BC Politics with Hubert Beyer

NO IMMIGRANTS FOR PREMIER

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VICTORIA -- Premier Vander Zalm makes a good case for the American law that immigrants cannot become president. To fill that nation's top elected position, a candidate must have been born in the U.S.

It's a discriminatory law, no doubt about that, but one that makes sense. In legal terms, the law would be called properly discriminatory.

Every law that applies only under certain conditions and in certain circumstances is properly discriminatory. There's no law against drinking, but you're not allowed to mix that pastime with driving. If you're 19 years old, you can vote for your favorite provincial candidate; if you're younger you can't. The Americans' insistence on home-grown presidents falls into that category.

I suppose one of the reasons Canada has never entertained the notion of barring immigrants from holding positions such as prime minister or premier is the high ratio of British-born Canadians. Mother of Parliament and all that.

Those noble sentiments have now come back to haunt us. We got ourselves a premier who doesn't have the faintest notion about British parliamentary democracy because he was raised in a somewhat different system, free, yes, democratic, yes, but at the same time, a system that's a whole lot more autocratic than we would ever be willing to accept.

Continental Europeans have always been more inclined to obey authority. As long as the authorities are benevolent -- which has been known to be the case in Europe -- there's no problem. The frequent absence of benevolence on the part of the authorities, however, has traditionally wreaked havoc in Europe.

So much for the Europeans. Canadians, steeped in the British parliamentary tradition, have a great distaste for even the most benevolent kind of autocracy. They don't like to be told what's good for them. And that's what Premier Vander Zalm has been doing with great conviction and stubborn dedication.

In the best European tradition, Vander Zalm has set himself up as the keeper of the province's morals. He is convinced of his moral superiority and he is possessed by a missionary zeal to make the rest if us conform with his views.

The first inkling of the premier's belief in his own infallibility came with the introduction of his conflict of interest guidelines. He did not appoint a committee of the legislature or of outsiders to judge alleged conflicts of interest. He reserved that right for himself.

When a number of cabinet ministers ran afoul of the premier's guidelines, Vander Zalm was the final judge and jury, admonishing and punishing the culprits, absolving the innocent.

His penchant for autocracy broke into full bloom when the abortion issue exploded onto the scene. And even though he had made his views on abortion clear before he became premier, his determination to force those views on everybody else didn't become apparent until recently.

The premier's unrelenting insistence on conformity with his own moral code has created a severe political crisis in British Columbia. The Social Credit Party is divided as never before.

Socred constituency association officials have openly defied the premier's stand. The Socred caucus is split.

The premier's answer has been to read the riot act to his rebellious backbench. Russ Fraser, Socred MLA for Vancouver South who had publicly called "objectionable" the premier's fiery speech on abortion, emerged red-faced and tight-lipped from a meeting with Vander Zalm.

Meanwhile, the rift has spread to the general population. The two sides -- pro-choice and pro-life -- are progressing from emotional rhetoric to outright hatred for each other.

All of this has been spawned by a man who doesn't understand the art of politics, as practiced in our system. That art calls for consensus, not dictate; it calls for compromise, not edict, for tolerance, not fanaticism, for wisdom, not narrow-mindedness.

In Europe, at least in the Europe in which he grew up, Vander Zalm's way of dealing with problems would be quite acceptable.

Here it isn't.

It's ironic that Vander Zalm should bring out the worst in people, while trying to tell them what's best for them. But that is precisely the problem. Because of his background, he doesn't understand that he cannot force people to do what they don't want to do, even if it is good for them.

That's why it would make sense to introduce a law that would bar anyone not born in Canada from becoming prime minister or premier.

It would mean that I could never become premier, but I think I could live with that, and so, I'm sure, could a lot of people I know.

HUBERT COMES OUT OF THE CLOSET -- WELL, SORT OF

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VICTORIA -- There comes a time in everybody's life when principles and honesty conflict with fear and trepidation. The only thing to do in a case like that is to come clean.

I have, therefore, decided to come out of the closet and admit publicly that I am a heterosexual. I like women. I always have liked women, and a careful self-analysis leaves little doubt that I probably will continue to like women. This, according to all dictionaries I've been able to lay my hands on, makes me a heterosexual.

I have lived with this feeling of iniquity for nearly 45 years now. Thinking back, my fateful attraction to women began at a very early age. When I was about eight years old, I found myself doing strange things like dipping girls' ponytails into ink wells or stealing their toques in the skating rink and making off with my trophies.

I didn't know it then, of course, but I later learned that these activities were the first tell-tale signs of my latent heterosexuality.

Soon it was too late to save me from my life-long fascination with the other gender. The older I got, the more confirmed I became in my heterosexuality.

One of the most portentous influences on my future development was a girl by the name of Maria. I remember getting this funny feeling in my stomach whenever I was near Maria. When I finally found the courage to hold hands with her, my knees were a bit wobbly, and I could have sworn I heard music.

And I never forgot that feeling of being too scared to ask a girl out and being too much in love not to. To my everlasting regret, I didn't always opt for asking.

These trend-setting episodes were followed by an evolutionary process that linked me inextricably and forever to the female gender. I am going to skip the sordid details; let it suffice to say that I graduated summa cum laude from hand-holding to eventual fatherhood.

