Party cheerleader, yes; B.C. premier, no.
For many pre-election 2013 political pundits, that pretty much summed up Christy Clark and her aspirations of leading a misfiring and malfunctioning BC Liberal Party machine back to a fourth consecutive term as government.
Clark's cheerleading enthusiasm aside, the Liberal political party engine was in dire need of overhaul. It was burdened with Gordon Campbell's harmonized sales tax fiasco, the BC Rail privatization controversy and a trunkload of other political baggage from three previous Liberal terms in office. High-profile Campbell regime cabinet ministers like Kevin Falcon and George Abbott had either resigned or decided against seeking re-election. On the road to the May 14 election, the party added a series of potentially devastating campaign missteps and consequently faced opinion polls that had the NDP leading by double digits and leader Adrian Dix with his new "not going negative" NDP supporters with victory parade route map in hand.
As the NDP pointed out in its 2013 Election Review Panel report, Clark – faced with a divided caucus and approval ratings in free fall in late 2011 in the lead-up to her inaugural swing at leading the party into an election – "lurched from one legislative gaffe to another" and "lacked the policy depth needed to run the province."
In addition, as UBC political science professor Richard Johnston pointed out to Business in Vancouver, Clark's shortcomings heading into the election included her weak base in the party's legislative wing and her reputation as a lightweight. He added that she was also seen as a beneficiary of "having cut and run when things got tough for Campbell" and then returned "as a carpetbagger to snatch away the leadership from persons who had fought the good fight."
Little wonder that she pulled the plug on her plan for a snap 2011 election.
Meanwhile, the NDP's damaging revelations released during the spring 2013 legislative session of the Liberals' "quick wins" ethnic vote scheme scored a direct hit amidships in an already badly listing Liberal election vessel.
But all of this mattered little in the final reckoning, because the sputtering Liberal machine also had Clark and what appeared to be a boundless source of optimism that to many observers bordered on delusional.
For example, Clark's parting words at an April 9 campaign interview with the BIV editorial board: "you know, we're going to win this thing [election]."
And doubtless a parting of the Red Sea to follow, Madame Premier?
That, as it turned out, was not just political vapour from an on-message-all-the-time leader living in a public relations bubble.
The premier had some inside knowledge, likely from her party's daily tracking of polls in key ridings. Or maybe just an unbending faith in the value of a simple message delivered with clarity.
But for many in the dysfunctional Liberal party at the time, that message was too simple.
Said West Vancouver-Capilano MLA Ralph Sultan: "We were so indoctrinated to Gordon Campbell, who always had a complicated solution to every problem we faced, [that] Christy's ideas seemed [too] simple. We'd say: what's the platform? What are we running on anyway? We are sitting there on the North Shore saying, 'We need some razzle-dazzle formula like the carbon tax maybe'; but, no, [it was] jobs, families, fiscal discipline over and over and over again. And we'd say, 'Christy, we need more than this.'"
But what the Liberals, the NDP and the rest of the province got was more of that: an incessant hammering home of a simple message from an upbeat and energetic political veteran with roots in a modest upbringing and a folksy family-first philosophical base.
It turned out to be the right message at the right time.
"Christy would lecture us," said Sultan. "She'd say, 'Listen up: I'll explain to you about politics.' She treated us like a bunch of novices, which compared to her we were. She said, 'I give this speech; I talk about growing up in the shadows of the B.C. penitentiary; my father was a school teacher; we didn't have much money; and we paid off all the bills and there was no mortgage on the house when he died, and that was a character-forming experience. Furthermore, life was not easy in our household, and jobs were obviously very important; so we have to make sure we connect with the common people and explain that we are all for jobs and all for fiscal discipline. We are not going to waste your money; and, of course, families come first.'
"And she would give the same speech over and over and over again."
That street-where-you-live schmaltz began to resonate with more than her party.
As Sultan pointed out, the press and the wider public started to listen.
"So Christy taught us all a lesson: have a solid message, keep repeating it and be upbeat and positive."
After NDP leader Dix lost the plot with his Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline flip-flop, his party misplaced the victory parade road map and public support for the son of a small-business man began to drop.
The Liberal party's negative ads focusing on Dix's dismissal as chief of staff for former NDP premier Glen Clark and what they claimed were the NDP's tax-and-spend policies also started resonating with the electorate.
But key in the unravelling of the New Democrats' march to victory and the party's campaign again was Christy Clark.
In taking a sober second look at why the NDP lost the 2013 election, new NDP president Craig Keating pointed to an NDP election platform that was being amended "literally hours before it was released."
Lulled into complacency by major opinion polls, the NDP also failed to conduct its own surveys in swing ridings during the campaign.
The Dix camp's decision to stay the course of no negative attack ads, which could have wrung much political mileage out of criticizing the ethnic vote scandal, the government's record and assorted Liberal blunders, also proved costly.
