Talk:Dave Barrett

Politics and Primary Sources

Quote from the article: Barrett called an ill-advised snap election in 1975, and was voted out of office after a short tenure, in favour of a resurgent Social Credit Party under W.A.C's son, Bill Bennett. Bennett successfully attacked Barrett over his government's handling of provincial finances.

That's the media line on it anyway. Sure enough there were people who voted for that reason, but those people nearly always vote Socred (or NeoGrit, as it is nowadays) because that's the way they vote. "Resurgent" is not quite the word for the Socreds in those days; "regrouping" was more like it, since most of Miniwac's first cabinet were old-guard (and had to be, as neoCon talent was hard to come by in the early '70s).

I spent an hour trying to come up with an explanation on my perspective on the quote, but it turned into an opus and I cut-pasted it into my hard-drive. Wikipedia's not supposoed to get political - or intensely-detailed historical, as is my wont - so I decided it best not to engage any political firestorms. But inasmuch as Wikipedia shouldn't be political, that's my problem with that quote.

If someone wants to read the long version digression, I made a subpage for it Politics of Primary Sources and may restew it into something else some day; my main theme is that being truly neutral means examining everything you come across for any foible within it. Spin doctors specialize in writing things that sound factual, or that they want people to think are factual, as if they actually were.

The longef version/digression starts out the same but branches off about the fiscal-management myth (a) that you're necessarily going to get that from the new guy who gets voted in and (b) that people even vote that way anyway, and some asides about political events in BC at the end of the Barrett regime in 74-75 and some of the political and economic dynamics about that era that you won't pick up from reading the regular media nowadays (they can look in the mirror and see someone else if they have to; it's in the nature of the profession, and their business in keeping advertisers happy). Bluntly put, without being too political, Barrett went to the polls as the equivalent of a vote of confidence, trying to get a stronger mandate to take on the unions even more than he'd been forced to do; so they didn't help out in the election nor did they actively get their members out to vote, which was the basis of NDP power, and a large chunk of their formal support base for decades. Add onto that that Big Forestry threw all kinds of money into the Socred campaign and were rewarded with the Forests Act of 1976 (details in the digression which are too involved explain here), and even so the Socreds didn't wipe out the NDP, and the next dozen years were a balancing act full of sleight of hand. And Bennett turned out to be a bad money manager, too; and he had more time to establish himself by weathering all forms of political nastiness and living into a resurgent-economic era - one that had almost nothing to do with his own policies; much of the wreckage of BC in the 1990s is directly due to the structural stagnation of the BC economy - and BC's infrastructure - during the 1980s, all the hoopla about Expo-spending/growth aside.

I'm digressing again. Suffice to say that I think regarding something from a newspaper article - which is what I think the above is, or sounds like the idea's from. No doubt a cite can be provided backing up that opinion but it's still only opinion and it's contestable; I might try a basic rewrite of it when I give some thought to what can be said that I can cite (the docks strike, and the back-to-work legislation that tripped things over with the union and brought Barrett down). But in general, as someone who "works" with history, I don't like believing everything I read in the newspapers; especially in a place (BC) where the legacy of the newspapers here has always been political meddling and dogfighting, and where it's all about making money for their own friends; right from de Cosmos and John Robson and the rest of them down to the current bunch at the "Seriously Westcoast" bunch who churn their spew out at Pacific Press.

The media are always trying to paint the past in their own tersm; they did it with Charlottetown and Meech, and with Oka and the Salmon War and Solidarity and more; stuff is news because they decide it is. But "news" isn't history, and to write any history or biography well you need at least three or four different "news" items on the same events to get a relatively unbiased perspective.

The quote above is biased, even though subtly so. It's so subtle it's propagandistic. And it's just not true.Skookum1 09:53, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

Hmmm... I see where yopu're coming from, but I don't arrive at the same place. Almost. Let's parse the original statement:

Barrett called an ill-advised snap election in 1975, and was voted out of office after a short tenure, in favour of a resurgent Social Credit Party under W.A.C's son, Bill Bennett. Bennett successfully attacked Barrett over his government's handling of provincial finances.

Chopping it up into bits:

Barrett called an ill-advised snap election in 1975,

Well, it tured out to be ill-advised -- he lost.

and was voted out of office after a short tenure,

I don't think anyone can argue with that.

in favour of a resurgent Social Credit Party under W.A.C's son, Bill Bennett.

Resurgent in that it won a larger number of seats, and, although I should check this, probably a larger share of the vote. I think resurgent in this context can be taken as a quantitative term, rather than a qualitative one, i.e., referring to the quality of the party's organization.

Bennett successfully attacked Barrett over his government's handling of provincial finances.

This is probably based in fact: he attacked Barrett's handling of government finances, and was successful in that the voters bought his arguments and voted for his party instead of Barrett's.

So I conclude that the statement does seem to be defensible on a factual basis.

However, the style is too florid for Wikipedia. Although not everyone agrees, I perfer to aim for a more neutral statement of facts, and letting the reader come to his or her own conclusions. Let's try the statement my way:

Barrett called a snap election in 1975, and was defeated by the Social Credit Party led by W.A.C's son, Bill Bennett. Bennett's campaign focused on attacking the Barrett government's handling of provincial finances.

It says the same things, but not quite so often, and in a way that doesn't tell the reader what to think.

I also think that there is some material from Skookum's comments above that would be worth adding into the article. My two cents. Ground Zero | t 00:17, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

"Quickly taking the government from surplus to debt"

This is debatable, although probably generally true. At least after 1972, W.A.C. Bennett was criticized for in fact hiding much government debt in the accounts of Crown Corporations, such as B.C. Hydra and B.C. Ferries.Chris. Fulker 06:19, 2 January 2007 (UTC)