With just over two weeks to go before the B.C. Liberals choose their next leader, two of the presumed front-runners have copped matching endorsements from a pair of party luminaries, such as they are.
Last Friday, Liberal interim leader Rich Coleman publicly threw his support behind former finance minister Mike de Jong, calling him “the best choice to make sure we can grow our free-enterprise coalition.” Then over the weekend, former party leader Gordon Wilson announced he was backing Todd (The Next Generation) Stone, whose “unique perspective,” Wilson said, allows him to fully understand the needs of both urban and rural voters. Stone’s campaign followed up Wilson’s videotaped message with a news release trumpeting endorsements by more than 100 political, community and business leaders from all corners of the province. The impressive roster includes 21 current or former MLAs and nearly 50 mayors, proving that Stone has worked the ground intensively.
Of the six candidates vying for the Liberal leadership, none has lit up the firmament and stood out as star material. The media have made some efforts to paint former Surrey mayor and MP Dianne Watts and rookie MLA Michael Lee as “fresh faces,” while second-term MLAs Andrew Wilkinson and Sam Sullivan have run intelligent, credible campaigns. Anything can happen, but as the race goes into the final lap it does look like de Jong and Stone are well positioned – de Jong because of his economic record and experience and Stone because of his ground game and demographic edge (yes, politics has become unapologetically ageist in the current year).
As the veteran legislator and money manager who shepherded B.C. through successive years of leading job creation numbers and economic growth, de Jong would seem to be, all things considered, the natural choice. Because isn’t a strong economy what the Liberals are all about?
The problem is baggage and de Jong’s vulnerability – not just on his perceived election blunders, but on something more fundamental and potentially devastating.
It’s not clear whether the Liberals have processed the fact that many voters turned away from them – and turned away in actual disgust – due to the whiff of corruption that was emanating from the party. Revealed more by newspaper exposés than the opposition, who were hardly innocent themselves, the almost-anything-goes party fundraising system became an ugly blot on B.C.’s political landscape.
This is still important because, for the Liberals, the worst revelations may be yet to come. In a speech delivered last month to a law conference and posted Jan. 13 to his MLA website, Attorney-General David Eby pulled no punches: “Our province under the last administration has gained an international reputation as a scofflaw. As a jurisdiction where the rules do not apply to white collar crime, fraud, tax evasion, and money laundering, where even if the rules do apply, enforcement is absent.”
In his speech, Eby said he was limited in what he could disclose because of ongoing investigations, but he did say, “The previous administration was well aware of these issues.” And the two cabinet ministers in the Clark government he named as being unresponsive to, and unforthcoming about, serious allegations of transnational money laundering were, respectively, Coleman and de Jong.
That taint is not going away. Stone, as a relatively young cabinet minister who was knee-deep in the transportation portfolio, might be able to avoid the fallout; but not de Jong. He was too close to the money. Fair or not, it’s politics.
Wilson is correct. Stone is the better choice.
