Dear Geoff ... you asked? Well here's the answer.

Former BC Attorney General, Geoff Plant

Today former BC Liberal Attorney, General Geoff Plant wrote a column entitled, “What does John Cummins really want?”

In it, he begins by stating:

Of the two provincial by-election campaigns about to get underway in BC, the race in Chilliwack-Hope may be the more interesting.  It looks like the fight in Barry Penner’s former riding will be between a BC Liberal candidate with impeccable conservative credentials, and a BC Conservative party candidate with impeccable conservative credentials. 

Huh? 

Well, it’s true.  The BC Liberal candidate is Laurie Throness, who was chief of staff to former Conservative MP Chuck Strahl, and calls himself a “policy conservative.”  The BC Conservative Party candidate is John Martin, a professor of criminology and former Chilliwack Times columnist, whose party describes itself as “BC’s only true conservative party.”

So with two candidates trying to “out-conservative” each other, maybe this is as good a time as any to ask what it is that BC Conservative Party leader John Cummins actually hopes to achieve.

He goes on to talk about truth … policies … being an armchair quarterback … the split-vote argument and more … the regular stuff you would expect to hear from the BC Liberals.  Then he concludes by saying:

Mr. Cummins is not resting in his armchair, entertaining friends with his political opinions.  He seeks elected office.  Or at least, he is the leader of a party that is nominating candidates for elected office.  Perhaps his agenda is to displace the BC Liberals as the coalition party of the centre right?  Not likely.  He often had trouble fitting in with his federal Conservative caucus; he’s not a coalition builder.  And it’s hard to see how a party that brands itself as the “real conservative party” is ever going to attract support from the centre.  I know federal Liberals who would much rather vote for the provincial NDP than ever cast a ballot for a provincial party led by John Cummins. 

Perhaps his agenda is simply to establish a conservative party as a permanent electoral force on the provincial electoral landscape.  Goodness knows, we could always use a wider range of interesting and thoughtful ideas in BC politics.  But history, if it tells us anything about BC politics, says that not only is this a faint hope, it’s a misguided quest.  Whenever someone has come close to success in building a third party on the centre-right, the result is that the NDP wins.  So again, Mr. Cummins, what do you really want?

I took the time to respond to comments of Geoff Plant, and this is what I had to say:

Geoff ... the BC Liberals have worn themselves out with the electorate on a number of key things, and re-hashing and bringing them up again will serve no good purpose.

The fact is that given recent polls during the past 18 months the BC Liberals were / are going down to defeat at the hands of the NDP. That said, it really does appear the ONLY thing that will at least STOP them from getting a majority government is for BC Conservatives to be elected to the legislature.

The general ideas of the BC Conservatives and the BC Liberals are very similar in many areas --- BUT on key points of fiscal responsibility ... government accountability ... and MLA's being accountable to the people that have elected them, we differ greatly.

I am a BC Conservative ... BUT I do appreciate and acknowledge there are many in the Liberal Party --- including MLA's that are working hard for the province. That they get anything accomplished that is for constituents and the province, often times however (I believe) is in spite of Christy Clark and the party hierarchy.

This is indeed what I sincerely believe!  And so do, I think, the thousands of people who are now members of the BC Conservative Party, people who likely at one time (myself included) were members of, or supported, the BC Liberals.

It seems that already 20% of the electorate in BC are ready to take those “wider range of interesting and thoughtful ideas in BC politics”, as Geoff Plant himself calls them, and see them put into action by the BC Conservatives.

I’m Alan Forseth in Kamloops, with the thoughts of one conservative.