2011 Liberal Party Race for B.C. Premier

January 5, 2011

One of B.C.’s most outspoken and high profile political figures, Christy Clark won her first term as Liberal MLA in 1996. She would proceed to serve as a cabinet minister and deputy premier under Gordon Campbell, before temporarily retiring from politics in 2005.

In 2007, Clark joined CKNW as a current events talk show host, a position she held until December, when she stepped down to join the Liberal leadership race.

NOTE: Longtime Filibuster readers will remember that I interviewed Christy Clark once before, ages ago, when she was still deputy premier.

This is not your first attempt at a political comeback. In 2005, you ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Vancouver, losing the NPA [a Vancouver municipal party] primary to Sam Sullivan.

I was just wondering what the lesson of that episode in your life was to you?

You know, you learn a lot more from the contests you lose than the contests you win, and I think that’s true in any part of life. It’s like, when you apply for a job and you don’t get it, you have a lot more to learn from that, or from the promotion you didn’t get, than from the one that you did because you’ll spend some time thinking about the things you did wrong.

I think the lesson in that was I didn’t live in Vancouver at the time (laughs). So I think it would have been really helpful if I had lived in the city. But you know, we came within 64 votes of winning. I entered the race at the very last minute, and we came within 64 votes of winning. We made some mistakes in the campaign — you do in every campaign.

I will say I feel way more comfortable in this campaign than I did in that one, because I know all of the issues. I was in opposition for five years and government for four years. I’ve been running a provincial talk show for four-and-a-half. I really know the issues, and the people I’m running with are all my former colleagues.

I notice that your official biographies don’t talk much about what you did before you got involved in politics. This is sort of an inelegant question to ask, but did you have a job before politics?

Yes I did, yeah (laughs).

My first job out of SFU was working in the provincial legislature under [then-Liberal leader] Gordon Wilson. Mike McDonald and I drove around the province, recruiting candidates for the B.C. Liberals in 1991. We were students at the time and so we borrowed somebody’s van and we drove all over the province. We sat in hot tubs with people, eating pizza, trying to persuade them to run.

It was kind of like, “So, do you want to be the candidate?”
And people would go, “No.”
And we would go, “What about your wife? What about your daughter, she’s 19, isn’t she?”

So we did that, and then after Gordon Wilson elected 17 MLAs I went over to work in the legislature. Then after that I went to Ottawa to work with [Chrétien-era cabinet minister] Doug Young in the transport ministry, and then I ran my own little consulting company for a little while, and then I got into politics.

I didn’t get into politics till I was 29.

Yeah, I remember it said you got elected when you were 30.

Well, I went to Europe for a couple of years and I was a nanny, so I didn’t go straight from high school to SFU. That would have been a very long time at SFU.

You’ve said that you’re a “life-long Liberal,” never Socred, never Conservative, never NDP. What drew you to the party initially? I know your father was a Liberal politician for a while, was it strictly a family thing? There was a time when being a Liberal in B.C. was not the popular choice.

That’s true. People used to set dogs on you when you went to the door. (laughs)

I am very much a practical, common-sense kind of person. So the thing that has always appealed to me about the B.C. Liberal Party is that it balances fiscal conservatism with a drive to care for people who can’t look after themselves, or who need a hand up. And it’s always been that balance for me.

Now I have to say, over the years, as I’ve gotten older and I’ve started paying taxes, and have to pay a mortgage, and get my kid into hockey and all the rest of it, I’ve become a little more fiscally conservative than I was when I was 19 or 20 years old. But the B.C. Liberal Party accommodates that. It’s all people who are looking for that kinda common-sense balance. And that’s what attracts me about it.

You will find people of very diverse opinions within the B.C. Liberal Party. So it’s not like “gee, I’ve been a B.C. Liberal all my life, and therefore I’ve always believed exactly the same things.” No! The B.C. Liberal Party accommodates all kinds of different views. That’s one of the great things about it.

What did you dislike about the Social Credit Party?

It’s hard for me to think back about that. Back in those days, it was probably just because my dad wasn’t a Social Credit guy. My dad was a teacher and teachers didn’t like the Social Credit Party, so therefore I didn’t.

Since then, though, the B.C. Liberal Party has become the new coalition party in British Columbia. There are a lot of people who supported the Social Credit Party that are supporting me. As I’ve gotten older, as I say, I’ve gotten a little more conservative in my views and I can look at [former Socred premier] Bill Bennett’s regime, for example, and say, “hey, you know what? All those things my dad used to criticize about it as a teacher, they weren’t right.”

In all of Canadian history, there has only once been a woman who was elected premier of a province.

Is that PEI?

Yup. Catherine Callbeck, a Liberal as well.