And here I am, 53 years old, and still afflicted by the same condition that first manifested itself so many years ago. Coward that I am, however, I have always gone through great pains to conceal this peculiar twist in my psyche. In all these years, not once did I own up to it, not publicly.

Sure, there were rumors. You know the kind of sick talk behind your back? People would say: "This guy is married and has four kids. He probably likes women. Do you think he could be a heterosexual?"

But like I said, I'm a coward at heart. Instead of getting on a soap box and publicly proclaiming my sexual preference for women, I stayed in the closet.

What finally gave me the courage to come right out and confess was the rush of public announcements by homosexuals. They weren't held back by cowardice. In fact, they couldn't wait to get to the next press conference to tell the world they liked men.

I mean, just these past couple of weeks, Svend Robinson, the NDP Member of Parliament, got standing ovation from his constituents after he announced that he was a homosexual. And what about Laurier Lapierre? People seemed to admire his honesty.

That did it. I decided I could do no less. The time had come to stand up and be counted. Hence my confession that I like women.

Mind you, I also had an ulterior motive for coming out of the heterosexual closet at this time.

Look at it this way: Thirty years ago, heterosexuality was pretty well mandatory. Twenty years or so ago, Pierre Elliot Trudeau decided that there's no room for the state in the bedrooms of the nation, and suddenly it was O.K. to go either way. I wanted to leave no doubt as to where I stand before someone up there decides to pass a law against heterosexuality.

Now, I realize that judging from the spate of announcements by homosexuals and the admiration a grateful public heaped on them, my confession to heterosexual tendencies will probably go unnoticed. I'm willing to accept that. It's the fate of minorities to be forgotten and ignored.

That doesn't mean though that I'm not every bit as proud of my courage to admit to my weakness for women as old Svend and Laurier are of their admission that they like guys.

So let's have a little recognition, eh? I don't expect standing ovations, but maybe a letter to the editor here and there, acknowledging my fortitude, would go a long way towards easing the pain of having bared my soul, as it were.

COQUIHALLA CLOSET REMAINS LOCKED

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VICTORIA -- Eager to fight what will probably have been his last political battle, Alex Fraser took his place in the B.C. Legislature last week, breaking months of silence.

His silence hadn't been by choice. Cancer of the throat had claimed his larynx, but with dogged determination, Fraser fought back. He learned to speak again, with the help of an electronic device.

Fraser's appearance in the legislature after months of absence, also wasn't by choice. He had found himself the centre of a controversy over the huge overruns the government had incurred in the construction of the Coquihalla Highway.

Fraser had been fingered by the NDP as the prime suspect in connection with allegations that the government of the day had misled the legislature with regard to the true costs of the project during its construction. The opposition had succeeded in getting a motion on the floor of the House, asking that a special committee of the legislature be established to look into those allegations.

The debate over whether or not Fraser had, indeed, misled the House was in its second day when Fraser stood up in his defence.

The NDP was obviously uncomfortable at the thought of kicking a man when he's down but did the best it could under the circumstances.

If the NDP's attack was somewhat reluctant, Fraser's defence certainly wasn't. He spoke eloquently and with conviction. But he failed miserably at clearing the fog of confusion that surrounds the controversy if, indeed, he tried.

Fraser blamed the overruns on a number of factors. Inflation, he said, accounted for much of the additional cost. Inflation and the forbidding terrain through which the highway was forged.

Turning the tables on his accusers quite nicely, Fraser brought the Vancouver Sky Train overruns to the legislature's attention.

That project was originally estimated at $289 million and came in a $1 billion. "As the honorable members know, Sky Train was built on fairly level ground and under moderate weather conditions, compared to the Coquihalla Highway, which was built over mountain ranges in all types of weather," he said.

And then he went on the attack. Everybody who took part in this "great project" should be congratulated for a job well done and should "feel proud of the part they played in the transportation history of our province," Fraser said.

As for the allegations that he had misled the legislature with regard to the true costs of the project, Fraser's only defence was an emphatic denial.

"Mr. Speaker, I have never misled this House at any time in the eighteen and a half years I have been a member," he said. And when he stated in the legislature in November 1985 that the highway would cost $375 million, he believed that to be the case, he added.

And with that statement on the record in the legislature, the case of the NDP collapsed. There is no way, the opposition can afford to pursue the matter any further.

Pity. Closing the books on the Coquihalla scandal will not provide taxpayers with any safeguards against similar disasters.

When all is said and done, the important point was not whether Fraser or anyone else misled the legislature, bad enough as that would have been. The really troubling question is how a

government, which prides itself on fiscal expertise, could have mismanaged public funds that badly.

Being out half a billion on a project that was supposed to cost only $375 million is more than inflation could possibly account for. As for the bad terrain, that didn't just appear overnight.

It was there all the time the highway was being designed. The truth is: the government of the day screwed up. It screwed up badly. The same government which always maintained the NDP couldn't run a peanut stand, wasted half a billion dollars of the taxpayers' money.

Unfortunately, the opposition has no tools left with which to pry open the closet that hides the Coquihalla skeletons. We will probably never know why the gross cost overruns occurred. The opposition has been shut down.

On the other hand, I can see election posters, showing a scenic stretch of the Coquihalla overlaid in red with the figure $1 billion and a caption: NEVER AGAIN.