Dianne Watts enters the BC Liberal leadership race
Dianne Watts is in, as a contender for the BC Liberal party
leadership.
The South Surrey-White Rock Conservative MP announced on
Sunday that she will run in what will be an fairly short leadership campaign.
The new BC Liberal party leader will be named, after a vote by party members,
on Feb. 3. Watts is also resigning as an MP, effective immediately.
Watts was widely suggested as a possible candidate for the
leadership in 2011, when Christy Clark won. At that time, of course, the BC
Liberals were in power and winning the leadership came with the added bonus of
becoming premier. Clark ran an excellent campaign in 2013 and boosted the party’s
seat count in an election that almost everyone thought would go to the NDP.
Back in 2011, Watts was in the process of finishing her
first six years as Surrey mayor and was extremely popular in Surrey and throughout
the region. She won the 2011 election a few months later with 80 per cent of
the vote – an astonishing figure, but a margin of victory partially due to the
fact that she had no major opponents challenge her for the position.
She decided to step aside from the mayor’s office in 2014,
as she planned to run for the Conservative Party in South Surrey-White Rock. At
that time, the Conservatives held a majority government in Ottawa, and some
speculated that Watts’ provincial profile and national role as a member of the
big city mayors’ caucus could lead to a prominent position in Ottawa. That was
not to be.
The Liberals won every seat in Surrey except hers, which she
won by one of the smallest margins in decades, in a riding which has been strongly
right-of-centre. She was criticized during the campaign for skipping candidate’s
debates, and since the election, her profile in Ottawa has been quite low. She
has discovered, as generations of B.C. MPs have before her, that big fish in B.C.
politics are rarely more than minnows in Ottawa.
Watts will face a number of contenders for the post. Former
Vancouver mayor Sam Sullivan has already announced his candidacy. Fellow Vancouver
MLAs Andrew Wilkinson and Michael Lee are expected to run, as is Kamloops MLA
Todd Stone and possibly Peace River South MLA Mike Bernier.
Abbotsford West MLA Mike de Jong, the former finance
minister, has the second-longest tenure as a BC Liberal MLA (23 years) and ran
in the 2011 race, finishing a distant fourth. He may run again as well.
Watts brings to the table an ability to work well with
people of other political stripes, a tough law and order approach combined with
genuine compassion for people, and the aura of an outsider, which is important in
this race as the BC Liberals struggle to regroup. She also gives the party a
chance to regain some Surrey-area seats. The loss of three former BC Liberal ridings
in Surrey and North Delta in the May election was a crucial factor in their
defeat.
Her challenges are her low profile since 2014, the continuing
popularity of the federal Liberals (and disinterest in the Conservatives) and
her almost total lack of public stances on many of the issues which proved crucial
in the provincial election, such as housing affordability, child care and
political party financing.
She can be a formidable campaigner, she has some very talented
political insiders working on her campaign and she is likely to be effective in
opposition, but only after going through a steep learning curve on the bear pit
of provincial politics..
Many Surrey residents will be excited to see her in the race,
and it’s likely the number of new BC Liberal party members in Surrey will grow
substantially between now and the membership cutoff date (for voting) of Dec.
29. The first leadership debate is set for Oct. 15 – in Surrey.
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