Why do you think we lag behind so many other democracies in having females as heads of government? In America they have lots of female governors. Even a country like Japan, which is far more chauvinistic than Canada, they have many females running their provinces.

That is a question I have struggled with for a long time.

I don’t know about other countries, but I think that our system discourages women from running, party because we’ve got this first-past-the-post electoral system. I mean, when you look at other countries they have single transferable ballots, multi-member MP systems… they’ve got all these alternative voting systems. The problem with the first-past-the-post system is that you end up with people that are heavily networked in their communities, that have the money to be able to win nominations, and that tends to be men.

When you have a single transferable ballot, you give voters more choices about who they want to put on. So they might say, I want a woman, I want a man. But it’s hard to break up the ol’ boys club, I think, with the electoral system we have.

Now, I was a big advocate for electoral reform last time around. It didn’t happen. We’ve had two cracks at it as voters and it’s failed both times. It’s not going to happen for a while. I’m not going to put it back on the ballot. But I do think we need to change the culture of Victoria so that it’s less of an old boys club, less of an insiders’ club. And I think the insiders’ club tends to shut women out, it tends to shut minorities out. People who have alternative views don’t get heard. And that’s what this whole campaign is about. I’m an outsider compared to the people who are running. I’m all about signing up new people to the political party that have never been members before.

What if we were to change the parliamentary system in some way? The parliamentary system tends to encourage people to sort of organically rise through the ranks over time. Cabinet ministers become premiers and it’s hard for outsiders like you to get in.

What if we elected the premier independently from the legislature? Has that ever occurred to you?

Yes, I’ve thought about it. But then you’re into full-on electoral reform again. When I think about electoral reform, the kind I favor is this single transferable ballot thing, because what it does is forces MLAs to be responsible to their constituents.

I think that there’s merit to that kind of executive style of government. That’s a much bigger change, though, than anybody’s really ever contemplated. And then you’d need federal legislation and all the rest of it.

The advantage of the single transferable vote is because you’re just changing the voting system, not the parliamentary system, you can do it internally in British Columbia.

What is the ideology of the NDP?

Well, I think the NDP is committed primarily to promoting the vested interests of the people that created their party, and that’s the labour movement. That’s their ideology: to promote the interests of organized labour in the province. And that’s a pretty narrow view of the world. There’s a lot of people who aren’t in unions, and there are a lot of people who are in unions who aren’t getting represented well by the NDP.

Really, the NDP is an organization that is driven by public sector unions. Not unions in general, it’s public sector unions. Look who makes up the executive of the B.C. Federation of Labour! It’s not the private sector guys.

Those voices need to be heard, just as all voices do, but I think government has a way bigger responsibility than just to represent that kind of a narrow vested interest.

Do you think that the B.C. government is too big?

That’s a more complicated question than it sounds.

I think that government has a natural tendency to grow, and I think that a politician’s job is to keep it from growing. You need that tension there, because the bureaucrat’s natural ambition — I’m not trying to cast aspersions on them, it’s just what you do, you try to grow your pyramid. And the politician needs to provide tension there by limiting that growth, because the public sector cannot be outpacing the private sector in growth. The private sector, if we want to have a healthy economy and lots of jobs, has to always be growing faster than government.

So is government too big right now? I think government is probably on the wrong trend. I think government is growing too fast right now.

Is government doing things that you believe government should not be involved in?

I think that the current government has done a pretty good job of limiting what government needs to do.

Let me give you an example. When we came in in 2001 we went through what was called the core services review at the time. And it was all about going in ministry by ministry, line by line, and figuring out how government could do less stuff, and we did a really good job of that. In fact, we did such a good job we probably made some mistakes. We probably went too far in some areas.

I think what we need to do now is get into government and do a similar review but not focus on what government shouldn’t be doing, but rather figure out what government is doing that we can do better. How do you add efficiency and value to the things government is already doing?

Government’s withdrawn from a lot of areas already, and I don’t know if there’s a lot of public appetite for government to do even less.

Some people would say that’s a potential for difference between the Liberals and the NDP. That used to be something that people would play up, the idea that the NDP was the party of the “nanny state” and the other, more free-enterprise parties were less into that.

I feel like under the Campbell administration we’ve seen the government get involved in health initiatives, parenting initiatives, what foods to eat, how to exercise more, this kind of stuff, that at one time would have been associated with an NDP style nanny-state. This kind of stuff doesn’t bother you?

Not really. I mean, the government’s not making us do it. You could say cigarette taxes are another “nanny state” type thing.

My idea, that I promoted before I left government, that we should give people tax breaks to get their kids involved in physical activity or the arts. I mean, that’s government providing incentives for people, but you’re not making people do things. You’re not taking away their choices. So I’m alright with government trying to provide the right incentives, I’m not alright with government trying to make people do things. The NDP has a tendency to do that.

