Former BC Attorney General Geoff Plant, now a partner with the law firm of Heenan Blaikie, says that none of the five candidates for the leadership of the BC Liberal Party were elected to be premier during the last election. This, he says, is justification for deviating from the fixed election timetable implemented when he was AG nine years ago.

Plant’s quoted as saying: “People can debate the politics of it, the reality is none of the five leadership candidates will be able to go into the legislature and look at the assembled members and say that they have a mandate directly given to them by the people of British Columbia to lead the government.”

We at DoubleHearsay think we know what Plant actually meant to say: when people voted in the last election, they voted on the assumption that the MLA they were choosing was a member of the political party that was led by Gordon Campbell. If we thought our local MLA was being run by, say, Christy Clark or Kevin Falcon (or Moira Stillwell), we may well have voted for the NDP or Green Party candidate. Or we may not have voted at all.

While we hate to state the obvious, it’s disappointing – and a bit puzzling – that a constitutional lawyer like Geoff Plant would take such liberties in describing the electoral process in BC. We don’t directly elect anyone to be Premier – ever.

Even the folks in Vancouver-Point Grey (Gordon Campbell’s constituency) weren’t directly elected to be Premier. For that, he only needed the support of the BC Liberal Party, and – speaking simplistically — for the Libs to capture a greater share of seats in the Legislature than any other party.

As for the issue at hand, namely whether it is appropriate for a new leader to seek a clearer mandate by going to the polls ahead of the next scheduled election date, arguably we encounter crossroads at which a clearer mandate might be warranted more often than governing political parties change their leaders.

In any election campaign, there are a given set of “issues” weighing on voters’ minds and which typically determine the results. Invariably, those issues change or shift relative priority between elections. Sometimes, those issues change significantly between elections. Maybe there was a fundamental shift in the economy. Maybe we found ourselves at war. Maybe we faced the prospect of making substantive changes to our tax system.

Whenever the “issues of the day” change significantly, our political leaders have two choices. They can take the position that they were elected because the voters believed they represented a shared set of fundamental values, and that those values ought to direct how our leaders, as our elected representatives, address those new issues. Or they can seek political cover by going to the polls – either by referendum or through a general election – and letting the voters decide.

In the case of the HST, it’s clear that people in government knew during the last election campaign that shifting to the HST might be an option. Rather than making it a political issue, it seems that our leaders took the position that, if re-elected, they ought to make decisions on the HST as our elected representatives and proceed accordingly.

When the BC Liberals failed abysmally at communicating the rationale for the shift to the HST, Gordon Campbell “agreed” to a referendum on the issue. As if the “right” answer to whether the HST is best for BC might change depending on whether it was implemented by decision of Cabinet, a free vote of all MLAs, or by plebiscite. If the HST gets shot down in a referendum, the Liberals might think they are no longer blameworthy for the resulting economic decline. Perhaps. But if they could be blamed for anything, it would certainly be for their lack of leadership.

Seems to us that Christy Clark’s call for an earlier election is not much different than taking an important issue like the HST to referendum. Either way, it’s a politically expedient way to take cover when making unpopular decisions.