If B.C. NDP leader Adrian Dix wins the May 14 election, there’s going to be a lot more arguments over the finer points.
There’ll be a lot less grandiose visioning and a lot more restating of questions to terms more favourable to the person answering them. There’ll be a lot more citing of statistics to the second decimal point. And a lot more stern lectures about high-concept policies.
He came off in the televised leaders’ debate as a detail guy, almost baffled at times by Premier Christy Clark’s propensity to wing it.
Clark handled the 90-minute showdown with Dix, B.C. Conservative leader John Cummins and B.C. Green leader Jane Sterk fairly well. She took it to Dix wherever possible, and painted the “stark choice” with as broad a brush as possible. He’s a big-government, tax-loving debt hog who says no to everything and wants to take money from kids’ RESPs, by her reckoning.
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However accurate that cartoon outline is, it’s unlikely to change the outcome of the May 14 election by much.
Midway through the evening, it started to look like a preview of how Opposition leader Christy Clark would be holding Premier Dix to account — on the uncertain assumption that she wins her Vancouver-Point Grey seat.
Sterk, meanwhile, fared well by sticking to the mildest points of the Green manifesto and making only passing reference to the more outlandish elements — like jacking the carbon tax sky-high.
Cummins, who looked surprisingly unsteady given his 19 years in the House of Commons meat-grinder, blew most of his credibility by insisting that — despite jettisoning a string of nominees for an assortment of stupid, vulgar or inopportune remarks — “our candidate screening is second to none.”
(Memo to the leader: When “the Google” shows results, there’s usually more than one page.)
His best line was off the top. “Look, everyone knows the Liberals can’t win this election. So you’ve probably tuned in to see what Adrian Dix will look like as premier.”
On that perfectly valid note, what Dix looked like was someone with a lot of negatives churning in the back of his mind when he thinks about Clark, who was grimly trying to stay positive.
Asked about the NDP’s record of saying no to just about every major resource project that comes down the pike, he tried the old dodge of saying it’s not a choice between the economy and the environment. (Most of the time, yes, it is.)
Then he cited his yes to liquefied natural gas, yes to forestry (but no to log exports), and yes to mining, film production and tourism (but not on Jumbo Glacier).
It was Sterk who goaded him back to no, by quizzing him on his pipeline-tanker move. After ducking the issue for a year, Dix last week rejected the idea of turning Vancouver into an oil port, which means rejecting the Kinder Morgan pipeline plan in its present form.
He told Sterk most people don’t want a nine-fold increase in tankers. “My clear position is that tanker traffic doesn’t make sense.”
There were a few compelling moments when Dix tried, as gingerly as possible, to call BS on the premier.
When Clark attacked him for not costing his platform, he protested “your claims are not true.”
When she raised the RESP repudiation, he said Liberals are running Chinese-language ads accusing him of stealing money from kids.
“Nothing could be further from the truth. Every penny of that money will be spent on kids.”
When she cited varying NDP stands on LNG, he responded: “What the premier is saying is not true, and the premier knows it.”
After she attacked the NDP’s curious Kinder Morgan stand, he said: “I know it’s in the script, but we’ve answered it twice already. I think it’s a little rich to talk about consistency here.”
Later, he took her on directly: “Let’s discuss accountability in its most basic form. What bond-rating agency has confirmed … your repeated contention that you’re running a balanced budget?”
Clark came up with a selective partial quote, which prompted Dix to dismiss her “fact-free campaign.”
“None of the rating agencies, not a single one, says what you’ve repeatedly said they’ve said.”
By that point, it was like watching your parents argue in the kitchen.
