There was an unmistakable clue in a Friday media advisory from the NDP as to how it’s going to be for the next three years.
NDP Leader John Horgan’s first official event was a tour of the Western Stevedoring facility in North Vancouver.
The note warned: “Media attending this availability must wear steel-toed boots and safety vests.” Not only that, but: “Steel-toed boots will NOT be provided on site, and must be brought by media attending.”
With a jolt that almost knocked my safety glasses off, I realized where the political discourse is going to take place from now until election day 2017.
Horgan is going to try to copy-cat Premier Christy Clark’s success last year on job sites around B.C. He’s going to try to out-hard hat her.
Then a secondary shock almost knocked me to the ground: We in the media are going to look like dorks for this entire term of government.
There’s nothing phonier than someone who clearly hasn’t done a lick of physical labour in years showing up in a hard hat, safety vest and steel-toed boots.
I’ve done hard hat visits with politicians. I could feel the derision from all over the plant as the real workers looked at me in my shiny new hat — standing around holding a pen, doing nothing.
That’s going to be the cost of doing business for the next while, but in terms of the contest shaping up, it’s a price worth paying. Because the NDP has a lot of catching up and backfilling to do before their leader can stand comfortably with a crowd of hard hats and know the workers are on their side.
For all the hard work and intelligence Adrian Dix put into his leadership of the party, he did nothing to stop the party’s drift away from blue-collar workers.
In fact, he intensified it dramatically, by abruptly opposing the Kinder Morgan pipeline. Any number of post mortems pin the party’s campaign collapse on that Earth Day moment.
Plus, he was weak on hard hat moments. He showed up at the Liberal’s first throne speech after their victory carrying a hard hat. But it was to make a bitter point, while standing in the legislature’s rose garden. “Getting the job done on a jobs plan … on skills training … requires more than wearing a hard hat.”
Liberals at that point were still giggling about Dix’s main hat moment of the campaign. He was photographed in Barkerville wearing a bowler hat. Liberal mirth arose from the fact they were stressing the fact he would destroy the economy and drive people out of B.C., and he showed up in a ghost town.
The NDP’s drift away from working people has been underway for a while, but it became clear in 2007. The party convention that year became wildly enthused with sustainability as a doctrine. It was an “action agenda” and an “inspiring brand.” A sustainability commissioner would check every decision of government and people would have a new environmental bill of rights under which they could sue to stop just about anything. Sustainability was going to “become a powerful and persuasive central theme of the 2009 campaign.”
It became no such thing, and they lost.
They downplayed the doctrine in 2013, but it’s still on the party’s books, and seemed to shape Dix’s thinking. They lost again. So starting Horgan off at a work site is a deliberate move, and there will likely be more such visits to come. But he’s going up against a master of hard hat and safety-vest moments in Clark. She staged one virtually every day of the campaign and still shows up at them every chance she gets.
Horgan’s job is to start trying to catch up to her — from a long way back — while not unduly alienating that chunk of the NDP that is quite happy to forgo the working people’s vote in favour of standing for some mushy “sustainability” doctrine that doesn’t seem to have much of anything to do with jobs. And he has to conduct that tap dance without leaving room for the Greens to move in.
Hard to do, when you’re wearing steel-toed boots.
