Gordon Campbell Resigns: A post-mortem

Gordon Campbell resigns
After nearly 10 years as B.C.’s premier, Gordon Campbell steps down.

Gordon Campbell resigns as BC Liberal leader after almost a decade ruling a continually angry land. Who can blame him?

You won’t have Gordon Campbell to kick around anymore. So who do you kick around next?

And there will be a next because this is B.C., the land of a thousand angry stances, where we live by the principal that politicians are there to be beaten on constantly because they may not serve our individual wants/desires/complaints.

In B.C. our politics tend to imitate mixed martial arts brawling more than reasoned discourse. For example, it seems to me that the same complaints were made about Glen Clark, whose NDP government  “destroyed” the province before Campbell came in, and Bill Vander Zalm, whose Socred government  “destroyed”  us before Mike Harcourt took over.

Every premier in B.C. has been blamed for everything from bashing the poor to kicking dogs and bringing on the rain in November. Usually, that means he or she has just done something that we didn’t like personally.

The politics of anger and discontent like that of the Tea Party in the U.S.
In this case, the installation of the HST – which despite the outcry from individuals who might be paying a few bucks more on the odd consumer purchase (in most cases they’ll be paying the same as before) is actually a pretty good thing – has been fingered as the fall guy who brought down the latest premier.

That’s completely illogical, but logic has nothing to do with it. It’s all about raw emotion.
 
Sure, Campbell was dissembling when he said before the election that there would be no harmonized sales tax in B.C. But do you blame him? Would any politician go into an election declaring that he or she was going to change the system so that it looked like a “new” tax was going to be imposed?
 
I don’t have any particular insight into why the premier suddenly resigned. I’ll leave that to the political pundits who inhabit every barroom in B.C. The only insight I have is that they’re probably angry – at Gordon Campbell, at the world, at themselves.  
 
I do think that after a decade at the helm of this angry and continually outraged province, Campbell was going to leave anyway. In this cantankerous region and time, surviving 10 years of fractious politics is a major accomplishment.
 
This way, he goes out early and gives his party time to bring in a new hero, rebuild, and get all the grumps and complainers off its back.
 
That may last a few years until the next big fall.