But more important was branding. And messaging.
Two swings, here, and two misses for the NDP team.
As Keating pointed out, his party underestimated Clark's focus: "the immense discipline in the campaign to stick to a relatively simple message about them and about us [and] to pound it home in everything. Policy and platforms were important, but message [was] crucial."
Another surprise for Keating and his party: Clark's ability, no matter how bleak things got for the Liberals, to attract top-quality candidates.
Langley Mayor Peter Fassbender, for example.
Fassbender, now Surrey- Fleetwood MLA and minister of education, said he threw his hat into the ring with Clark even though the Liberals appeared headed for defeat because of "her vision for the province" and her ability to "clearly articulate where we as a province needed to go."
It didn't hurt that, as Johnston pointed out, Clark was extremely likable on the election campaign trail. Her ability to connect with people quickly and positively was far greater than that of her adversaries.
And then there was that optimism thing: another Clark attribute.
"I was always optimistic," Clark recently told BIV, "but you can't take anything for granted. The support we had on the ground from people in communities across the province let me know we were on the right track."
Clark added that the election was decided by the focus that she and her party had on "things that actually mattered to people: growing the economy and creating jobs and more opportunities today and for our kids.
"Granted, it's easier to say that when you've had success, but we won because we stood for something that British Columbians believed in."
And while the NDP might have underestimated that message and Clark's ability to deliver it over and over and over again, Clark said what the NDP really underestimated "was the public. People care about the economy. They care about creating opportunities. They understood that just saying 'no' over and over again isn't leadership."
Another loser in the 2013 provincial election was the political opinion polling industry, which showed the Liberals consistently trailing the NDP from campaign start to finish.
BIV's survey of the business community conducted by Ipsos Reid and released May 7 was one of the few polls that predicted a Liberal majority election win.
Meanwhile, BIV writer Trevor Lautens, a longtime Metro Vancouver daily and community newspaper columnist and a communications consultant to the Bill Bennett government from 1981 to 1984, was one of the only, if not the only, commentator who picked Clark to win. Lautens said he had an unfair advantage over fellow members of the pundocracy in making that prediction.
"Since 2001 I've been inoculated from the newsroom disease – which is 'knowing' too much – and am not influenced by polls, colleagues' chatter, academics, above all party hype, official lies, phone-in-show plants and dirty tricks and finally the so-called 'social media,' which can only make one relieved that we have as little real democracy as we do.
"I stood back and did not drink from the bathwater the above shared. I picked the Liberals in BIV a year or so before the election when [BC Conservative leader] John Cummins tanked, then media-under-criticized Adrian Dix stumbled, threw in the Curse of [former NDP leader] Carole James – a good woman undermined by stupid NDP rebels – and noted that Christy Clark has a sunny smile. The prophecy therefore took on a life of its own, and I sat back and watched it admiringly."
But it wasn't all mistletoe and maypole dancing for Clark, and it has been a short honeymoon for her since. Losing to the NDP's David Eby in her Vancouver-Point Grey riding, she said, was "obviously disappointing, but [it was] tempered by the fact that I was also elected premier that same night."
Clark later had to find a safe by election riding to run in to avoid the embarrassment of being a premier without a seat in the legislature. That proved awkward. She had to go further afield (Westside-Kelowna) than Metro Vancouver to find an MLA willing to step aside. West Vancouver-Capilano was rumoured to be one of the safe ridings Clark had initially targeted for that byelection. Sultan said he, too, had heard those rumours.
"It would have been helpful for Christy to have found a seat in the Vancouver area from a logistics point of view; but I felt Christy would land on her own two feet and didn't need my help."
Clark faces a host of significant challenges in her current term. Atop that list: selling LNG as a panacea to the province's economic future dream.
The new BIV-Insights West "B.C. Government Report Card" shows that while respondents say Clark and the Liberals have done a relatively good job on such files as the economy, education and energy in their first six months since being sworn in, they're doing a poor job on accountability, housing and poverty. Thirty-five per cent of respondents also said their opinion of Clark had worsened since the May 14 election; only 9% said it had improved. (See page 8.)
Another major challenge for Clark is following through on her commitment to balance the province's budget. "I don't think people realize this," said Sultan, "but you have to look long and hard for any senior government or regional government in the western world that is within sight of balancing the books: we are. This is astonishing. I don't think people get it."
Pollsters still don't get how their election campaign polls could have been so far off the mark in predicting an NDP victory right up to election night – another major miscalculation in the marketplace and another misreading of the Clark effect. Sultan sees a lot more mileage in that effect. He said he has watched Clark grow as a politician for the past decade, and that she has still got a lot of growing to do.
"I don't think she has hit the peak of her performance yet."
