User:Skookum1/PoliticsOfPrimarySources

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 my digression, let me know and I'll post it onto a subpage. It goes 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 09:55, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

What I remember, even though I was only a young university pup in my late teens but trying to follow the news as best I could, was that the reason Barrett lost the election was because organized labour bailed on him. And without organized labour the NDP vote, especially the old NDP vote (not like it is now), disappears like a puff of smoke on the wind. The capital-u Unions didn't help "get out the vote" and the NDP lost enough ridings to give Bennett the government; the NDP were hardly wiped out electorally (not like they were when Gordo came in) but it wasn't because of fiscal mismanagement that Barrett got turfed out. That's what Howe Street says, and said, because they wanted him out anyway and the papers say what Howe Street wants; or rather, there isn't a difference between the money/people of the Chamber of Commerce/investor types and the money/people of the local media magnates and the advertising companies who feed off them (you know them, they're the ones who sell you on the political parties you learn to hate....)

The events as I remember them were that a series of escalating big-union strikes forced Barrett's hand; he legislated some back to work - the docks? rail line? I can't remember at the moment. But doing that to a hardcore unionist - declaring a strike illegal by legislating them back-to-work - is like performing a Black Mass for the Pope. Unions are sacred to unionists, and that was even truer in the '70s and earlier than it is now (breaking the union climate in BC is not incidentally what Bill Bennett managed to do 1975-1986). So when he had to show 'em what-for and call an election as if to call for public support of his bravery in facing down the unions (trying to appeal to a right-of-centre vote by showing he wasn't a union patsy) the unions sat on their hands and the People's Republic of British Columbia, as we sometimes referred to the place, went down the tubes, and we got Miniwac, or Bennett II as we called him at first.

Another factor in the vote that came out once or twice in the last thirty years since is that Big Forestry had bankrolled the Socred government comeback, and the election was largely bent on spending money. Again, without union funds to back them up, and not that union funds would have been sufficient (as 1983 serves to remind), the NDP was simply out-spent. Big Forestry's reward? The new Forests Act of 1976, which converted to their near-exclusive use the 85% of the province that had been in the status "Government Reserve" (dating back to the 1870s and the Lord Dufferin-era controversies on the disposition of Crown Lands, and that they would be set aside in abeyance of an eventual settlement of the native treaties dispute between Victoria and Ottawwa). Government resources and support (and land and nearly-free trees, in a big way, plus road building, marketing, tax breaks) were thrown behind the forest industry, entrenching it into the fabric of the provincial economy as never before. The rhetoric about BC having always been dominated by forestry was a product of this era - "since it's the only way we know how to make money we might as well keep on doing it". Barrett's government had also invested in forestry - as make-work and buying votes as all governments do - but it was Bill Jr's government that notched things up into hyperdrive; the NDP continued it under Harcourt, and so we have Skeena Cellulose and the ongoing religion of Megaprojects which the NeoGrits continue to do.

But it had been WAC's vision to use the infrastructure he had so lovingly built - the highways, hydro and ferry systems, primarily, all meant as modernization for what had been a frontier backwater - to transform the lumber-dependent economy of the province into a highly technologized services and manufacturing/design economy. He may have used voodoo economics (thankfully he didn't actually believe in them, unlike some of his followers) but he also had vision; he knew where the world was going, and had seen in himself the willpower to give BC the pavement and electrical power and education standards to open the way to a modern future; he didn't intend for the province to remain a boom-and-bust resource economy, which still is fundamentally what it is (we're having a long real estate boom, plus having the pot business, without either of which the Lower Mainland would have been as hard up as most of the Interior for the last ten years. You'd have thunk the NDP, or somebody in the NDP, would have had the vision to pursue this (in a realistic way, not as a megaproject like Fast Ferries)

Funny thing, this kind of discussion was around back then, and was even more powerful once Bill was in power. But nobody listened. No more than they listen when the media talk about a government's ability to manage money. Yeah, they want them to not lose it, not steal it, not do really dumb things with it; but they don't want them not spending it, that much we know. Even Campbell knows that, which is why he started throwing money around like crazy for the year leading into the election. People like good money management. They don't like skinflints and cheapskates, and mean-spirited attacks on politically-tainted programs (the Restraint Budget of 83 was all about that); and they don't like goofy stuff either - BCRIC, BC's very own monopoly money (I used to have my 100 shares, but my wallet with them in it got ripped off; worth all of 10 cents, if that).

About this money thing:

People vote for spendthrifts, no matter where the money is or isn't coming from (or going to), and that's the way Canada is although the major print media intone their own political agenda as if the public shared it, which most do not. Why else are the Liberals in power? And Mulroney and Klein? Well, at least Klein's money comes from residual powers, but Mulroney tried to buy people's love so much he left the country in a bizarrely worse condition than when he came in. Trudeau was a financial genius by comparison...and people voted for him because he spent money on things that they wanted. Anyone need reminding he didn't get driven from power, he retired after taking it back?? That as much had to do with his ability to run the country, which even people who hated him conceded he had the smarts to do (they just didn't like what he was doing to the place, and what was getting funded). Invariably when a government - especially a BC provincial government - gets kicked out, it's revealed that there were problems with the books (oh, did I mention? That's WAC's other famous innovation, and the foundation of Socred-nomics)

One of Barrett's problems in 1972 is he'd inherited the mess left him by WAC, as well as a turbulent economy (a hazard of politics is that new governments are often immediately faced by the economic situation which launched them into power; whether they earned it or not, or have the ability to deal with it). The main thing I remember about his regime, other than the scandaleering of the papers as they'll always try to do (even to parties they Back)

So that's why the line Bennett successfully attacked Barrett over his government's handling of provincial finances sounds so odd. Come to think of it, Dave Barett succesfully attacked WAC Bennett over his government's handling of provincial finances, too, and as things turned out through the course of the '80s Bennett had even less understanding of "voodoo economics" than his father had had. And Mike Harcourt succesfully attacked.....no, OK, that was a cakewalk, I admit it, but it's not like Bill Vander Zalm was a public money-management genius, either. The way book-fiddling could be tuned to perfection was invented by WAC - he fused the positions of Premier and Minister of Finance to the point it's almost a constitutional convention now; back then it was like a revolution, a transgression. But BC Premiers get away with a lot of transgressions (I mean the constitutional kind) and the media don't make a big deal about it; those they like they praise the fiscal policies and management skills of even when they don't have any and they run the place into the ground. Another constitutional irregularity that is (or was - it may have spread across the former Dominion from here) Bill Bennett's restructuring of the civil service. Deputy Ministers were to report directly to the Premier's office; which meant since Bennett couldn't handle the workload it would have to be handled by his "assistants". In other words, political appointees had supplanted career bureaucrats as the senior managers of various portfolios. The ministers were the fall guys (and gals) even though the chain of command only went through them indirectly (they manage departmental budgets and human resources; it's cabinet - the Preem's office - that makes their policies).