By R. Paul Dhillon
SURREY – The BC Liberals held their first Leadership debate on Sunday in Surrey with the race down to six candidates, who has paid the $10,000 entrance fee.
The party obviously picked Surrey for the opening debate to get the ball rolling on getting a new leader as it was this city that forced Christy Clark from the Premier’s chair and sent her packing.
Surrey’s big losers included Ministers Amrik Virk and Peter Fassbender and the huge NDP sweep has John Horgan as NDP Premier after more than 16 years of BC Liberal rule.
The first debate among the candidates – Andrew Wilkinson, Dianne Watts, Todd Stone, Michael Lee, Mike de Jong and Sam Sullivan – hit on many of the things that forced the BC Liberals out of power, things like housing and affordability but more like not caring and not listening.
Wilkinson, Stone and Sullivan made some good points and Watts and the others too but mostly it’s the same free enterprise ideology that they all back and spout.
Only Watts seems to want to speak beyond that but others were largely Preaching to the Gallery as they do need party support and supporters’ votes to win the leadership battle.
But with the large number of recognizable and well funded candidates in the field, the race looks wide open at this stage of the game with certainly Wilkinson, Stone and Watts having a very good chance of winning the leadership on either second or third or even fourth ballot.
De Jong and Sullivan are unlikely to get much support as Sullivan’s ideas are fairly radical given the party’s usual rightwing stand on issues and de Jong is just too Christy-Clark like and full of himself on being the master controller of funds and so-called surplus of $2.7 billion which he and Clark didn’t use to cut things like tolls on bridges and other hidden BC Liberal taxes and instead allowed NDP to use that money from the sidelines to win and form a government with Green support.
Michael Lee, the only ethnic Chinese-Canadian candidate, is a strong orator and has his head in the right place in terms of communicating the party platform and his ideas within that but he will have to work really hard on his ground game and major endorsements to make any headway in the field.
There certainly will not be a winner on the first ballot as there isn’t a candidate who is really having a large sway among party members despite Watts being the front-runner out of the gate but she needs to get sharper at the debates and get momentum in terms of endorsements to stay competitive or ahead of the other candidates.
Let the fireworks begin!
One issues that seemed to have overly dominated Sunday’s debate is the proposed proportional representation and changes to political fundraising laws which the NDP has introduced or will introduce.
No doubt that the proportional representation is a big evil to the all-controling BC Liberals’ heavy business-free-enterprise friendly and big money-making-for-the-party agenda but they seemed to be going after it as if it was some unjust monster. The Liberals probably want to rethink that as their party is currently in opposition and for a reason so making this a bigger evil then it is will make them look self-serving and all consuming and fund-raising power hungry.
Sunday’s debate was the first of six the party will hold across the province before it elects a new leader in early February.
