Shirley Bond Reflects on Her Party’s Opposition Record

Shirley Bond sees one of her main jobs as interim leader of the BC Liberal Party to be steering through a period of transition while the party picks a permanent leader. It’s a job that’s now almost done.

“Our members are going to make a choice that in my view makes it a pretty important 2022 for us,” Bond said in a December interview. “I think it’s a pretty pivotal decision in early February.”

For a party that won four majority governments in a row starting in 2001 and at times seemed unbeatable, there’s much riding on the next leader as the BC Liberals recover from a trouncing in the 2020 election.

There are seven people vying for the job, including current MLAs Ellis Ross, Renee Merrifield and Michael Lee. Former cabinet minister Kevin Falcon, who last sat in the legislature in 2013, is widely seen as the front runner. Rounding out the field are Val Litwin, Gavin Dew and Stan Sipos.

While Bond backed Falcon when he narrowly lost the leadership to Christy Clark in 2011, this time around she has pledged as interim leader to stay neutral.

The most she’ll say on the topic is that it’s healthy to have candidates expressing diverging visions for the party and the province. “I think it’s fantastic we have seven people who want to be the leader of a political party that’s currently in Opposition,” she said.

BC Liberal members will need to consider who has the potential to best take on the current NDP government in the legislature with its strong majority, she said, as well as who gives the BC Liberals the best chance to convince British Columbians the party deserves another chance in government.

And whoever members choose in the Feb. 5 vote will need to be ready to lead into the next sitting of the legislature that starts just three days later.

The BC Liberal caucus “will need to be part of that transition, supporting the new leader, making sure that we continue to be effective in the legislature from the beginning of that session,” she said.

The party doesn’t get a pass when it returns to the legislature in February, Bond said. “We have to continue with the focused, disciplined approach that we’ve had, at least in my view, and continue to press on important issues.”

There is a general consensus among observers of the B.C. legislature that the BC Liberal opposition has been more effective under Bond’s leadership than at any other time since the 2017 election.

People sharing that view include BC Green Party Leader Sonia Furstenau. “Particularly in the fall session, critics seemed to lean into their role and brought a lot to questions and debates,” Furstenau said. “They went from being a caucus to being a team, is what I saw.”

Bond acknowledged that it took the BC Liberals some time to get used to being in opposition and to recognize how much the role matters.

“It’s not the one we wanted, but it’s the one we ended up having,” she said. “I think it was a matter of reframing our thinking about that: it gives us the opportunity to hold the government to account, to focus on important files.”

Part of the shift for the BC Liberals has been a greater focus on social issues, including funding for families with children who have autism, supports for people with mental health issues, and the ongoing opioid poisoning public health emergency.

The shift was deliberate, Bond said.

“We gained a reputation [in government] for concentrating on the economic things and all of that side of the agenda, and I think in many ways part of what we need to do, and what I think we’ve tried to do this year and going forward, is talk more about why that matters.”

Balanced budgets, fiscal discipline and job creation matter, but not simply for their own sake, she said. “The ‘why’ is because we need to be able to provide resources for families who have children with autism, we need to make sure we have a robust mental health strategy and addictions strategy that looks at a whole spectrum of supports for people.”

What would she say to people who don’t believe the commitment is genuine, given the party’s poor record on social issues while it was in power?

“I think that’s part of the work we need to do as we restore confidence in our party,” Bond said. “All of us, if you’re elected to public office, you care about people. The issues aren’t necessarily partisan in nature, but the solutions often take different paths.”

The current group of MLAs is passionate about issues that matter to families, she said, and talking more about social issues also exposed some gaps in the government’s performance.

She gave the example of the government’s poor handling of the record-setting temperatures last summer. “How can you not be personally impacted by a heat dome that takes the lives of almost 600 frail, elderly British Columbians? Those are devastating things, and those aren’t partisan issues.”

Another is the opioid poisoning crisis, which has gotten worse over the past two years despite the focus of a standalone Ministry of Mental Health and Addictions.

Bond criticized the government’s unwillingness to work together with opposition parties on the issue.

“When we see the loss of life continuing to increase month after month after month,” she said, “we had better figure out how we are going to sit down and ultimately grapple with what it is going to take to turn the tide here.”

She said she’s hopeful the government can be convinced to work more collaboratively and argued it’s an approach that voters have come to expect, though she acknowledged that back when she was in cabinet, the BC Liberal government also missed opportunities to benefit from input from the opposition.

“We certainly weren’t perfect at it,” Bond said. “I’ve been learning too on this path. You learn as you go.”

As interim leader, one of the challenges was to hold the government to account in the legislature without overshadowing the leadership race. “I wanted to create as much space as possible in the leadership race for people to share their vision,” she said. “That’s not an easy balance.”

The third debate in that race happened on Dec. 14.

During it, Falcon said the BC Liberals lost power because they failed to lead on issues that mattered to British Columbians and said that while he still believes in low taxes, some of the things the NDP government has been doing deserve support, including the guarantee of five paid sick days a year and the push to provide $10-a-day child care.

Ross said the BC Liberals won’t win future elections by having “NDP lite” policies. Litwin, a former CEO of the BC Chamber of Commerce, talked about the importance of supporting small businesses and said providing affordable child care makes economic sense.

Merrifield pointedly asked Lee how he would work collaboratively with MLAs like her and stressed her own experience building organizations in the private and non-profit sector. Dew criticized Lee’s weak performance as the critic for the attorney general. “You never landed a solid punch on David Eby,” he said.

Lee defended his record as a lawyer in the private sector and as an MLA and warned, “Partisan games of the past won’t win.”

Sipos, a developer from Victoria who announced his candidacy just in the last week and missed two prior debates, presented himself as a “non-politician” and observed that in the months it has been underway the leadership race has generated zero excitement.

The BC Liberal Party leadership voting uses ranked ballots and a point system where each constituency is given the same weight regardless of how many members it has. The system makes for unpredictable results, as happened in 2018 when Andrew Wilkinson won on the fifth ballot despite receiving fewer votes than four other candidates in the first round of counting.

For whoever becomes the next leader, there are challenges ahead, Bond said, including an ongoing Electoral Boundaries Commission process that will have implications for all the parties, but particularly for the BC Liberals. The party holds many of the rural seats where there are relatively few people, and the commission is most likely to significantly adjust boundaries.

“We still have our work cut out for us,” Bond said. “We have a long pathway to return to government.”

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