I enjoy covering elections, I’ve reported on 28 at last count, but I don’t normally read books about those elections.
I made an exception for A Matter of Confidence: The Inside Story of the Political Battle for B.C. by legislative reporters Richard Zussman and Rob Shaw (Heritage House).
A Matter of Confidence takes readers from the 2009 election win by the Liberals under Gordon Campbell to the NDP’s first weeks as a minority government with Green backing, through a confidence and supply agreement, following the 2017 election.
Last year’s election and confidence vote had echoes of the 1985 Ontario vote that saw the NDP and Liberals join forces to topple a minority Progressive Conservative government.
I followed the ’85 Ontario election closely while finishing my history degree in that province, and I was curious to see what Zussman and Shaw had learned about how B.C.’s NDP-Green alliance was forged.
A Matter of Confidence does not disappoint, and I won’t give away the good bits here.
Zussman and Shaw give a fly-on-the-wall view of the deal-making in the weeks after the election, the events that followed the confidence vote that brought down the Liberals, and the tense B.C. Liberal caucus meeting in Penticton where Christy Clark decided to step down as party leader.
The book also offers some fascinating vignettes of local interest.
There’s a bit about Powell River-Sunshine Coast MLA Nicholas Simons’ role in the so-called “Baker’s Dozen” that forced then party leader Carole James to step down in 2010.
The authors also devote the better part of a chapter to what they argue was a pivotal moment in the 2017 campaign – an encounter between Clark and Sunshine Coast resident Linda Higgins in a North Van grocery store. Even though it got extensive coverage at the time and spawned the Twitter hashtag #IamLinda, Zussman and Shaw’s retelling manages to offer some fresh insight.
The book is a quick, lively read and I highly recommend it for your next long ferry trip.
I keep coming back to the first chapter (and I think I’m safe from spoilers here) – the story of how the HST led to the end of Gordon Campbell’s run as Liberal leader and premier.
For a believer in the value of the lessons of history, it’s an interesting comparison with the NDP government’s struggles rolling out the expanded foreign buyers tax and new speculation tax. Those tax initiatives haven’t hit quite the same nerve with the public, and may never spark a negative reaction on that scale, but the vivid account of how mistakes in introducing a new tax, no matter its merits, can come with a political price is definitely timely.
