By Mark Crawford
After the NDP’s stunning defeat in last May’s provincial election, UBC professor and former federal NDP co-campaign chair Michael Byers said: “Instead of a cosmetic paint job, the party needs to be knocked down to its foundations before rebuilding begins again. A leadership race is needed to turn the public memory away from the recent loss, to revitalize and grow the membership, and to get donations flowing again….
“[Dix] should step down in favour of an interim leader, who would serve until a new person is chosen to head the BC NDP.”
Longtime NDP MP Ian Waddell offered similar advice: “If Adrian Dix decides to step down as leader at its convention in November, the party should choose a respected interim leader who does not intend to run for the leadership.… Then, in 2015, the BC NDP should run a wide-open leadership race looking to a new generation of candidates.”
Yet, Dix recently announced he was going to hold the reins of the party leadership until a leadership vote could be taken “by mid-2014 at the latest.”
So why did he deliberately ignore the calls of prominent senior New Democrats and other commentators to allow for a longer lead-in under an interim leader and a more wide-open process?
Dix is nothing if not a consummate political insider. He knows candidates who are currently MLAs – in particular his good friend (and best man at his wedding) John Horgan, will be most advantaged by the process he prefers.
He knows Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson has more than a year left in his mandate and will have difficulty making a decision and pulling together a winning campaign in this time, as will other potential “outside” candidates, such as Victoria Mayor Dean Fortin and federal MPs Nathan Cullen and Peter Julian. Dix’s concerns about these outsiders no doubt motivated his subsequent remark that “B.C. doesn’t need two Liberal parties.”
Not that I find Dix’s attitude to be extraordinarily selfish or evil. Rather, I find it to be all-too-typical.
When there is a range of reasonable-sounding arguments available to a politician, they usually choose the ones most congenial to their world view and their interests.
The difficulty in this case is that in presuming the existing caucus and party do not need to undergo an extensive renovation, the NDP may fail to assuage the concerns many marginal voters and taxpayers have about an aging, insular and hidebound party representing an overly-entitled and self-serving public sector.
If the NDP fails to grab the centre from the left, as Vision Vancouver has successfully done in civic politics, it may concede too much of the middle ground to the B.C. Liberals. And if as a result the B.C. Liberals win in 2017, they may once again be able to thank Adrian Dix.
Mark Crawford is a former public servant and now teaches political science at Athabasca University.
