Interview with Christy Clark

March 6, 2004

The Honorable Christy Clark is the Deputy Prime Minister of the Province of British Columbia and the Minister of Children and Family Development. She is also a Memeber of the Legislative Assembly representing the City of Port Moody, and a leading figure within the BC Liberal Party. Minister Clark agreed to sit down to an interview with the Other Press.

OP: Good morning, Madame Minister, and thank you for agreeing to this interview.

You've recently switched from the Ministry of Education to the Ministry of Children and families.
I assume that was quite a bureaucratic hassle. Based on your own experiences, is this province making
any headway in cutting back government excess?

CLARK: Yes. Yes with an exclamation mark. In this ministry, Children and Families, we have cut the headquarters' staff by 50%. We've gone from 800 people down to 400 people, so there are a lot fewer bureaucrats working in Victoria. Now, we try not to just fire people. We try to pursue other means, like getting people to retire voluntarily and get then get rid of their positions afterwards and that kind of thing, but no single, great mass firing. So in essence, yeah, we've really slimmed down the bureaucracy in Victoria.

OP: That's a good thing?

CLARK: Yeah. I don't think anyone wants to know that you're spending their money on bureaucrats. People want to know that if a government is paying people, its nurses and doctors and social workers and people on the front lines. In this ministry we've cut a few social workers but as a percentage its a much smaller percentage of front line workers than we did of headquarters staff.

OP: Ideologically, how do you define yourself? What views are the foundation for your political beliefs?

CLARK: I have always defined myself as a middle-of-the-road liberal. I was a member of the BC Liberal Party when we used to get 5% of the vote. I was never Socred, I was never New Democrat, so I've always believed in very middle of the road politics. I think we've had a challenge in this last couple of years, because BC swung so far to the left under the NDP, anything that's kind of "back to normal" has required taking some really tough measures, probably tougher than anybody would have liked to have taken, and we had to do it quicker than anyone probably wanted to do. But I think overall, I think when people look back on our government they will look at what we achieved, and how we left British Columbia, they'll say that this was a pretty middle-of-the-road government.

BC Ferries, for example. We didn't sell it to the private sector. We wanted it to operate better, get it operating more like an independent entity, so we spun it off from government, making it an independent Crown corp. That's a middle-of-the-road sort of solution. Lots of things that we haven't done people think we should have. Liquor store privatization for example, and privatizing ICBC. There are lots of examples of things we didn't do that our supporters really wanted us to do, but there are also lots of things that we did do that people will look at and go "boy, that's not center of the road, that's right wing." But that's the mix.

OP: So you wouldn't agree with the characterization that the Liberal Party is right-wing?

CLARK: No, I don't think so. The period we're in British Columbia right now is a period that every province has gone through in the past. A process of trying to get our expenditures under control. The sad thing is, in British Columbia we're just the last in the country to do it. Manitoba did it, Saskatchewan did it- under NDP government, in fact- Quebec did it, and we're just kind of the last to come to the party. But the process of trying to get your finances under control and cutting spending is painful. So no, we're not unusual from the rest of the country in that. It's just we're so far behind the curve it's really noticeable.

OP: Do you think the ten years of NDP rule has negatively affected the way British Columbians view the role
of government in their lives?

CLARK: I think the NDP had a basic philosophy of entitlement. That's part of their theological view. It's not ours, we disagree about that and I think to some extent they did help encourage a culture of entitlement. But I do think that the results of the last election showed a complete and utter rejection of the NDP approach. So, yes, I think they did have an ideological bias that they pushed, but no, I don't think that they were very successful.

OP: A common complaint in this, and other provinces, is that our system of government forces us to give important cabinet positions to men and women who often do not have any experience or education in dealing with their portfolio topics. Wouldn't this government be better served if we appointed people from outside of the legislature to cabinet, as they do in American states?

CLARK: Well it's not part of the Canadian tradition, the British parliamentary tradition, to do that. The NDP tried that actually, with Ed John. Ed John was the chairman of the First Nations summit, and they appointed him to cabinet. But they did it with the understanding that he would win a seat in the next election.

Choosing people from outside government has its advantages, in that you have a much bigger pool to chose from. A premier has a very limited pool of 79 people, or 50 people, or 35 people depending on how many seats his or her party has. So you've got a really narrow group of people to chose from. But the downside of getting people from outside of parliament is that they are way less accountable. In that case, in the United States, only the president is accountable for what the Secretary of Defense does, or the Secretary of Education does, or Secretary of Housing does. He's accountable for all that stuff. In our system, I'm accountable for what we do in the Ministry of Children and Families. Rick Thorpe is accountable for what we do in Revenue. We're accountable to the parliament. We're there every day to answer questions from the opposition and the public. That doesn't happen in the United States, so that results in a lower level of accountability.

OP: But they have congressional hearings and that sort of thing, too. Personally, though you must see your duties as minister taking precedence over your duties as a legislator. Doesn't this make the legislature largely irrelevant, with the executive and legislature being merged like this?

