In our view the BCLiberals didn’t deserve to win the election because they lost they lost their moral compass. They spent taxpayer money promoting their party, they ran mean negative ads and under Premier Clark they merged the Attorney General’s office, i.e. the courts, with the Solicitor General’s office, i.e. the police. Worst of all, they created the IRP scheme. To us this is despicable. The problem, of course, is that BC voters faced an unpleasant dilemma.
For many people the NDP with Adrian Dix leading, were a completely unpalatable choice. As the editorial boards of the major papers noted, Dix comes across as evasive, uncompromising and inflexible. Anyone over the age of 35 remembers that he was a key player in the previous NDP government that was all but wiped out due to their poor management of the province and numerous scandals.
With a different NDP leader the election results would probably have been very different. Gordon Campbell once told me that so many things can change in an election campaign that it was impossible to predict the result.
Clearly not fans of Christy Clark bearing in mind the points we raise above and previously on our blog, we put some of our hope in David Eby here in the Point Grey Riding. He’s a smart lawyer with a good resume and we thought he’d be a good voice in government. So we’re glad to see that he appears to have defeated Christy Clark. We think he’s well equipped to speak out about the IRP scheme in particular.
The narrative of the election may be that Christy Clark and the BCLiberals pulled off an unexpected win. Still, the people of Point Grey didn’t want her. And the people of BC didn’t want Adrian Dix.
Our hope is that the BCLiberals drop some of the arrogance. Our hope is that instead of looking for easy political points, they think long term, particularly when it comes to our crumbling justice system in BC. Our hope is that they recognize that courts and the police need to be distinctly separate to ensure public confidence in our justice system. Our hope is that the Point Grey election results send a message to Christy Clark.
We won’t hold our breath.