BC Politics with Hubert Beyer

VICTORIA – Note to Gordon Campbell: If your intentions are to chip away at Premier Glen Clark’s support, don’t refer to him again as a "class warrior," as you did following his television address the other day.

People like warriors, even the class ones. Warriors are tough guys, born leaders, used to have it their way. If you really want to get to the preem, call him a sissy or wimp. That’ll rattle him.

The pre-election television address, paid for by the New Democratic Party, got mixed reviews. Some of my colleagues believe it did little to influence the all-important undecided vote. I don’t see it that way.

As TV productions go, it was a pretty slick one. Clark shed his usual cockiness, looking every inch the serious statesman. No wink, no grin, his stock-in-trade during scrums with reporters. And the footage tracing the NDP’s history was downright home-spun and heart-warming. This guy definitely has better advisers than Mike Harcourt did.

The content was vintage election campaign stuff. While Mike Harris and Ralph Klein are taxing and reducing the dickens out of Ontario and Alberta, Clark promised a three-year tax freeze for all British Columbians, a moderate tax breaks for middle income earners, and a tax reduction for small businesses.

And then he went into the partisan mode that earned him the class-warrior reference from Campbell, attacking the Liberals as the champions of the rich, while portraying himself as the defender of the ordinary British Columbians.

His tax cuts, he said, won’t be huge, but "are another clear signal of whose side my government is on, not the powerful and privileged minority, and not banks and big corporations. We’re on the side of ordinary people, and I’m very proud of that fact."

He said a Campbell government would slash spending on education and health care, lower the minimum wage and offer tax breaks to the rich. "It’s not because they have to do it, they want to do it to give tax breaks to banks and corporations."

Opposition leaders didn’t lose any time thrashing the premier. Reform leader Jack Weisgerber called the broadcast ineffective contrived and insincere. "I think it was plastic and lacking in any personality."

Public debt, he said, is out of control, and the biggest threat to education and health care is the NDP’s fiscal management.

Liberal leader Gordon Campbell said Clark’s comments about the rich and the poor are meant to divide people along class lines.

Well, I got news for Campbell. Politics has always been and always will be along class lines. In less democratic nations, the rich overtly oppress the poor. In democratic countries, the rich and the poor are represented by political parties.

Only a fool would deny that the NDP philosophy favors the less fortunate of our society. And it would take an even greater fool not to see that Tories and Liberals have traditionally been the parties of choice for those more blessed with earthly goods.

The trick for any governing party in Canada, left or right, is to appeal to the centre, while keeping both rich and poor relatively happy. The Socreds knew how it was done. And the NDP is doing a pretty good job of it, too.

But no matter what a governing party’s political stripes, it’s always about rich versus poor. For Campbell to suddenly discover that fact and dislike it, suggests to me that he hasn’t lived in the real world.

If Clark’s television broadcast and the opposition’s reaction to it is any indication of the upcoming election campaign, we’ll be in for the most bitterly contested and acrimonious battle in years.

I look forward to it.