CLARK: It can if the private members don't have any say in the goings-on of the House. The more limited their power, the more "whipped" they get by the party whip, the less say they have. But you know, in Britain, where our system comes from, they have a really loose system where the people are allowed to vote their conscience, where the leader is elected from the caucus all the time- that's how Margaret Thatcher went down. It works really well in that individual members have a lot of say, but are also accountable. I think in Canada, the direction we've gone in has been very unhealthy, where really all the power gets vested in the Prime Minister, or the Premier, because the Prime Minister or the Premier elects cabinet, and cabinet doesn't elect the leader. And then private members get whipped into line and they say "if you don't vote the way we want you to on this, you're out," more or less. So it's not healthy.

But on the other hand, the American system not only doesn't elect the cabinet, but second, it has a sort of perverse impact, electing people as individuals, as opposed to party members. Yes, they vote their conscience, but in the United States they've become extremely vulnerable to the money of special interests, and that hasn't happened in Canada because we have a party system. If you are the gun lobby, and you've got a million bucks, you don't go to Christy Clark and say "I'm going to put a million dollars into advertising against you in your riding." What you do is you try to defeat the Liberal Party. But it's much harder for you to try and leverage your million dollars on a nation-wide or province-wide campaign than it is on individual campaigns. So in the United States individual congressmen and individual senators are so vulnerable to that, they know that if someone decides to put a million bucks on their forehead, they're going to lose. Period. So they really feel pressured to try to follow the orders of the special interests.

OP: Some people, though, might say that in our system the special interests are just concentrated all at the top, as we've seen with Prime Minister Martin's government, and all of the scandals swirling around there. While the individual legislators might be totally left in the cold, the top part, the executive branch of the government is sort of where all of the special interests converge.

If you were just an MP I'm sure no one would ever contact you, just on the basis that you wouldn't have any actual power within the structure of the government. I think special interest groups in this country realize that if you affect anything, you go to where the power is, and that means that you go straight to the top of the government, the cabinet and the Prime Minister. Which can allow for a concentration of corruption.

CLARK: Yes, except because you're talking about trying to affect a national campaign, as opposed to an individual, local campaign, you have got to have a lot more money than anybody does in Canada, to be a special interest group that has that kind of effect. Because the value of my million dollars to the Liberal Party, nationally, or the Conservative Party, nationally isn't very much compared to the value of my million dollars if I decide I am going to spend it defeating you, J.J., in your riding. Special interests can't get big enough, really, to have that same kind of control over a national party that they can have over individual candidates, because individual candidates just can't compete with that kind of money. Unfortunately, political campaigns are all about money. So whoever has the most money wins, and at an individual level, if we didn't have spending maximums here, and the NDP decided to spend $500,000 to defeat me, they probably could. Just because they wanted to defeat me. But nobody does that, because I'm part of a party, and what you want to try and do is influence the total number of members who get elected. It's much harder for special interests to target people, so it dilutes the value of their money and makes it much harder for them to manage it.

But you're right. It does concentrate power in the Prime Minister's office, or the Premier's office. There is no question about that. And that's the trade-off that we make. We should have a system more like the British system. We should go back to that, where we let people vote their conscience and give them some real power over control of who the leaders of the parties are, and that kind of thing.

OP: What do you think of the whole idea of "confidence votes." I've always thought of that as being a sort of outdated notion. That's why I've sort of admired Premier Campbell in setting election dates, because that seems to ensure a lot more stability. I mean, I don't think that the public really feels like having an election every time the government gets defeated on some trivial bill about the budget or whatever. So do you think that perhaps its an idea whose time has passed?

CLARK: Yeah, I do. I think the nature of a confidence motion is to say that on some things, you cannot vote against your government no matter what your conscience says, and if we really want to free up peoples' consciences and let them vote in a way that reflects their own views and the views of their constituents, you're right, we have to get passed that notion.

So another thing that Gordon Campbell did was he defined what a confidence motion was. He's said that certain types of legislation are not motions of confidence.

OP: Minister, you are currently serving as Deputy Premier, which I think is a position very few Canadians fully understand. What exactly does the job entail? If Premier Campbell had resigned last summer, would you be the Premier right now?

CLARK: I don't know. It's not an automatic thing. Because in British Columbia leaders of parties are elected by the political parties, or maybe by the caucus. So it's not an automatic succession.

The deputy premier's job is that I chair cabinet when the Premier is not there, and that's a very important role. I do all the "visiting dignitary" kind of roles that I need to do when he is not there as well. I confer with him quite a bit about policy too, and those kinds of things. It's a role that is probably different in every jurisdiction. It depends on what the premier is like, and what the deputy premier is like.

OP: Would you say then that it's an exaggeration to say that you're the "second in command" of the province?

CLARK: Well, I have a responsibility to answer all the questions that are put to him when he's not there. I don't know if you could say there's a second in command, though. It really depends on the issue. But when he is not in the House, for example, I answer his questions. So I suppose on a flow chart, that's how it works, yes. But the reality is nothing ever works that way. Everything is a little more fluid than that. Like for example, at your home, is your mum your head of the household or is your dad the head of the household? Or, are neither of them really head of the household, and you're all kind of in charge in your own way? It's more like that, in a political party a caucus is like a family.

