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Tuesday, October 23, 2012 The Chilliwack Progress
Pointsof View
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Who’s the lame duck?
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With Christy Clark trying not to appear as a lame-duck premier, NDP leader Adrian Dix has been doing his best not to put his foot in his mouth in the run-up to the 2013 election. It’s interesting to compare and contrast Dix’s situation with that of Carole James, his predecessor as leader. James took the reins of the B.C. NDP in 2003, when people were getting wise to the Gordon Campbell Liberals’ strategy of gutting the public service to balance the budget. James pledged to build a broader base of support for her party, which was still feeling the sting of being annihilated in the 2001 provincial election. With anti-Liberal sentiment growing, the strategy seemed to work. In 2005, the NDP went from two seats to 33 and people began to talk of the once-vanquished party forming government in 2009. But James, doing her best to bridge the gap between big labour and big business, couldn’t get the party over the political hump. As such, she was unceremoniously given the boot in late 2010. Dix, the longtime party strategist and premier-in-waiting by most accounts, wants to please enough voters to gain a majority in the legislature. But he runs the risk of pleasing no one through giving little detail about his party’s stance on such key issues as oil pipelines, labour contracts and welfare rates. He’s politically fortunate that the popularity of Clark and the B.C. Liberals’ is low – even lower than when James was NDP leader. Dix hasn’t been completely silent on policy. During a speech to a business group last month in Vancouver, he showed nerve by pledging to raise corporate taxes if his party forms the next B.C. government. That sounds like the NDP of old, the party line from which James was so keen to distance herself and the NDP, in trying to appeal to more voters. We hope for more policy pronouncements from Dix in the near future. Waiting to lay out his platform, so as not to alienate voters, makes him just as lame as Clark appears to be. ~ Black Press
L OCALLY G LOBAL
Canadian perspective on the U.S. election
With the U.S. election race too hard to call, who will be best for Canada when the chips finally fall? For sure, President Barack Obama has found the past four years a tough row to hoe. Jobs, the economy, and the debt plague his administration. But given the mess he inherited from the Bush reign, no one should have expected a one-size-fits-all quick fix. The Democrats know too well, perhaps to their peril, the effects of the grindingly slow economic recover y with the national debt weighing in at $16 trillion. This is all delicious stuff for the Republicans who have made jobs and the economy a central part of their platform to get Americans to vote Mitt Romney for President. On the up side, the Obama administration has passed health care reform, a stimulus act and
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reformed Wall Street to tighten those light fingers. The war in Iraq ended, as did the life of Osama Bin Laden, and Obama set about improving America’s image abroad which had been royally battered during the Bush years. As Prime Minister Harper pointed out when Margaret Obama was elected, “The United EVANS States remains Canada’s most important ally, closest friend and largest trading partner.” But that was before the sticky issue of the Keystone XL pipeline debacle when Obama threw the deferment factor into the mix, forcing Harper to re-think markets for our oil. That led to our own
debacle of Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline and shipping bitumen to Asian markets. Pondering who is better for Canada, reporter Basil Waugh with UBC Reports enlisted political scientists Richard Johnston and Paul Quirk for their take on the campaign so far. “The race is very close, but it might not matter,” said both Johnston and Quirk. “The best polls available put Barack Obama ahead of Mitt Romney by two to four percent. But this slim margin is enough that the best forecaster in the U.S. – Nate Silver of the FiveThirtyEight blog – currently puts Obama’s likelihood of re-election at 75 per cent. This is because there are so few undecided voters.” Granted, the UBC interview was done before the first Presidential Debate a few weeks
ago and we all know where that ended. Romney came out swinging while Obama totally off his game. With that nasty wake-up call, Obama got his act together for round two last week. He made enough of a showing that he joked about it at the Alfred Smith Memorial Dinner, a ritual political fundraiser during election campaigns when candidates take time out for some lighthearted comedic one-liners. “Some of you may have noticed I had a lot more energy in our second debate,” said Obama. “I felt really rested after the nice, long nap I had in the first debate.” Johnston thinks this election could have really mixed results with Obama winning the presidency, the Republicans winning the House and the Senate up for grabs. With votes inconclusive, the political system could remain
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divided with neither side getting what it wants. It’s like Canadians voting in a minority government. Each side holds the other’s feet to the fire but as for forward movement, forget it. Canadians, Quirk said, generally prefer the social policies of the Democrats. “But the Republicans, who are better on energy and trade, would actually likely be better for Canada economically.” The next president, though, has got to fix the U.S. economy and nail that break-over point when the debt’s coming down and employment numbers are going up. And that’ll be good for both countries. So, to paraphrase Mitt Romney’s one-liner and in the spirit of Sesame Street, this editorial is brought to you by the letter O and the number 16 trillion.
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