It was the hapless Kim Campbell who is supposed to have said before she went down with all hands in 1993 that an election campaign is no time to discuss serious issues.
Of course it isn’t: That sort of talk just confuses everyone. Bores them to death, too.
The trouble is that some issues for some folks are more serious than they are for other folks. Those who live in inner-city condos are unlikely to be as concerned about a shortage of Mason jar lids as those in the Okanagan who grow apricots and bottle their own jam.
Another problem is that some of the issues a lot of people are most upset about are outside the jurisdiction that is in electoral contention.
If there’s a glue that holds the Greater Victoria electorate together, it’s probably its own sewage. In Oak Bay, marauding deer seem to be the dominant concern.
But on the first, no one seems to have the guts to question Ottawa’s Pecksniffian dictates. On the second, whatever provincial government is elected is unlikely to pay for fencing or send in squads of archers.
This puts political parties intent on forming a government for all B.C. in a bit of a bind. They have to look for issues that appeal to universal passions and prejudices. They pronounce sweeping generalizations devoid of detail and describe broad visions devoid of focus.
When Christy Clark was created premier by a cabal of the Liberal elite, she seized on “families” as her universal issue and sounded like Mother West Wind. She’d see that family wage-earners had jobs, that parents would get benefits for looking after kids, that neighbourhoods would be safe playgrounds and she would be an open and transparent materfamilias.
I don’t know how her fumbling the HST actually helped families. I don’t know if families who sit still around a dinner table marvel at the transparency she’s shown over the B.C. Rail disgrace.
But she’s offering jobs, still, as the way to prosperity as every politician who presumes to know how economies work always does in an election campaign.
Well, it’s people who make economies work. They’re not cogs in a machine or placid organisms waiting for benefits to trickle down to them.
They make their own choices: Parents will decide whether income benefits, earned or doled out in government envelopes, shall be spent to give their kids more of what other kids have or fly themselves off for a Maui vacation again.
And voters, like so many of the politicians who pander to them, tend to want quick results when promised good fortune. Voters can be satisfied with the meagre leavings of mega-projects that make fortunes for strangers in many lands, and that’s why politicians are in such a hurry to dig the first shovelful of earth. They’re hares in hard hats.
Prosperity and political fortune dance to a timetable of fixed elections. So where does that leave the tortoises?
Plodding, of course. But plodding in a hurry, too — to fix what has been allowed to break, to provide what may have been overlooked, to try to fill in gaps in families’ lives. The prosperity that the NDP, too, seek is less immediate, but voters are told that when it comes it’ll be more long-lasting.
The NDP under Adrian Dix has been campaigning for change. For a while, it looked as if he’d be cautious, the change small.
But as Les Leyne pointed out last week, he’s promised a lot more during the campaign than expected. And $2 billion isn’t small change.
How do voters know in whom to trust — especially when blatant skulduggery and nasty TV advertising has taken over the campaign, and voters are lied to?
It would be sad if they entered the voting place suffused with anger, vowing revenge. It would be sad if they marked their ballots for personal interest untempered by concern for others — for there is a common interest at stake. And it should be the common issue.
It’s that our governors recognize that what’s bought must be paid for and that abandoning responsibilities by cutting services isn’t leadership.
