B.C. Views

Fixed election dates, as we’ve just seen in the United States, allow for a more polished show. You can order up the nice graphics and nasty smears well in advance.

Here as in so many things, B.C. is leading the country. Gordon Campbell is going into his second fixed-date election next May 12, while in Ottawa this important democratic reform still exists only in theory.

No one in B.C. has quite the nerve of Toronto’s Jack Layton, who briefly tried to emulate Barack Obama. For Campbell’s team there were also lessons learned from the Conservative campaign that returned Stephen Harper to 24 Sussex Drive.

Lesson one: go negative early. Later this month the B.C. legislature will stir to life for a few days so the B.C. Liberals can force the NDP to vote for income tax cuts. This will mark the formal start of a “not a leader” campaign already targeting the NDP’s Carole James.

Lesson two: send out cheques. Campbell’s colour mug adorns the personal letters that accompanied the first quarterly “Climate Action Tax Credits” mailed out to low-income people. This is the only dishonest part of Campbell’s carbon tax program, because it’s not a tax credit, it’s a wealth-redistributing spending program financed by higher income earners. But it’s great retail politics, targeting the young and poor who tend to vote NDP.

Lesson three: backload the advertising. The Campbell government’s new “Best Place On Earth” TV ads don’t even go through the motions of providing a public service, as the earlier budget consultation series did. These are pure political propaganda at taxpayers’ expense, larded with scenes of federally funded construction projects and plucky Olympic athletes. The slick accompanying website www.bestplaceonearth.ca touts every conceivable B.C. Liberal project from the Mackenzie Spirit Square to the Abbotsford hospital and the Richmond speed skating oval. (Ah, there’s the purpose of this site. It’s one more place to sign up as a volunteer for the Olympics!)

We won’t see a slugfest of negative ads like the one between Obama and Republican John McCain, but the big public sector unions are lining up to get ahead of Campbell’s election gag law.

The nurses and the BC Hydro unions are heavily focused on privatization, of senior care and hydroelectric power respectively.

The B.C. Teachers’ Federation, meanwhile, has budgeted $1 million to its Stop Campbell ’09 effort, a modest sum compared to the union’s 2005 campaign. The BCTF is also leading the court challenge against the law restricting third-party election spending next spring, although two union members have applied to the court to protest the use of their union dues for the executive’s political battles.

The long campaign created by a fixed date also gives parties a chance to test and discard themes that don’t work. The NDP’s “axe the gas tax” may turn into a liability, with lower gasoline prices and a looming tax cut contest with the B.C. Liberals. Even the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has praised the B.C. carbon tax, although the left-wing think tank wants to see it used even more extensively to redistribute wealth.

In his speech to party members in Whistler, Campbell tried his hand at theoretical physics, suggesting that even Cambridge professor Stephen Hawking can’t come up with a “unified theory” of NDP tax policies. Campbell said he was working on a sequel to Hawking’s defining work, called A Brief History of NDP Time. His opening line: “It was a dark period, a time bereft of logic, of empty space and utter chaos.”

Now there’s an idea that deserves to be sucked into the nearest black hole.

Campaigning in cyberspace

The B.C. Liberals tried a bit of Obama-style web wizardry at the recent party convention in Whistler, unveiling an “open platform” website where people can suggest their own ideas for B.C. Liberal policy. A lavish “digital room” at the convention showed off Facebook pages and other up-to-date social network methods of getting younger people involved in policy discussions.

The giant flat-panel monitors of the digital room are, ironically, a reminder of one aspect of the B.C. scene that remains decidedly old-fashioned: corporate money. While Obama and Harper have thrived on a broad base of small donors, the B.C. Liberals once again have more money than the NDP and big unions put together, thanks mainly to corporate donations from industries that benefit from government policy.

tfletcher@blackpress.ca

—Tom Fletcher is legislative reporter and columnist for Black Press newspapers.