Also, she needs to worry about the people in the caucus she did not include in the cabinet. Two previous female cabinet members, both well quali- fied, were dropped from cabinet. Also, George Abbott was appointed Minister of Education just as the government is in negotiations with the BC Teachers’ Federation. When Christy Clark was Minister of Education she did poorly in the port- folio and in general the relationship between the Liberals and the teachers has been very poor. I am sure Abbott does not see this appointment as a fa- vour to him. She is going to need to do a lot to get the total support of her caucus.
Doug McArthur: She did not win over the true par- ty loyalist, the believers in Campbell and the more conservative members. This will be a problem for her because she will have to placate them making it harder to keep a clear iddentity for her program. There is also a real possibility that her leadership will strengthen a drift to a provincial conservative party.
Jeanette Ashe: Well, she only won on the third bal- lot suggesting she has several bridges to build be- tween herself and Falcon, de Jong, and Abbott. If she doesn’t manage to do this it’s quite likely, in the fashion of BC politics, that they will undermine her, push her out of power, and take her place.
7. What happens next? What does she need to do to get the Liberals re-elected? Kathleen Cross: Likely all she needs to do is hold the course. Traditionally there has been a Liberal/ Conservative coalition in BC, first under the “So- cial Credit’ banner and now as ‘provincial Liberals’. They tend to take the majority of the vote if they are able to hold the coalition together. As long as there is not a split from the right wing of the party she is in a good position. Further, the provincial NDP almost self-destructed with the messy oust- ing of leader Carole James in the fall, suggesting to many that if they are unable to govern themselves they may not be ready to govern the province. This was a serious miscalculation on the part of the ‘dissidents’. A new NDP leader should provide some attention and energy, but the damage has al- ready been done.
Marjorie Griffin Cohen: She is beginning quite strongly. Her first move has been to raise the mini- mum wage from $8.00/hr (the lowest in Canada) to $8.75 in May, then again increasing it in No- vember, with a final increase to $10.25 in May 2012. She also abolished the $6.00 ‘training wage’
April 2011 | Campaigns & Elections 13
for the first 500 hours of employment in B.C., al- though she is introducing an Ontario-style lower minimum wage for those serving alcoholic bever- ages.
This signals that she may be moving away
from Campbell’s punitive approach to labour and the poor. This alone is not enough to change the fact that BC has the highest poverty rate in the country. Before the next election she will need more detail about her ‘family’ focus. One area that may get her into trouble is her insistence that the federal government reverse their environmental as- sessment of a controversial mine on first nations land near Williams Lake B.C. First nations groups, environmentalists, and the public in general were relieved when this was prohibited. It will destroy a lake that First Nations use for fishing and drink- ing water.
Doug McArthur: She needs to understand that the NDP is still quite popular and by no means out of the contest, while meeting the need to satisfy the more conservative voter. She is seen as almost left wing among those voters, but not by the more progressive voters. She has to put a stamp on her government in the midst of these two pulls.
Jeanette Ashe: In addition to building bridges between herself and her opponents, she needs to move the BC Liberal brand away from the Gordon Campbell legacy toward the middle of the political spectrum to appeal to more BCers . She is already doing this as seen with her increase of the mini- mum wage to 10.25 – it’s even a greater increase than the NDP’s proposal.
Kathleen Cross is an expert in political communica- tions and teaches at the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University
Marjorie Griffin Cohen is a Professor of Political Economy at Simon Fraser University.
Doug McArthur is Professor and Distinguished Fel- low, Graduate School of Public Policy at Simon Fraser University
Jeanette Ashe is a Political Science Instructor at Doug- las College
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