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  • The Art of the Impossible: Dave Barrett and the ndp in Power, 1972–1975 by Geoff Meggs, Rod Mickleburgh
  • Gene Homel
Geoff Meggs and Rod Mickleburgh, The Art of the Impossible: Dave Barrett and the NDP in Power, 1972–1975 (Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing 2012)

“Are we here for a good time or a long time?” Dave Barrett famously asked his cabinet colleagues in 1972 just after being sworn in as British Columbia’s first ndp premier. As Barrett recalls, “We were impatient to do something decent and honest and human. It was going to be a good time for the ordinary people of British Columbia.” (58)

Barrett’s government set a blistering pace of progressive change. That, and the government’s self-proclaimed socialist beliefs, resulted in a ferociously hostile reception from the corporate sector, the media, and a coalition of centre-right political forces behind Bill Bennett’s revived Social Credit Party, which brought down Barrett in 1975.

The Art of the Impossible (the phrase is Vaclav Havel’s defence of principled politics) suggests that much of Barrett’s agenda can be characterized as modernizing BC’s public administration after twenty years of neglect under Premier W.A.C. Bennett, Bill Bennett’s father. Barrett advanced social services, education, human rights, public enterprise, and environmental protection: hardly the stuff of ideologically driven socialism.

Many of the issues that roiled west-coast waters from 1972 to 1975 are still central to BC politics today (as are the considerable accomplishments of this government). These issues include shipping Canadian oil by tanker along BC’s coast, sustainably developing and capturing proper resource rents from natural gas, preserving farmland through the ndp’s Agricultural Land Reserve, and updating liquor laws.

Even concerns about US security forces’ covert monitoring and interference have a current sensibility. Barrett and some colleagues felt that, with the BC government’s acquisition of resource companies, the high degree of US ownership, and American anger over the ndp’s moves to raise the price of natural-gas exports from rock bottom, the cia and State Department “were not above direct interference to hasten [the ndp’s] downfall.” (284) [End Page 331]

Meggs’ and Mickleburgh’s coverage of labour is especially engaging. They describe the late-1960s internecine leadership struggle in the BC ndp between Barrett and his labour-backed predecessor, Tom Berger, and Berger’s subsequent defeat in the 1969 election. Once acclaimed leader in 1970, Barrett tried to end union-local bloc affiliations fearing that those ties hurt the ndp’s popularity with voters. Barrett often declared, “this is not a labour party. This is a party representing the common interests of the common man.” (37)

Labour relations under W.A.C. Bennett were conflict-ridden and his policy harshly one-sided, aimed at diminishing union power. In 1972, Barrett chose Bill King, a tough-minded locomotive engineer from the southern interior (and a heroic figure for the authors), as labour minister. King, like Barrett, believed in steering an independent course to create a reformed labour code, rather than handing the process to the Fed – the BC Federation of Labour. The result was what the authors call “undoubtedly one of the Barrett government’s finest achievements: a dynamic, sweeping new labour code” that “set the standard nationally and internationally for a generation” (153–54), but also generated bitterness among some Fed leaders.

Bill 11 moved the balance considerably towards labour and into the middle ground of fairness, but also aimed at curtailing bitter strife. Dispute jurisdiction was wisely removed from the courts and placed in an innovative new Labour Relations Board (lrb). The code made it easier to certify union representation, professional strikebreakers were banned, vital public-sector employees now had the right to strike, and craft unions for workers with similar interests could be ordered into joint bargaining councils. However, new rules limited union picketing at locations beyond an employer’s strikebound place of business.

While King and Barrett believed in unionism and free collective bargaining, the authors write that an “evenhanded approach” was not what the Fed expected and wanted from the government. The Fed was peeved at picketing limits and the fact...

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