Gordon Campbell – Nation Builder?
Today’s nominee for The Globe and Mail’s Nation Builder of the Year award for 2007 is B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell.
One online nomination puts it this way:
“He came to office on a platform that included opposing aboriginal treaties and weakening environmental protection. Yet in the past year, he has taken a bold leadership role in both fields. …
“He has shown that a political leader can grow in the job and rise to the challenges that confront him.
“In a time of growing cynicism about politicians, such an example helps restore our eroding faith in public institutions.”
I am going to have to spend some more time on this site to find out how to protest about this. It has obviously been posted by one of his hired hands, or some odious creep who thinks it will get him something. Because that is the way it works in the BC “Liberals” who are, of course, anything but.
He came to office and then disgraced it by driving drunk on holiday in Hawaii. Luckily no-one was hurt – except his own reputation but somehow he managed to survive that and did not do what he should have done then – resign! He then proceeded to “deregulate”, which meant gutting the Environmental Assessment process, and halving the resources of the ministry that was supposed to be protecting the environment. (At the same time he also reduced the ability of the Human Rights office to do anything effective in that field.) He got rid of photo radar, refusing to acknowledge that it was curbing excess speed and reducing collision severity. He had promised not to privatise BC Rail prior to the election, but did so anyway. A court case about that the corruption of that process has still to actually get to hearing evidence. The outcome was a series of incidents – one of which killed all life in the Cheakamus River. He overturned a Regional Transportation Plan that had won an award from the Transport Association of Canada as the first urban sustainable transportation plan in order to promote a subway to the airport and a “Gateway” program that threatens the Burns Bog (a unique ecosystem essential to the health of the Fraser delta) the Pacific flyway and will also lock the South of Fraser region into car dependence. At the same time he ended democratic local control of the regional transportation authority mainly due to its lack of support for his imposed favourite projects. He allowed a highway to be built across Eagleridge Bluffs – another unique ecosystem – a tunnel would have been cheaper and produced a better road. The process of “improving” the Sea to Sky Highway also ensured urban sprawl would spread in Squamish – and ended any discussion of using the railway to improve passenger transport choice in that corridor. Instead of improving transit across the province (the most cost effective way of dealing with increasing greenhouse gas emissions) he has pursued a “hydrogen highway” – despite the inability of Ballard (one of the initial developers of the fuel cell) to make a hydrogen car that could become commercially viable. He has done nothing to promote the use of conventional electric vehicles in BC despite there being three BC companies exporting these around the world.
I have not touched upon his activities in other areas since they were not mentioned by his nominee, but I think it is fair to say that he has not been a unifying force in BC – promoting dissent and discord wherever he goes. He has managed to hold on to power simply because rising energy and natural resource prices have produced a booming economy and budget surpluses. However, he has not dealt with outstanding issues like the shameful record in child protection or the lack of affordable housing or the growing crisis in health care, all of which required increased government spending. Throughout his term of office he has been mainly concerned with privatisation, tax reductions and paying down the debt, not delivering better public services. His recent conversion to reducing greenhouse gas emissions was not conveyed to his cabinet so that effective action has been delayed – and in the case of highway expansions – deliberately ignored.
If anything Gordon Campbell has confirmed the worst possible view of politicians: he has confirmed the cynics who now have a demonstrable example of a politician who is lying as long as his lips are moving: who has no principles other than promoting his own career and the narrow economic interest of his wealthy and powerful supporters: who has used the treaty process to forward the interests of his cabal rather than the broader welfare of First Nations and the province as a whole. It is only because he is compared to current politicians such as George W Bush that he looks better than some – and no worse than most of the rest.
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