I talked to a few people post-election who had been utterly dismissive of Premier Christy Clark for the last two years.
A lightweight, they felt. Not up to the job and never will be.
So were they dismayed at the voters’ choice? Were they fearful of the future?
No. They were laughing their heads off at the enormity of the upset, and her audacity in pulling it off.
They still might have reservations about her. But those faded into the background as they revelled in one of the most unexpected election outcomes ever in B.C.
Everybody loves a winner. Particularly a scrappy underdog who has just upset all the conventional wisdom.
Clark is solid gold for the next while. When she’s sworn in as premier next month, she’ll be queen of all she surveys. The lustre will fade when the next scandal develops, but one of the lessons from the election is that they simply don’t matter much.
British Columbians sputter and fume about political atrocities, and at the same time they love them. To the extent they follow them, it’s for the entertainment value, analyzing the implications and charting the moves and counter-moves.
But they don’t seem to have much to do with how people vote. We elect governments knowing they’re going to run off the rails at some point. So when it happens, the impact isn’t as great. It has all been accounted for beforehand.
B.C. Liberal campaign boss Mike McDonald alluded to that view in a Times Colonist interview this week.
In the run-up to the campaign, B.C. Liberals blew millions of tax dollars on a self-serving ad campaign, got into a huge fight with the auditor general, fired some key staff over an ethnic-outreach scandal and faced questions about how their key climate-change policy — the Pacific Carbon Trust — worked.
McDonald said: “We were getting hammered in March. It influences perceptions on the spot, but when it comes to going to the voting booth, it’s different.
“Regular people don’t follow politics that closely in between elections, because they’re busy and there’s a lot going on in their lives. When the time comes, there’s much more focus on choice.”
So elections seem to be much more about the future than the past. Clark’s immediate future revolves around fiscal matters. Once her government is sworn in — some time in early June — they’ll have to tackle the job of getting the budget re-introduced and passed, within 90 days of the swearing-in, likely in early September.
Her government will also compile the public accounts for release in July, the full and final report on the fiscal year that ended March 31.
That report has been characterized in the past by serious reservations by the auditor general on how the books are being kept. But indications are that since John Doyle left the post, the process is going more smoothly.
Then it’s on to the job of ensuring the current budget stays balanced.
When the New Democrats analyzed the budget and decided to give up on committing to keeping it balanced, they did so on the basis of some expert advice. The conclusion was that any government that tried to fulfil the pledge would have to curtail programs and services to a degree much larger than anyone had discussed publicly.
The NDP were wrong about many things, so they might have been wrong about that, as well. But it’s safe to say that holding to the current budget is going to be a gruelling job.
Nobody likes cutting services and everybody complains about it. But McDonald had some thoughts on the net impact. For all the emphasis on growth and jobs, controlling spending was a whole other side to the platform, and it was a winning campaign message, he said.
“That was a real weakness in the NDP that they didn’t have an answer for. We have a good record on controlling spending.”
In the face of all the doubts, McDonald said they still believe they can balance the budget. Doing so is going to start a lot of arguments. But there are fewer people today under-estimating Clark’s ability to win them.
