Who likes Mike? NDP leadership candidate hugs the Kootenays
By Erin Handy
The BC Liberals will choose us a new premier on Saturday, but Mike Farnworth doesn’t really care. He too, is running for premier.
“After ten years, people are ready for a change,” the NDP leadership candidate told the Telegraph this week during a brief Kootenay campaign tour. “We don’t live in a one-party state. This is a democracy and the government changes.”
But Farnworth will need to win his own party’s top spot first, in a membership ballot to be held April 17. So he’s currently pounding the provincial pavement in an effort to show the party faithful that he’s got the finesse to heal the party’s (now painfully public) internal rifts, while also convincing the rest of the electorate that the NDP is really ready to form government.
It’s a tall order, but Farnworth is nothing if not a keener. The four-term MLA entered politics in the early 1980s, elected to Port Coquitlam city council at the tender age of 24. He served three municipal terms before moving to the provincial legislature in 1991, a member of Mike Harcourt’s government. In his second term he made cabinet, serving in a series of key roles: minister of municipal affairs, employment and economic development, health, and social development and economic security. When the NDP was reduced to two sitting members in 2001, he did governance work abroad in Bulgaria, the Balkans and Iraq. But he came back, holding the Liberals to account from the opposition benches from 2005.
His house leader role requires savvy, and Farnworth is noted in Victoria for his conciliatory approach and quick Question Period wit. He’s also a practiced politician, with excellent instincts.
For instance, Farnworth was the first to point out that certain more aggressive BC Liberal candidates (if successful in their own leadership race) might well call a snap election soon, before the NDP has an opportunity to properly organize and repair its public image following the nasty infighting that toppled Carole James, whom he supported. The party has to be ready.
“I never expected that I would be running,” he said. “But circumstances change . . . lots of people were urging me to run. I feel that I’ve got the skill required at this time . . . [I’m] someone that can unite our caucus. . . . We’re at a crossroads, and I believe we can win the next election if we reach out to the majority of people across this province.”
And that reaching out includes the business sector, Farnworth was careful to confirm–an important ideological point in the NDP; James was often criticized for reaching out fruitlessly to a sceptical, right-leaning business crowd, potentially alienating the party’s union-strong and socially-focused base in the process.
“I think it’s about being relevant,” he explained. “People expect us (the NDP) to talk about health care and education; they also want us to talk about the economy and public safety. I will bring my own approach, which is to work with people.”
And communities. The high points of Farnworth’s platform reads like a Rossland hive-mind wrote it. The education system is chronically underfunded, he said, pitching a proposal for a well-resourced Royal Commission on the state and future of the education system to be headed by an eminent appointee – dismissing any suggestion that the party might be too closely tied to the powerful unions in the education sector to produce a truly independent result.
The ever present rural/urban divide in BC is a significant issue, and to heal it will require working with regions, linking economic and social successes, building on environmental strengths and planning sustainable growth. He cited the Columbia Basin Trust as a successful regional development model, ensuring a portion of resource wealth stays to support the communities where it is generated.
He’s even proposed a pesticide ban.
Doubtless other candidates will say some similar things. Where Farnworth thinks he’s got a key advantage is in his personal approach, a practice of “treating people with respect regardless of their view,” he said, though resisting a suggestion that if both he and BC Liberal George Abbott (running an eerily similar campaign) win, they’ll have to enact a speedy policy on hallway hug days in the legislature.
Not so fast, said Farnworth, showing a little steel.
“Politics is always going to be politics in BC, and that’s not going to change.”
Farnworth visited Trail and Castlegar on February 20, Nelson February 21 and Cranbrook and Creston on February 22. He’s hit the province’s Northwest, Kamloops and South Fraser, and will soon head to the Okanagan and Island. Next up locally, NDP candidate John Horgan comes to the West Kootenay on Thursday, February 24.
