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Put Your Money on de Jong

And province's New Dems are wise to troll federal ranks for a new leader.

Rafe Mair 10 Jan 2011TheTyee.ca

Rafe Mair's column runs every second Monday on The Tyee. Find his previous Tyee columns here and more of his writings on The Common Sense Canadian.

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Middling: BC Liberal leadership candidate Mike de Jong.

Somehow, sitting in a room in London concentrates the political mind wonderfully. I've been muddling through political questions with an eye on the NDP and Liberal leadership races, if races they can be called. I'm mindful of the fact that my predictions invariably turn out to be kisses of death.

We start with the fact that both parties are in disarray and both should be ashamed of themselves for not being able to make leadership changes at appropriate times and in appropriate ways.

For the NDP, it should have been immediately after the 2009 election and for the Liberals anytime since, because of the inept and immoral government Gordon Campbell was leading.

Inept?

How could a competent government not see the signs of the financial crash in 2008? Wasn't it aware of the huge financial hole the U.S. was in?

Did it not see how China had the U.S. by the throat? Did it not know of the subprime mortgages issue? How worthless mortgages were being bundled into "securities," then foisted by banks on the public? Did they not have a finance ministry full of bright people capable of analyzing and reporting back to the minister and his colleagues?

My bet is that the ministry did warn the minister, as it did on the HST scandal, and the government chose to ignore reality.

How could a business-minded government not know that the economy was in trouble if my wife and I, without any help (in fact against the advice of our broker, who had a personal interest in seeing us continue to trade), got out of the market, what the hell was the matter with the Campbell government?

For utter incompetence, one need hardly look further than the HST mess. I believe that it was more than incompetence -- it was deceit.

The Campbell government's reckless indifference to the environment, the paving over of farm land, the ongoing fish farm catastrophe, the rape of our rivers and streams by subsidizing huge outside interests to produce power not for B.C. but for foreign markets and foreign profits, in themselves should be enough to defeat a dozen governments.

Throughout this never-ending saga of deceit and mindless fealty to the principles, if principles they are, of the Fraser Institute, only one minister, Blair Lekstrom, had the guts and morals to resign.

Meanwhile, across the aisle

What about the NDP?

They sure as hell are nothing to write home about!

They screwed up the 2009 election big time. They'd had nine years to get together an opposition party with its s--- together and didn't. I watched the election very close at hand. Most candidates simply didn't understand the issues and fell back to their usual tactic of campaigning by slogan. It was dreadful to watch.

If the party held a postmortem on the election, the results were either of no use or not acted upon. The opposition has been, to be charitable, pathetic.

Now they're stuck with their "gender equality," which shows them up to be a "fellowship society," not a political party. I recently addressed this -- and I submit correctly -- on the CBC political panel, when I said that "affirmative action, which this is, should have as its goal equality of opportunity, not specific consequences." Not only will this rule hurt them in getting good candidates, it makes the party look idiotic -- a fair assessment.

Why de Jong has best chance

Down to business, who's going to win for the Liberals?

Christy Clark, despite her many charms, won't win; BC Rail will be a huge issue and she was there, and deputy premier to boot, but jumped ship. We all know what those who leave a ship in trouble are called. Her main rivals, Kevin Falcon and Mike de Jong, like those who after Agincourt will be able to:

strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispian's day.'
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day;

Ms. Clark avoided Agincourt while de Jong and Falcon have scars to prove that at least they stayed on board for the tough part. Clark has no such scars, and in her days on radio had little to say on the matter except she didn't think there should be an inquiry into the matter, and as another lady, Christine Keeler, once said: (s)he would say that, would say that, wouldn't (s)he?

On the third ballot, Mike de Jong will win, with Falcon seen as too far right for the mainstream Liberals to stomach.

Where NDP should be shopping

For the NDP, there is one major concern -- how to find a leader who wasn't in on the ousting of Carole James and wasn't part of those who supported her and thus bear the blame for what is seen as inept leadership.

A no brainer would have been Peter Julian, NDP MP for Burnaby-New Westminster. He is a fresh face, well thought of in political circles and bears no responsibility for the mess to be cleaned up. However, he has said no thanks.

And Nathan Cullen, another federal NDP bright light, is hemming and hawing.

Until Cullen or someone else from outside B.C.'s New Democrat MLA ranks makes a run for the job, expectations can't be high. After all, the NDP usually pick someone who has the fewest mortal enemies inside the party, the ability to win scarcely ever an important consideration.  [Tyee]

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