Perceptions by Gerry Warner

“There are strange things done in the midnight sun . . .” wrote Canada’s greatest poet more than 100 years ago and if Robert Service was alive today I’m sure he’d start his great epic a little differently . . . “there are strange things going on in Victoria these days.”

How strange? Well, where do I begin?  First it was 11-year MLA and former cabinet member John van Dongen (pictured above) jumping ship Monday, quitting the Liberals to sit in the House as the first Conservative wannabe in many years and saying some very nasty things about his former party and Premier Christy Clark to boot.

Whew! And, if that wasn’t enough, van Dongen’s bombshell announcement Monday is followed by two senior cabinet ministers and three-back-bench Liberal MLAs saying Thursday they are considering not running in the next provincial election in May 2013. What’s going on here? Are the Taliban at the gates of Victoria? Will they march down Government Street to the Legislature?  Stay tuned. You may take this as a joke but I’m telling you it’s not very far from the truth, at least metaphorically, especially when one of the cabinet ministers cites “family concerns,” the ultimate fib of any politician from Victoria to Washington D.C. (I say this because if they genuinely had family concerns they wouldn’t have entered politics in the first place.)

So what is going on here? Well, you don’t have to be the proverbial rocket scientist to figure that out. This is a government in total disarray! Even in the last, dark days of the much derided government of former NDP Premier Glen Clark nothing remotely close to this occurred — cabinet ministers openly musing about not running again. (Finance Minister Kevin Falcon and  Education Minister George Abbott)  Three sitting MLAs saying the same thing. (Joan Macintyre, Kash Heed and Randy Hawes) And saying it more than a year before the next provincial election. And, oh yes, another minister (Harry Bloy) resigning from cabinet less than two weeks ago. Will the last Liberal MLA to leave the Legislature turn off the lights?

At this point, you have to wonder how Clark, dubbed Ms. Photo Op, by her many critics, will even be leading her party in the next election? Some observers say Falcon, who holds the crucial finance portfolio and finished a close second to Clark in the Liberal leadership race, is the power behind the throne and still lusts for the leader’s role. It’s also obvious that the dark shadow of former Premier Gordon Campbell lies heavy over the provincial Liberals and there is much unfinished business in the party.

This is ironic because potentially the most lethal shot van Dongen took at Clark as he made his hasty exit was about the B.C. Rail scandal and the Basi/Virk affair, which the Campbell Liberals have been trying to bury for years. Van Dongen has hired a lawyer to get to the bottom of the B.C. Rail mess and the lawyer he hired, Roger McConchie, is considered very capable and was earlier given “unprecedented access” to Crown files in the corruption case, according to a Globe and Mail story this week.

In the celebrated case, defendants Dave Basi and Bobby Virk copped a plea to breach of trust just before senior government ministers were expected to testify in the corruption trial and the government spent $6 million of public money to cover their legal fees, something van Dongen calls “completely contrary to government policy, according to the story by Mark Hume.

If an NDP government is elected in May, Opposition Leader Adrian Dix says it will launch a public inquiry into the B.C. Rail affair which may reveal the seamy undersides of several unturned stones in Victoria and seal the fate of the provincial Liberals, one way or the other, forever. Ever wonder why they call politics a “blood sport” in B.C.?

So the stakes are already high and there’s more than 13 months to go before the next provincial election, which could be the ugliest in B.C. history and that’s saying something in a province known for its visceral campaigns.

Clearly the Liberals are on the ropes and the two upcoming by-elections in the Lower Mainland will probably confirm this. The government is not expected to win either one of them in what normally should be friendly territory.

Then there’s the revival of the BC Conservatives, which alone could split the vote and guarantee an NDP victory. But let’s not get carried away because over the years the many ways the BC NDP has snatched defeat from the jaws of victory is a wonder to behold.

Will they do it again in May 2013? The clock is ticking.

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