OP: During your tenure as Education Minister, you were subjected to intense criticism, and more than a few rather brutal personal attacks. I was wondering if that had any kind of personal effect on you.

CLARK: No. It doesn't get to me at all. Because I know that the critics don't care about me, they care about my position. I'm just a concept to them, I'm not a person to them. And I know they're not attacking me as a person, they're attacking me as a concept of what I represent to them (laughs). So it's like, okay, fill your boots. Now that I'm gone they're just going to attack the new guy. So it's not about me, it's about them, and what they want. Trying to criticize me is just a means to that end. It's not personal, and so I never take it that way.

OP: Do you view yourself as being popular?

Um, I don't know. I've never really thought of myself in those terms. That's an interesting question.

OP: Well, how confident do you feel about your re-election?

CLARK: Well that's a more specific question. You always have to think about whether or not we're going to get re-elected. And the reason we have to be concerned about that is because if you're not going to get re-elected it means you probably haven't paid enough attention to the people in your riding. It's often on a very specific basis, for example people in Port Moody care about the big issues like taxes, but they also have some very specific concerns about if BC Hydro is providing them with enough information to the police to track down grow operations. That's not an issue everywhere. They wonder about the future of Burrad-Thermal. There are specific, local issues that I need to pay attention to.

I won the last election with 75% of the vote, I was the third-highest vote-getter in BC in the last election. But that doesn't mean I don't have to work for the next one. I always have to work, and I have to make sure I am out there, listening to my constituents. That's Job One of every politician, to tend to your constituents first, and then do all the other job that the Premier gives to you, or the caucus gives you, or whatever as a second priority.

OP: Do you feel then that in your own riding you're a popular figure that will not have a difficult time winning re-election?

CLARK: [long pause] I get lots of positive feedback from people. I mean, there are lots of critics out there too, no question about that, but I do get lots of positive feedback from people. And I'm working hard, and I'm in my community a lot. So I guess we'll know the answer to that question on the next election.

OP: What would you say is the public's biggest misconception about your government?

CLARK: I think that the single biggest misconception is that we want to balance the budget because we like to play with numbers. The reality is, we want to balance the budget because that's the only way we can support social programs. Again, if we don't get BC on a sound financial footing we are not going to be able to afford to pay for education or healthcare anymore. So what we want to do is put us on a sound financial footing so we can pay for those things, and more importantly recognize that a deficit really is a matter of a saying that "we want to spend all the money that we take in and we want to take all the money that belongs to the next generation, too. So we don't care if they get pensions, we don't care if they get healthcare, we don't care if they get anything in their future. We want to use it all." That's what a deficit is. One generation being greedy enough to say "we want you to give to us, and take from our kids, too, and let them figure out the problem." So I think we have to work hard to scale down our expectations in a generation. Because we have to leave something for people like you. We have to. Otherwise all we'll have at the end of our reign of government is more debt that's all you're going to pay for. You're going to be paying the banks. So you're not going to be thinking about "gee, should we be expanding medical coverage to cover podiatrists" you're going to be thinking, "okay, maybe we shouldn't be covering heart transplants at all."

Those are going to be the kinds of questions that your generation is going to have to ask unless we take care of it. And it's just not fair. Because you don't use up a lot of resources of government. The years when you use up a lot of resources of government are when you turn 60 or 70. So all those people who are making the cases for those who are 60 or 70 right now are using up the resources for your future.

OP: On a personal level, what frustrates you the most about government?

CLARK: [long pause] I... would say.... the distance between a politician making a decision and the people who receive service on the front lines. Someone like you could come to me and say "we have a real problem at our hospital and it's this" and it is so hard for me, as a politician to change that, because there is so much bureaucracy and decision-making and complexity between the top level of government, and the bottom level, the front lines. That's the most frustrating thing. Nobody in any political party you run for gets into office with anything other than the idea that they want to change everything, they want to make things better for people. That's why we do this. And then you get there, and it is really, really hard to get things done. It's just so unwieldy and cumbersome.

OP: What party do you hope wins the Federal election?

CLARK: I don't publicly speculate about that. Because our provincial party has a whole coalition of people. We have people who are federal Liberals, who are working on the Liberal campaign, and people who are working on the federal Alliance campaign, and people on the federal Conservatives. Actually, I guess they are one party now.

OP: Lastly minister, where do you see your political career going in the next ten years?

I don't know...

OP: Is there a dream job you have in mind?

CLARK: I want to be a mother again. I want to have another baby. That I want to do. But I think I can accommodate a professional job at the same time I have another baby. So I don't know. The thing is, about politics, is that it doesn't lend itself to long-term planning, in terms of personal career planning. You get re-elected, or not, every four or five years. So your future is not in your own hands, and I think it is foolhardy for any politician to try to make a long term personal career plan, because who knows when you're going to be chucked out of office.

OP: Thank you for your time, Madam Minister. Best of luck in the future.

EPILOGUE:

In the fall of 2004 Minister Clark shocked British Columbians when she announced that she planned to retire from politics and would thus not seek re-election. She claimed she wanted to spend more time with her infant son.