Part of the challenge of this leadership campaign is all of us are tempted to go out and say, “you know what, I am going to come up with 10 or 15 new promises. The government is going to do this-and-that-and-this-and-that and my view is very much, look: the government came in with five principles at the very beginning of 2001, and they were: keep the deficit low so it’s not a tax on our grandchildren, keep taxes low so you have more money in your pocket, get government out of the way in terms of regulation so that people can imagine and innovate, health care reform that focus on patients, and education reform that focuses on students. Those are the five things that we said. Those principles are still good principles and I’m not in the business, in this campaign, of going out there and making a whole bunch of new promises, “gee, we’re going to change this and change that!”

There are some things that we need to change. But in the overall direction of government it’s a matter of refocusing on those five core principles. The thing that needs to be changed is the culture of Victoria. It’s the fact that government has become closed and insular and doesn’t listen to people. To me, that’s the issue that has to be addressed. That’s the elephant in the room that the rest of the candidates aren’t talking about. And why aren’t they talking about it? Cause they were part of that problem.

Is B.C. becoming too ethnically segregated? There are a lot of communities and neighborhoods where people can live and never speak English, only interact with people of their own community, only read media from the home country.

I think it’s something that makes a lot of people uncomfortable when they think about the unity of the province in the long term, as immigration continues to go up. I’m just wondering if this is a trend that troubles you at all.

Nope. And I’ll tell you why, I have tons and tons and tons of friends in various multicultural communities, and their kids, or their grandkids all become completely integrated. It’s just a matter of time. That’s what Canada always was.

I mean, nobody made the Ukrainians than settled Edmonton start speaking English in the first generation. They were eating Ukrainian food and speaking the Ukrainian language and sending their kids to Ukrainian church. That’s what Canada is all about! And because that’s what we’re all about, that’s what makes it easy for people to integrate. Our public schools do a good job for the most part of integrating people and our public institutions sort of do that job.

I don’t worry about that. In fact, there are some studies that have been done that say that we are the most ethnically integrated city in the world. If not the world, then in North America, certainly.

You go to Richmond, for example, and people say well, Richmond’s a very heavily Asian community, and it is. But you can barely find a single block in Richmond that is all Asian. Every block, even in that community, that has been predominantly Asian for a long time, every single block is integrated. And that’s what Canada has always been about.

That question doesn’t worry me one bit.

When we talk about integration, why is that not also a goal for our First Nations people? Why are we moving in a direction of more sovereignty and self-government for tribes and bands and not greater integration with mainstream Canadian society?

Because the integration plan is something that government has been on for what, 200 years now? And look what’s happened. Look at the result. It’s back to that whole thing about if you don’t like the results you’re getting, you better change what you’re doing.

This whole idea that First Nations should just be treated like everyone else, and integrate them, well… residential schools tried to take away their language, their culture, their sense of family and community, and look what happened. Our aboriginal communities have the absolute worst social conditions, the worst health indicators of anyone in this country. It’s embarrassing. So we have to change what we’re doing.

They are saying to us: we need to be self-sustaining, we need to be able to provide roots and community and culture to connect our people to each other if we want to be fully participating members economically and socially of society.

So I’m all in favor of changing the way we’re doing this, because it just hasn’t worked.

Do you think it’s patronizing when we ask female politicians if getting elected will have a negative affect on their family life? I’m sure you’ve heard that question a billion times.

Yes. Never from a female journalist. And I always say, “so did you ask Kevin Falcon that question?” Cause he’s got an infant. An infant. That’s pretty high maintenance. And I wonder who’s looking after that infant? But of course everyone asks me that question.

I think it is a question that exclusively comes from older male journalists. Not younger ones or female ones.

What do you think of Sarah Palin?

She’s a bit of a mystery to me. I don’t understand why so many Americans seem to like her so much. She doesn’t seem to have a lot of depth about public policy. She’s a bit of an enigma to me.

She seems to be completely bullet proof. She’s got this image of this common woman, this common small-town mom, but apparently during the campaign she was spending, I dunno, thousands of dollars at the American equivalent of Holt Renfrew, on the Republicans’ tab. But her supporters don’t care about any of those things. They just know that they love her, and I don’t know why. I guess it’s just the American obsession with celebrity, right?

You’ve been compared to her, you know.

Only by people who hate me. But seriously, anybody who knows me knows that’s ridiculous.

Are there any American politicians that you do admire?

