Mike Farnworth’s star-crossed career as a cabinet minister in the 1990s gives a glimpse of what kind of leader he might be.
He confirmed the obvious this weekend and announced he’s running for the leadership of the New Democratic Party. By this point — six months since leader Adrian Dix put the job up for grabs — it looks as if he might pull a Mike Harcourt and take the job by acclamation.
If so, it will be one of the few things in politics that come easy for him. His ride as a cabinet minister, during which he handled three different portfolios through three different premiers, was a rocky one.
He was handed a series of unpleasant jobs, brewing crises and outright stinking messes. It became such a pronounced trend that inside the legislature he became known as “The Janitor” — the guy called on to take out the garbage.
It’s a tribute to his character that he emerged from that experience without having any of the garbage stick to him.
Then-premier Glen Clark introduced him to the role in 1997, when he named the Port Coquitlam MLA to the Municipal Affairs portfolio.
It’s usually a quiet, benign little fiefdom. But Clark had just finished enraging B.C.’s mayors by whacking their provincial grants by 40 per cent ($100 million).
Farnworth was brought in to smooth things over and did a creditable job. He took a break at one point and went to Hawaii. He got a call there telling him Clark was planning to knock the grants back another $30 million. Farnworth flew back home and argued him out of the move.
Clark thought enough of him to make him employment and investment minister in 1998. (Years later, testimony emerged that Clark called him in, berated him for his shortcomings, but then gave him the job with the warning: “Look, if you f--- up, I’ll fire you.”)
That’s where the real nightmares started. The NDP’s massive investment in a derelict series of north-coast mills — Skeena Cellulose — was already unravelling. Farnworth got to preside over the realization the situation was hopeless.
He also got named the front man when B.C. Hydro’s hilariously inept investment in a Pakistani power project went south in a big way.
“The project will be completed, and B.C. Hydro will be in a good position at the end of it all,” Farnworth reassured everyone.
The mysterious middleman Hydro was using ( “Who is Ali Mahmood?”) disappeared. So did millions in taxpayers’ money, and the project was dead on arrival.
Along the way, he also picked up the gambling file. Farnworth started working on expanding gambling in a big way. It set the stage for the scandal that brought down Glen Clark.
Farnworth was directly involved in approving the questionable casino fronted by Clark’s neighbour, the one that destroyed Clark’s premiership. But no wrongdoing on Farnworth’s part was ever implied. He approved it knowing he was backstopped by the need for a rezoning that would never happen.
After the police arrived on the scene, Clark stepped down and became a free-range MLA for the balance of his term. At one point, Farnworth was attending the tear-gas infused world trade talks in Seattle (The Battle in Seattle) as part of B.C.’s official delegation, while Clark was on the streets as an observer of the riots.
When Ujjal Dosanjh took over as premier, Farnworth became health minister, giving him another taste of strife and turmoil. Doctors at the time were whipsawing the government by demanding raises on a town-by-town basis. Prince George doctors wild-catted and won millions, so Williams Lake doctors did the same thing. Then Cranbrook, etc.
“It’s almost like blackmail,” he said, as he shelled out ransom payments.
His health career came to a merciful end after the NDP was slaughtered in the 2001 election.
There’s no telling if the NDP will ever form government again. But if they do, Farnworth will be the one person in the cabinet room — perhaps at the head of the table — with a lot of hard-earned experience in how to handle the dirty jobs.
