MARK MACDONALD
BRITISH COLUMBIA – Now that’s leadership.
Kevin Falcon’s surprise decision to suspend the BC United campaign and throw his weight behind John Rustad’s upstart BC Conservatives not only gives British Columbians relief from the resignation that the province is heading towards another four years of anti-business and expensive, socialist government. It should be a text book case for how a leader “reads the room” and makes the right decision for others above himself.
Falcon could have soldiered on, choosing personal pride over pragmatism. He tried every strategy he could to move the polling sticks, yet nothing worked. He dusted off his mentor Gordon Campbell’s stunning massive personal tax cut, which jump-started the provincial economy after a decade of NDP Rule a generation ago. No move in the polls. Other “major policy” announcements. Crickets. Bashing Rustad – repeatedly. Nothing worked in terms of even nudging BC United out of the basement of poll-dome.
He led the charge to change the party name – which I always thought was a good move, considering the angst of federal Conservative voters being forced to line up under anything named Liberal. That move took too long and, ultimately only resulted in removing a brand name that voters recognized.
Falcon is a successful businessman and investor in his own right. He was lured back from the private sector to try and rejuvenate the ranks of a party, under the BC Liberals, that provided 17 years of mostly good free enterprise government. Why would someone do that? Because he, like many business people, saw firsthand what NDP governments ultimately do, and wanted to do something about it. So he did. He tried. It wasn’t working. He stepped back.
And today, the BC Conservatives have a legitimate chance of knocking unelected Premier David Eby and his socialist agenda to the sidelines in this October. Without this move, that wasn’t going to happen.
The fact the BC Conservatives even hold this position is only due to national Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, who has pounded the drum on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s excesses and failures to deafening levels. The BC Conservatives have been a blip on the radar for decades now, and their representation in the legislature is mostly due to defections from BC United. Hands up for anyone who would recognize Rustad in a room full of people?
Eby and his fellow ideologues must be trembling today. What was an insurmountable polling lead at the beginning of the year has vaporized. Watch them ramp up personal, vicious attacks on Rustad and the BC Conservatives, as NDP messengers are at their nastiest and most vicious when they recognize a real threat.
Socialism, of course, can only work with heavy-handed, oppressive government which can use force to take from those that work and invest and redistribute to those that won’t and don’t. Or as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher used to say: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”
The NDP has, yet shows absolutely no signs of restraint. Every program they’re rolling out is to be financed by debt, and they’ve consistently hampered the business community’s ability to grow and prosper – the profits of which being the only way to grow legitimate government revenues.
Eby has made grand announcements just like Glen Clark did with forestry, most notably his 100 day “action plan” for housing. That has done absolutely nothing except make local bureaucrats nervous and send them scurrying to tighten up any remaining loopholes that would increase density for private developers.
Government, low-income housing projects? Yes, they’ve been announced, and are coming along, glacially slow as per usual. But why would the private sector barge ahead to build investments that are limited by NDP rental increase restraints that leave investors vulnerable to perilous rates of inflation higher than the amount they’re allowed to increase rent by? A bump in the bank rate, combined with those restrictions, and leave little on the table for profit.
Profit. Ah, yes, profit, the word that socialists have demonized, even though it remains the essential ingredient of all successful business. Isn’t it time to re-package the term so people recognize profit as essentially “overtime pay” for the extra hours and risk investors put into their enterprises?
Admittedly, the voice of free enterprise has been muted in B.C. Whether that’s because the remaining newsroom members in media outlets continues to be dominated by NDP sympathizers, management being afraid of losing their “support grants” from the government, or the virtual silence by traditional business advocacy groups – who has been speaking on their behalf?
There is one obvious move that needs to be made, and Poilievre has made it the primary plank in his platform: Axe the Tax. As in “the” tax, the carbon tax that has made every aspect of Canadian life much more expensive and driven people to despair. The BC Conservatives make noise about doing the same.
That one move will do as much to “fix” the economy than anything else. People hate it – it is the GST and they see what it has done. Non-government types know this has done nothing to change the weather. The only beneficiary is government revenue.
Falcon wouldn’t make that move, but the one move he had left that he could make, he did. By stepping aside now, he finally gives B.C. voters an umbrella under which they can unite to defeat the NDP.
Bravo.
Mark MacDonald is President of Communication Ink Media & Public Relations Ltd.: mark@communicationink.ca