I’m always careful about answering that question because it’s easy to cast it as “gee I really support that person and 100% of the things that they say.” But I’ve always admired Hillary Clinton, because she’s really smart, she’s really tough and tenacious. I just think she’s gutsy. She’s a gutsy woman. And she managed to be a mom at the same time! Her daughter’s turned out quite functional, I think.

Condoleeza Rice was another one, she was tough and smart and gutsy…

Female American politicians, hmm.

It could be a male politician too…

You know, I’ve always liked [late Democratic Texas governor] Ann Richards. I don’t know a lot about Ann Richards, but I saw her speak at an event once, and thought, man! But it’s hard not to like the Texans, right?

Hearing those names, it seems like women politicians have to be extra gutsy, extra sort of…“out there” if they want to be successful.

Well you know, the thing is, women have to prove their intellectual credentials way more frequently than men do. The assumption that a man got the job, therefore he must deserve it — that rule doesn’t apply to women.

In all honesty, do you think we will have the same health care system in 20 years?

Well no, I mean, I think the healthcare system is changing every month just because we’re getting behind.

We have to find imaginative ways to change, to evolve, because if the health care system doesn’t change, and stays the same the way it is today, one day the premier is going to come to the people of British Columbia and say “I’m sorry but we have no money left for public education. We just don’t have any money left because we’re spending it all on health care.” And then the day after that, the premier is going to say “oh, and guess what? We don’t even have any money for heart operations now.”

There is an unlimited amount of demand for health care the in way we provide it, and we just can’t continue to satisfy at the rate that it’s growing. That day is actually a lot closer than people imagine, so government is going to have to be imaginative about it.

I think in the last five years, that’s one of the things that this government has done reasonably well. It’s not been without controversy and it wasn’t perfect, but they have found ways to keep evolving the health care system so that we can make improvements. For example, the patient-based funding that the government introduced. That’s something that I was talking about when I was in government in 2002, but they finally got around to doing it.

But those kinds of changes, you change the incentives in the system, you start making it more efficient, those are the kinds of things that have to happen. Some of those changes are tough, and it’s all going to be controversial.

If you become premier, will you have any interest in holding elections for the Senate?

I don’t have any interest in having a Senate.

I’ll tell you why: I am a proud British Columbian, first and foremost, and the problem with the Senate is that it is unequal. So our hope, in this country, to have a greater say is that our population is growing. The number of seats in the House of Commons changes to accommodate that, so our voice, proportionately, in the House of Commons, is growing all the time.

In the Senate, it’s fixed! And we start electing the Senate, we give them legitimacy, and then we’re stuck with one out of ten votes? Forget it! I don’t want to disadvantage British Columbia like that.

I think that people who support an elected Senate in British Columbia better give their heads a shake, because it’s not good for British Columbia. The best thing for British Columbia would be to abolish the thing.

If Queen Elizabeth dies when you are premier, will you support Canada becoming a republic?

No.

No? So you are a monarchist?

Yes.

What is your biggest fear for the future of the province? What keeps you up at night with worry?

Today it is the extent to which people are alienated from government. I would say that’s the biggest worry we all need to have.

This whole HST fiasco, and the way that the cabinet foisted that on people without talking to us, has shaken people’s confidence in our democratic process. I think it’s really important to have taxes that are efficient, and help the economy and encourage innovation — that’s all really important — but it is not more important than faith in government, and faith in our civic process. That is the most important thing that we have to protect. The problem that they created with the HST is that people’s faith in our democratic process has been fundamentally shaken, and we have to address that.

To me, that’s job one for anyone in government right now: try and restore faith.

Why does it matter, though? What would be the long-term consequences?

People won’t vote. People will stop voting and going to the polls and taking part, and once you start going down that hill, next thing you know, you’re America.

People died to preserve our vote in this country, and politicians more and more are shoving the public away and giving them basically every reason not to go to the polls and exercise their franchise. And democracy only works if people vote.

What does “and next thing you know we’re America” mean?

Well, the next thing you know, the number of people who are participating is falling, and then the next thing you know only the people who are wealthy, healthy, and well-educated are the ones that are participating — and then even they’re not participating after a while.

The next thing you know, elections are won and lost by who can smear the other candidates the most, because people aren’t participating and you have to find some way to get them to the polls through negative advertising.

Voter participation is crucial for a functioning democracy. It is just the absolute cornerstone of it, so what I’m talking about in this campaign is reengaging citizens in a very real way. Listening to them, not foisting stuff on them at the last minute, not trying to tell people what’s good for them when they don’t agree. I want to reengage people, and I think that’s job one. Once we can do that, then we can start talking about other big changes in government.

I mean, if health care’s the big worry, we need to engage people and talk to them about that. If government doesn’t want to talk to people, and people don’t trust government to hear them, they won’t bother talking. You can’t have a dialogue about those things.