It was the hapless Kim Campbell who is supposed to have said before she went down with all hands in 1993 that an election campaign is no time to discuss serious issues.
Of course it isn鈥檛: That sort of talk just confuses everyone. Bores them to death, too.
The trouble is that some issues for some folks are more serious than they are for other folks. Those who live in inner-city condos are unlikely to be as concerned about a shortage of Mason jar lids as those in the Okanagan who grow apricots and bottle their own jam.
Another problem is that some of the issues a lot of people are most upset about are outside the jurisdiction that is in electoral contention.
If there鈥檚 a glue that holds the Greater Victoria electorate together, it鈥檚 probably its own sewage. In Oak Bay, marauding deer seem to be the dominant concern.
But on the first, no one seems to have the guts to question Ottawa鈥檚 Pecksniffian dictates. On the second, whatever provincial government is elected is unlikely to pay for fencing or send in squads of archers.
This puts political parties intent on forming a government for all B.C. in a bit of a bind. They have to look for issues that appeal to universal passions and prejudices. They pronounce sweeping generalizations devoid of detail and describe broad visions devoid of focus.
When Christy Clark was created premier by a cabal of the Liberal elite, she seized on 鈥渇amilies鈥� as her universal issue and sounded like Mother West Wind. She鈥檇 see that family wage-earners had jobs, that parents would get benefits for looking after kids, that neighbourhoods would be safe playgrounds and she would be an open and transparent materfamilias.
I don鈥檛 know how her fumbling the HST actually helped families. I don鈥檛 know if families who sit still around a dinner table marvel at the transparency she鈥檚 shown over the B.C. Rail disgrace.
But she鈥檚 offering jobs, still, as the way to prosperity as every politician who presumes to know how economies work always does in an election campaign.
Well, it鈥檚 people who make economies work. They鈥檙e not cogs in a machine or placid organisms waiting for benefits to trickle down to them.
They make their own choices: Parents will decide whether income benefits, earned or doled out in government envelopes, shall be spent to give their kids more of what other kids have or fly themselves off for a Maui vacation again.
And voters, like so many of the politicians who pander to them, tend to want quick results when promised good fortune. Voters can be satisfied with the meagre leavings of mega-projects that make fortunes for strangers in many lands, and that鈥檚 why politicians are in such a hurry to dig the first shovelful of earth. They鈥檙e hares in hard hats.
Prosperity and political fortune dance to a timetable of fixed elections. So where does that leave the tortoises?
Plodding, of course. But plodding in a hurry, too 鈥� to fix what has been allowed to break, to provide what may have been overlooked, to try to fill in gaps in families鈥� lives. The prosperity that the NDP, too, seek is less immediate, but voters are told that when it comes it鈥檒l be more long-lasting.
The NDP under Adrian Dix has been campaigning for change. For a while, it looked as if he鈥檇 be cautious, the change small.
But as Les Leyne pointed out last week, he鈥檚 promised a lot more during the campaign than expected. And $2 billion isn鈥檛 small change.
How do voters know in whom to trust 鈥� especially when blatant skulduggery and nasty TV advertising has taken over the campaign, and voters are lied to?
It would be sad if they entered the voting place suffused with anger, vowing revenge. It would be sad if they marked their ballots for personal interest untempered by concern for others 鈥� for there is a common interest at stake. And it should be the common issue.
It鈥檚 that our governors recognize that what鈥檚 bought must be paid for and that abandoning responsibilities by cutting services isn鈥檛 leadership.
