Halfway through its term, the Campbell government is confounding friend and foe alike.

Angus Reid
Vancouver Sun

There's a painting at the Art Institute of Chicago that serves as the perfect metaphor for B.C.'s political picture over the past two years. "Time Transfixed" by French artist René Magritte shows a steam locomotive coming out of a fireplace. In the finest tradition of surreal art, it is characterized by fantastic imagery and incongruous juxtaposition. Just like the government of British Columbia premier Gordon Campbell.

The most incredible image of Campbell's regime at mid-term is, of course, that infamous Maui mug shot. I raise this incident here, not just because it's impossible to reflect on the Campbell government without at least mentioning it in passing, but also because the whole Hawaii affair underscores the contradictions and incongruity that define his government. Gordon Campbell, the light drinker, the quintessential moderate, falls in with the wrong crowd and exercises poor judgment.

Within days of assuming the premiership, Mr. Campbell produced his first bit of surrealism by declaring "Christmas in June" with a 25-per-cent tax cut for all. It stunned observers and left many of his advisers speechless. The Campbell tax cut took $1.13 billion U.S. from the provincial treasury. Approximately 8,000 high-income residents got the same amount—$250 million U.S.—as the 1.7 million tax filers in the bottom brackets.

Here, Campbell the artist threw away his brush of fiscal prudence on which he had campaigned so tirelessly. Rather than opting for a phased tax cut that would have sent the right message to investors about the business climate in B.C. and allowed room for infrastructure and education spending, he recklessly chose to place his faith in a flawed model of economic development that dates back to the Thatcher-Reagan era: Cut taxes and spending and let the market take care of the rest.

What's happened to Gordon Campbell, the good Liberal? Has he fallen in with some bad company on the right-wing fringe and made one of those terrible errors in judgment? Last year, B.C. was ranked eighth in terms of its economic growth. This year, according to the Royal Bank, we'll be dead last. Not an encouraging trend.

Then there was the spectacle of the referendum on treaty negotiations. Geoff Plant, as attorney general, is responsible for the justice system in the province. He is charged with ensuring that the treatment of citizens is fair and even-handed. Yet as the minister in charge of the treaty negotiations he cooked up one the most deceptive and biased referenda in Canadian history.

Plant recently announced significant progress on the negotiations front. Ironically, several of the key measures that the government has conceded to the First Nations negotiators are completely contrary to the results of its own bogus referendum. It turns out the native groups will have some powers on top of those enjoyed by municipal governments, and special access to resources might extend beyond existing tribal boundaries—two areas specifically voted down in Plant's $3.77 million U.S. poll.

This isn't to suggest every brushstroke on the Campbell government's canvas has been flawed. The province needed significant reform of labour legislation and they've delivered. Restructuring in the forestry sector in order to create conditions for greater stability and productivity was long overdue. The government has made good progress on this front, even though the end result will hurt some communities and upset some environmentalists.

In health care, the Campbell government has maintained the heavy investment program initiated by the New Democratic Party (NDP). It has launched a long overdue initiative to train more doctors and nurses, streamlined the administration of health regions and taken controversial but necessary steps to improve productivity. Waiting lists are still too long for many procedures but it could be worse—our system has so far looked very strong in the face of the SARS outbreak.

In spite of these and other areas of progress, the Campbell government seems to invent new ways to display dizzying inconsistency. One of its more laudatory measures was to bring greater honesty to the accounting systems of the province by introducing stronger, independent auditing procedures.

Yet for other government information there appears to be an amateurish program of half-truths and misleading data. Go to the government's website and you'll find a section titled "Positive Economic News." Here you'll find every scrap of data that paints an upbeat picture of the province. But you won't find Statistics Canada results that show that disposable income in B.C. actually declined in 2002. Nor will you see that our employment growth for 2003 is expected to be significantly lower than the national average.

Or look at the "New Era Review," which the government published earlier this month. The section on education has check marks next to every item, suggesting straight A's for education minister Christy Clark. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Recently published Ipsos data reveal that almost 70 per cent of B.C. residents give her failing grades.

To be fair, the Campbell government inherited a troubled province. British Columbia has been in decline for more than a decade. In the mid-1990s, our per capita GDP dropped below the Canadian average for the first time in more than a generation. And it's been dropping ever since. This decline has been attributed to myriad factors, including NDP mismanagement, long standing practices in industries like forestry, changing markets and global shocks such as the Asian currency crisis of the late 1990s.

To make matters worse, forces beyond the premier's control—including the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the softwood dispute, the War in Iraq, SARS and a rising Canadian dollar—all conspire to aggravate things. Add to this a resource industry whose survival depends upon improved productivity and, consequently, fewer jobs.

I have no doubt that no one is more aware of these pressures and challenges facing B.C. than Campbell himself. The critical flaw during his first two years in office has been the lack of coherent vision on how to prepare B.C. for a new beginning.

Which brings me back to Magritte's enigmatic painting. Gordon Campbell's "new era" was supposed to deliver B.C. from the smoking embers of our recent, troubled past. But he's not riding a bullet train. Instead it's a steam engine—an apt symbol of the Social Credit "ancien régime" that informs his thinking. To date, the Campbell locomotive has bestowed many favours on the tired old money of British Columbia while the province slips into penury and its citizens have a harder time than ever making ends meet.

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