Ladies and gentlemen: the man who would be king. Or at least the leader of a minority government that does not include Christy Clark.
But when it comes to Adrian Dix, is there much new in this leader of B.C.’s New Democrats?
In a fireside chat, the personable Mr. Dix effects a man-of-the-people persona, and, far from being a stooge of organized labour, he professes to be a friend to business; after all, as he likes to point out, his dad ran a small business hereabouts for 42 years.
So, should business fear what appears likely to be a return next year to the workingman’s grip on power in B.C. with Mr. Dix as top dog workingman?
Consider the known and the unknown.
First the known: Dix, a Glen Clark operative in the last NDP go-round, is a longtime student of the orange and brown, having done time with the likes of NDP MP Ian Waddell before serving as Clark’s chief of staff from 1996 to 1999.
But, as Dix readily concedes, the NDP game has changed considerably since then. How considerably?
Well, for starters: “Glen Clark is no longer premier; he’s the president of the largest private company in the province.”
So there’s hope for a post-Party free enterprise life after all.
Also known by Dix and most of his fellow British Columbians: there were many foul balls during that Clark-era NDP at-bat.
No room here for a top-10 list. There is room, however, for some Dix insights into why. Here’s one: the party attempted too much too early.
Therefore, this time around, staying in the game for more than one inning will require that an NDP government be “focused on doing important things but doing a few of them and doing them well.”
The interpretation of “important things” is where we drift into the unknown with Mr. Dix.
He’s short on game plan specifics.
But business values specifics. Especially financial specifics.
Dix, however, prefers to bang hard on the skills drum. B.C., he points out, is nose to windscreen with a shortage of highly skilled workers that the Liberals are inadequately addressing.
But the heart of the issue for business is not just more skills training, it’s more training of the right skills the marketplace needs now. That will require more than guaranteeing organized labour stronger representation on apprenticeship governance boards, as Dix favours.
The NDP leader also offers few specifics when it comes to tax changes, spending cuts and other hard budget decisions.
Expect higher corporate tax rates, a levy on financial institutions and a reconstituted PST that will be unchanged from the tax that wasn’t working for business before the HST was instituted.
The full NDP tax plan, Dix promises, will be unveiled prior to election day. But it remains to been seen whether it will be focused on settling fiscal accounts or political scores.
In the meantime, Dix will be hard at work trying to assuage B.C. business fears of another NDP at-bat.
The man who would be king is still distant from the throne. Unless Dix can deliver more compelling reasons to convince B.C.’s business world that he is really a new New Democrat, it will rightly want to keep him from getting any closer. •
