As of today Christy Clark has been premier for two years. She is only the sixth woman in Canadian history to have been premier for two years but with the election in eight weeks and Liberals much more likely to lose all their seats than win government again, her term as premier is not going to last much longer.
One impact of how she has governed is that her political career is more or less over. If she had lead the government into the election and lost but still retained 30 or so seats she would likely be the leader for the Liberals in 2017 and have a second shot at winning an election.
With two years in office I would have thought that she would have been bolder in making a new vision for the party, but instead we have had two years of vague stumbling around with no strong direction of where the government was headed. She had a lot more time to reverse the decline of support for the government than Ujjal Dosanjh had in 2001 or Rita Johnston had in 1991. Both Dosanjh and Johnston tried to run out the clock in hopes of something happening to improve the fortunes of the government.
2 years too long
ReplyDeleteChristy Clark works for Harper, as Campbell did before her. Christy had the opportunity to clean up, some of Campbell's thefts and corruption. Christy chose to not do so. Campbell twice lied and cheated, to win his elections too.
ReplyDeleteChristy supported Harper by, permitting Chinese miners to take our BC mining jobs. Christy chose to work for Harper, rather than for the citizens of BC, as did Campbell.
Christy was doomed right from day one, for siding with the enemy.
totally o/t
ReplyDeletePEI Premier Robert Ghiz was in the news for some-whatever-thing which led me to Wikipedia which confirmed that he is not the same Ghiz I remembered from so long ago: his father Joe who was PEI Premier 1988-1993.
Wikipedia noted that they are PEI's second father and son duo Premiers: the other pair being Thane Campbell (1936–1943) and Alexander B. Campbell (1966–1978).
Here in BC we too have been 'blessed' with a father-son team in WAC Bennett (1952-1972) and Bill Bennett (1975-1986).
All of which got me wondering: are there any other familial leadership histories?
Try as he might Ernest Manning's western separatist son could not convince enough conservatives to crown him, but other than that I can't think of any others.
Can you?
Christy Clark's first mistake was to break her early election promise made during her victorious BC Liberal party leadership campaign. It looked as if the Campbellite caucus was still in control when they bullied her into running in a by-election instead ( all of them were scared to death of facing the voters.) Christy's polling numbers were competitive up to that point, then quickly joined the disgraced Campbellites at the bottom of the tank. She never got out from under their boot--they effectively shooed her out of the kitchen, leaving her to prance around the province unsupervised whilst they hoped she'd prance off a cliff.
ReplyDeleteThe Campbellite caucus seemed to have known better than anyone else the BC Rail fiasco, the 2009 deficit lie, the HST lie and the taxpayer funded hush money payment to the only two BC Liberals so far convicted in the BC Rail corruption investigation precluded redemption. The jig was up and they began an orderly retreat, carefully wiping their tracks. This underlies the last two years of Christy's political career.
The Campbellite caucus must have had some powerfully persuasive stuff to deny Christy the control she craved and much conjecture has been made about her still-unresolved involvement in the corrupt sale of BC Rail. Did they blackmail her into breaking her early election promise to give them time to get away? On the other hand, the supremely self-confident Princess Warrior might have calculated she'd be just as capable of winning even a postponed election. And she'd be rid of those nasty Campbellites, almost all of whom have declined incumbency. Unfortunately for her, the electorate didn't like waiting for the BC Liberals to get all their own career ducks in a row.