Former leader ‘comes home’ to Liberals

VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – Who says you can’t go home again?  Certainly not Gordon Wilson.  The former Liberal leader has broken his silence to make a surprise endorsement of current party boss Christy Clark.

Wilson famously took the Liberals from the political fringe and back into the mainstream in 1991 with an unforgettable performance in the provincial leaders debate that year.

He was forced out of the party in 1993, started his own political movement, and then joined the NDP and even ran for that party’s leadership.

Today, he’s ‘coming home’ to the Liberals and thinks you should too.

“Christy Clark is a populist.  She’s built a broad-based and inclusive party and that party represents the best choice for British Columbia,” said Wilson in a special YouTube address on Sunday.

“It’s time for all progressive thinkers to join forces and elect a party to continue to present the very best option for British Columbia.  It’s time to elect Christy Clark and the BC Liberals to government.”

He claims Adrian Dix and the New Democrats are planning a tax assault on BC business and he warns the party would treat the sector as an ATM for billions of dollars in program spending.

“Frankly, I am shocked that Adrian Dix will acknowledge that the challenges within the international economy have caused British Columbia to reach record debt levels, and yet, what is his plan?  His place is to run billion dollar deficits, consecutively, and increase the debt.”

He says he was compelled to act because of the way Dix has handled the Kinder Morgan file, suggesting he’s not ready for government.

“Having promised that he would not take a position on the pipeline until he had seen and properly reviewed their proposal, Mr. Dix incredibly admitted that he woke up on Earth Day and decided his government would stop a $5.4 billion project.”

York University Political Scientist Dennis Pilon says it’s another stunning reversal by the man once dubbed “Flip” Wilson.

“If anything, I think Christy Clark’s Liberals look not that far away from Gordon Campbell’s Liberals, the very Liberal party that Gordon Wilson once quit!  It does seem very, very weird.”

Wilson rejects this characterization as well as any thought Adrian Dix and the NDP occupy the same political centre his Liberal party did in 1991.

“If you go back and look at our policies then… we always ran on a policy of balancing budgets.  We ran on a fiscally small-c conservative platform that said we needed to leave more money in the pockets of people who earned it, that we didn’t want to tenants in our province to big government.   I knew then and I know now that the ideological basis of the New Democratic Party is to run big government and that’s very expensive.  They’re almost unapologetic in their view that in order for them to accomplish their goal they’re going to run massive deficits over the course of the next two years.”

Having worked with both Clark and Dix, Wilson feels Clark will make the better Premier.  He maintains he hasn’t asked for anything and hasn’t received anything for his endorsement.