Christy Clark doesn’t seem to have a re-election hope in hell – which at least sounds drier and warmer than Vancouver in March.
But the premier has something going for her that doesn’t require dark deeds in the political night. Human nature.
It strains the memory glands, but it existed long before the six o’clock news, talk shows and the flawless experts on how this province or any government should be run: we columnists and other such career spectators. Canada today would be a different, nay perfect place, if only Alan Fotheringham had dislodged his original choice for prime minister, Pierre Elliott Trudeau – the two tiny angry men actually got so nose-to-nose once that they alternated stepping on each other’s Guccis – and modestly replaced PET with his know-it-all self.
Some of his touchingly naive readers urged Foth to descend from his fur-lined pulpit and dispatch the lions in the political arena with a few stabs of his rapier pen.
Foth, who more cunningly steered his chariot than any journalist of his day, had no illusion that a gift for witty cracks and treacherous eavesdropping was translatable into Platonic genius for governing the sweaty, disputatious plebs.
Crestfallen Christy fell victim to that very fallacy, confusing the lever of public policy with the button in CKNW’s studio and the fun of cross-examining cagey public figures schooled in compressing the smallest amount of dangerous fact into the largest volume of anesthetic words. (As a reformed politician, of course she should have learned better.)
Well, here’s a last-ditch hope: An election-day conversion on the way to, and in, the ballot box.
The bolt of lightning is that life in British Columbia is pretty good. Not for all of the people all of the time. Not for some – very few – of the people any of the time. But for the great majority.
In spite of politics. In spite of politicians. In spite of the busy little bees in the artificial worlds of Victoria and Ottawa and city hall.
And in spite of the media – which, spare our tender egos, multitudes tune out from, growing a protective carapace against our interminable bad news (the term is an oxymoron).
Oh, they enjoy us, in our parts – what crass newspaper mogul Roy Thomson called “the good news,” the inventive, escapist ads. In TVland, a clever commercial, like the one about the guy who laughs off being soaked by a passing car (maybe a nasty Honda) and other annoyances because he’s delirious about his new Ford, can be pleasurably watched over and over between the grim reports on the current unpleasantness in Volcanovia.
The pretty good life. New cars, new kids, a tough climb up Mortgage Mountain, but you’re doing it. And what the stiffs in the legislature are doing? A sideshow. Divorced from real problems, like those in much of a suffering world. So why change? Why replace the devil you know with the devil you don’t know well enough?
The Liberals have screwed up, but what unpredictable disasters await the alternative?
And so the pencil hovers over the box, and the X falls on – “oh, what the hell …”
Adrian Dix, his party soon to finally reveal its platform, has largely, slyly kept silent while the Liberals destruct, following the masterly strategy if not the precise words of Napoleon: “Never interrupt the enemy when he is making a mistake.”
Hold on. Where did Napoleon end up?
