkers got around to them, they’d already taken themselves out of the running.
All in all, the first round of recriminations served to confirm an observation by B.C. journalism legend Bruce Hutchison: You can learn to dislike anyone in politics, but for those feelings to develop into full-blown hatred, the person will usually be a rival for power and position within your own party.
Already, too, one can see a couple of fracture lines emerging, one factional, the other geographical.
The B.C. Liberals are one party, albeit including people with roots in the federal Conservative and Liberal parties, as well as the old B.C. Reform and Social Credit provincial parties.
Between elections, the parts work well comparatively together, particularly if the party is in power. But when the leadership is open, the components tend to come unstuck.
The leadership race in 2011 came down to a showdown between Christy Clark, who’d come up through the federal Liberal party and its old provincial counterpart, and Kevin Falcon, whose connections were all federal Conservative and provincial Socred.
Clark edged Falcon by about four percentage points in the popular vote and afterward had to work hard to staple the two halves of the coalition back together.
She did so with assistance from prominent Conservatives, including former federal cabinet ministers Stockwell Day and Jay Hill, longtime provincial Socred and federal Tory John Reynolds, and then prime minister Stephen Harper himself.
The effort helped put the party on a winning footing in the 2013 election. But with Clark now giving up the leadership after blowing the government majority in this year’s election, some of the conservatives in B.C. Liberal ranks are saying it is time to put one of their own into the leadership.
That’s not the only factor with those who discount Todd Stone and Andrew Wilkinson, both of whose roots are on the Liberal side of the party equation.
But Tory proclivities do account for the push to recruit former Surrey Mayor Dianne Watts, now serving as a federal Conservative MP.
Another Tory name to conjure with is retired MP and former cabinet minister James Moore, now a business consultant, policy adviser and chancellor of the University of Northern B.C. The still-youthful Moore (he’s 41) quit politics in 2015 in part because of the precarious health of his infant son and for personal reasons, so may not be in a position to return to the arena.
The other potential dividing line in the Liberal leadership is urban-rural — or to be more precise, candidates from Metro Vancouver versus those from the North and Interior.
Since Kelowna’s Bill Bennett retired as premier 30 years ago, the office has been inhabited for all but a few months by leaders whose home base was Metro Vancouver, including two former mayors of the city itself.
Another group of Liberals making the “it’s our turn” argument are from the North and Interior, where the party added to its strength in the recent election even as it lost nine seats and four cabinet ministers in and around Vancouver.
Others argue that far from going with a leader like Stone or Bernier from regions where the party is already well entrenched, Liberals should pick a candidate like Watts or Johal from a region where the party lost ground this year.
Based on the formula set out in the party constitution, the Northern and Interior ridings will have about 28 per cent of the voting strength at the convention, the Island and Coast should get 17 per cent, and the rest, about 55 per cent in total, will be allocated to the Lower Mainland and Fraser Valley.
In that regard at least, Metro would appear to have the edge.
But it’s too soon to say how all this will shake out. The two dozen or so members of the party’s governing executive have yet to meet to set all the membership and voting rules — and date — for a convention that is expected to be held early in the new year.
Until then, speculation and recriminations will rule the day.
Between elections, the parts work well comparatively together. … But when the leadership is open, the components tend to come unstuck.