Raise a Glass to Gordon Campbell

The B.C. premier became the country's least popular provincial leader thanks to his handling of the HST, but history will see him in a kinder light.

The resignation yesterday of B.C.’s Premier Gordon Campbell was described as a ‘surprise’ in much of the media, but really we should have seen it coming. Thanks to the wildly unpopular HST, his approval rating had dipped into the single digits, and that’s just too big a hole to dig out of.

So the three-time premier is leaving on a low note, but the Globe and Mail says, “he will be judged as one of the great premiers of British Columbia … he has consistently pushed the boundaries of the possible, in terms of both politics and policy.” When he took over the Liberals in the early 1990s, the party hadn’t won an election in B.C. in 50 years, and he showed remarkable leadership on aboriginal issues, climate change, and landing the Olympics. It’s one of the curiosities of politics that a man being run out of town on a rail actually made the province a better place to live.

The Vancouver Sun’s Barbara Yaffe speculates a role in federal politics could be in Campbell’s future, thanks to his record of fostering good relations between Victoria and Ottawa. “Campbell had a remarkable record when it came to getting along with Ottawa, at every turn transforming potential conflict into cooperation,” she writes, “His actions appear to belie a philosophy that holds it is up to provinces to take initiative and make their own good fortune rather than relying on Ottawa for federal money or other assistance.” Some one who thinks provinces should be self-sufficient is exactly the kind of person federal parties want in their ranks.

“The buzz around Queen’s Park in the wake of B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell’s resignation is will Dalton McGuinty be next?” writes the Toronto Sun’s Christina Blizzard. And who’s generating that buzz? Well, uh, Christina Blizzard. It’s hard to see what the point of this article is, other than to meet the Sun’s weekly anti-McGuinty quota. She spends most of the column listing things she doesn’t like about the Ontario premier, before concluding McGuinty has no reason to resign, and no one is asking him to.