Premier David Eby should hire me as an advisor. He should hire me as an advisor because I can certainly give him better advice than he’s getting now.
The decision to call snap election two years into the NDP’s mandate was ill-conceived, opportunistic, and crass … to say the least. I get it that, with the opposition parties in freefall, the temptation to call an election was great.
My advice would have been to wait until the Conservatives and CentreBC each coalesce into separate working entities before calling an election. We all know (or at least the NDP should) that as long as there are two credible right-of-centre parties in B.C., the NDP have a lock on winning the election.
Did no one in the NDP braintrust even contemplate that the right-of-centre folks would kiss and make up? They did. They found common ground … they each hate the NDP more than they hate each other. Not necessarily a recipe for good governance, but perhaps a recipe for winning an election.
And they picked an old buddy of mine, Lorne Doerksen, as their leader. Lorne and worked together for several years in Williams Lake back before we had grey hair. He threw a wonderful going away party for me when I left Williams Lake. It might have been because he was happy to see me go, but it was still a nice party.
Lorne was the sales guy, focused on selling ads and making people happy. I was the news guy, focused on telling the truth, which quite often made the people Lorne was trying to keep happy, unhappy.
The BC Conservatives made the right choice when they picked Lorne as the person to lead them. Doerksen is imminently likeable, which is a trait neither of his two predecessors have.
He has a personality that lights up every room he walks into. And, he has excellent leadership skills. He’s going to need them.
If there is one saving grace over the recent BC Conservative melodramas, it’s that it happened when they are in opposition. The soap opera we witnessed over the past few weeks would have been disastrous for the province had the Conservatives been in power when it happened.
The problem for Doerksen is pretty much all of those issues that led to the fracturing of the party still remain. The far-right Conservative caucus that put Kerry-Lynne Findlay in the leader’s chair is still there. The party is still split. Putting a band-aid on that potentially fatal wound until after the election won’t serve British Columbians well.
Born and raised in Fernie, Bill Phillips is an award-winning journalist and columnist. He was the winner of the 2009 Best Editorial award at the British Columbia/Yukon Community Newspaper Association’s Ma Murray awards, in 2007 he won the association’s Best Columnist award. In 2004, he placed third in the Canadian Community Newspaper best columnist category and, in 2003, placed second. Read more Writer’s Block here.
